CARA OBER IS THE FOUNDING EDITOR AND PUBLISHER AT BMOREART, BALTIMORE’S ART AND CULTURE MAGAZINE.

Cara Ober writes about Baltimore's unique cultural landscape from the perspective of an artist and feminist. She approaches all kinds of cultural production from a constructive and critical perspective informed by material and pop culture, history, social movements, and politics. Over the past decade, Ober's critical reviews, essays, and interviews have explored the political and economic impact of the arts in Baltimore and the way artists maintain a professional practice and thrive in a city full of rich and diverse cultural traditions as well as serious social issues.

She writes regularly about artist and museum culture and and the way they intersect and collide, assessing how this impacts art communities and establishes hierarchies of value.

Recent Articles and Essays:

Bmoreart: Fever Dream: Symptoms but no Covid-19 Tests or results

BMOREART: Only Women: 27 Women in the Arts on the BMA’s Recent Collecting Announcement

bmoreart: Falling in love with art is like falling in love

Bmoreart: Context and Celebrity: Amy Sherald at Hauser & Wirth

BmoreArt: Location, Location, Location: The Problem of Site Specificity and Mark Bradford at the Baltimore Museum of Art

BmoreArt: Artspeak and Audience: Art Writing as Bridge or Barrier

BmoreArt: Anarchy at 72: John Waters’ Indecent Exposure

Hyperallergic: Revisiting Carolee Schneemann’s Candor and Intellect in a Previously Unpublished Interview

hyperallergic: Jack Whitten’s Secret self

Hyperallergic: The relentless efforts of Maren Hassinger

NY Magazine/ Vulture: John Waters is the Godfather of the Baltimore Art Scene

Hyperallergic: Artists and Curators Weigh In on Baltimore Museum’s Move to Deaccession Works by White Men to Diversify Its Collection

Cara is the recipient of a 2019 Rabkin Arts Writers grant, winner of a Mellon Arts Innovation Grant from Johns Hopkins University in 2015, a Grit Fund Grant from The Contemporary via The Andy Warhol Foundation in 2015, and a Warhol Grant for Emerging Curators in 2006. She has been a finalist and semi-finalist for the Warhol Writers Grant on multiple occasions and a Sondheim Semi-Finalist as a visual artist.

Ober earned an MFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2005, a MS in Art Education from McDaniel College in 1998, and a BA, Phi Beta Kappa, in fine arts in 1996 from the American University.

As the founding editor of BmoreArt, Baltimore's online art magazine and print journal, Ober has spent over a decade building a local, national, and international audience for arts and culture produced in Baltimore. She founded BmoreArt in 2007 to encourage accessible and rigorous dialogue about arts and culture in the Baltimore region. Named "Best of Baltimore" by Baltimore Magazine in 2017 and 2014, BmoreArt questions and analyzes issues of gender, race, social justice, and cultural institutions with emphasis on artist-centric issues of material and process and how they influence content and artistic output.

Ober launched BmoreArt: A Journal of Art + Ideas in 2015. The bi-annual, full color print journal explores Baltimore's cultural landscape thematically, offering a deep and diverse perspective on individuals and cultural institutions, as well as a curated content-laden experience, more like an exhibition in print than a traditional magazine. In both the online and print publications, Ober seeks to ask challenging questions, to build community dialogue through digital, printed, and in situ formats, and to celebrate the rich and diverse cultural landscape of Baltimore.

From 2010-2012, Cara was the online arts and culture editor at The Urbanite Magazine. She has penned art reviews for Art Papers, ARTnews, Hyperallergic, and BurnAway and numerous other national publications. In addition, Ober taught Professional Development, Online Journalism, and Painting classes for a decade at MICA and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. 

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