THE BMOREART JOURNAL OF ART + IDEAS, ISSUES 1-7
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.
BmoreArt Magazine Release Party 3 at The Walters Art Museum, 2017
Baltimore Magazine: 30 Women to Watch, 2021
Select Articles and Essays:
Baltimore Banner: Nine Art Gallery Shows to Explore in Baltimore this April, 2024
Baltimore Banner: Seven Baltimore-based Artists On the Rise–and on Display Across the Nation, March, 2024
Baltimore Banner: 10 Soul-Warming Art Exhibitions to See In February, 2024
BmoreArt: Unreliable Narrators: An Evening with Ann Patchett and R. Eric Thomas, December 2023
BmoreArt: Opinion Editorial: AVAM’s Misstep in Dismissing Jenenne Whitfield, November 2023
BmoreArt: When the Devil Calls: Martinis, Opera Baltimore, and a Gilded Age Mansion, June 2023
BmoreArt: Radically Simple, Unmistakably Betty Cooke at The Walters, December 2021
BmoreArt: Maryland State Arts Council Shifts Grants to Address Equity, Bringing Cuts to Largest Organizations, September 2021
BmoreArt: Rebellion, Relevance, Texas, and Lisa Yuskavage, September 2021
BmoreArt: A Cure for Toxic Museum Culture: Laura Raicovich’s New Book, Culture Strike, August 2021
BmoreArt: Let’s Get It On: A Brood X Cicada Photo Essay, June 2021
Bmoreart: Fever Dream: Symptoms but no Covid-19 Tests or results, 2020
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: 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
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
“I have never been an art writer for other art writers. I don’t write about art specifically for those with an advanced degree in art history. I don’t use Artspeak.”
Cara Ober speaking at Motor House at a Connect+Collect Lecture | Photo by Jill Fannon
Cara is the recipient of a 2022 Sue Hess Legacy Arts Advocate of the Year Award, a 2019 Rabkin Arts Writers grant, winner of a Mellon Arts Innovation Grant from Johns Hopkins University in 2015, and a Grit Fund Grant from The Contemporary via The Andy Warhol Foundation in 2015. 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.
“Cara Ober is relatively easy to spot at an art exhibit preview.
It’s not only because of her art-chic style and general confidence and authority when it comes to art, but because she is deeply, passionately inquisitive about the work. Even if you were to close your eyes, you could most likely recognize her by her voice; she is often the first person, in a room buzzing with press, to look directly at the artists and start firing off insightful questions—the ones that either seem too difficult to ask or had eluded others, sometimes even the artists themselves.”
- Lauren LaRoca “Meet Cara Ober” in Baltimore Magazine, May 2019
As the executive director, founding editor, and publisher of BmoreArt, Baltimore's publishing platform for contemporary art, 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 as an online magazine 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 biannual, 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.
Contact
For inquiries about BmoreArt coverage, speaking engagements, curatorial collaborations, events, and art in Baltimore, please email.