News & Blog

My favorite thing about teaching is the feeling I get when someone lights up and says, ‘Oh, I get it.’ To share that with someone else and see them feel joy over creating something beautiful; that’s why I do it. The joy and understanding of how you got there is what it’s about.” For the 30 years Andrea Olney-Wall has taught art classes at Maryland Hall, she’s ended every class the same way: with an art show. “It’s really important to reward kids for their work,” she says and so on the last day of class she hosts a reception with food and a display of the students’ self-selected best work.

For nearly 40 years John Ebersberger has had a home at Maryland Hall, his favorite places being rooms 213 and 214, the two north-light studios. Despite the fact he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Ebersberger’s artistic abilities took shape at Maryland Hall, first as a student then as a teacher.

Maryland Hall's Exhibitions Coordinator, Emily Kohlenstein, talks with Tom Stoner about collecting time-based media and incorporating it into his home. Tom explains the relevance of nature, both, in his video-art collection and his foundation Nature Sacred (TKF Foundation) which supports green spaces in urban areas.

H.C. Porter hosted students from the Bates Liberal Arts Band and PVA (Performing and Visual Arts) classes for her traveling exhibition Blues @ Home: Mississippi's Living Blues Legends. Her exhibits were showcased in both the Chaney and Martino Galleries. Porter explained the culture of Blues music and its heritage from the state of Mississippi, the background of the Blues @ Home project including interviews and oral histories of each living legend. She also shared the process and techniques of her work - starting as a photograph, transforming into a high-contrast silk-screen image, and finally becoming a mixed media painting with acrylic paint and prisma-color pencil.

Members of a street artists group called Urban Walls Brazil took over the first floor hallway at Maryland Hall and transformed the blank hallways into beautiful works of art. If you haven't seen their work yet, we highly recommend you stop by Maryland Hall to check it out.

What’s your earliest memory of art? Art was always a part of my academic life starting in the second grade with life-like paper mache animals and musical instruments. I still remember vividly the experience of creating them. In our free time my sister and I would create paper mosaic pictures and paintings with glitter and collage. By age nine, I won an award for an abstract painting.