Baltimore has a joyful new reason to get dressed up and head to the Inner Harbor. Flaunt: When Appearance Speaks opened on October 10, 2026, at the American Visionary Art Museum, and it will be on view through September 5, 2027, in the museum’s Zanvyl A. Krieger Main Building at 800 Key Highway, beside Federal Hill.
Flaunt is the museum’s 31st major thematic exhibition, bringing together 100 works across drawing, portraiture, photography, fiber, wearable form and sculpture. Many of them are made from transformed everyday materials such as buttons, pipe cleaners and bark. Highlights include Shawn Payne’s dazzling Space Heels, Montrel Beverly’s cowboy boots, Beau McCall’s Button Yoke: Blue I, sewn onto an upcycled denim jacket, a clay crown by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, drawings by Helen Rae and Lucy Walker, and Maria ‘Maima’ Tani’s Coral Dress.
The exhibition playfully turns a familiar saying upside down. Instead of asking visitors to look below the surface, Flaunt invites them to look closely at what is right in front of their eyes, where so much feeling, invention, humor, protection and self-authorship is already on display. For Happy City News readers, it is a bright, welcoming celebration of self-taught creativity and of the way appearance can speak joyfully about who we are. Pair it with a stroll around Federal Hill and the harbor for a very Baltimore day out.
Photo: Space Heels (2024) by Shawn Payne, courtesy of the American Visionary Art Museum.
