Glenn F. Walker, a Baltimore painter trained at the then-Maryland Institute of Arts and a "best kept secret" among area art aficionados, is the subject of the latest art exhibition in the University of Baltimore Student Center Gallery, 21 W. Mt. Royal Ave. Twenty-one of Walker's works are featured in the show, including Landscape in Paris, pictured in part above and on the UBalt home page. The retrospective, organized by Shelley Amsel and Buzz Cusack, will continue through Jan. 6, 2012.
Walker, who died in 1988, continues to be known for working in a breathtaking variety of media and styles, including oils, pastels, watercolors, drawings and woodcuts. He won prizes for his art from the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Peale Museum, and elsewhere. Walker is remembered in part as the subject of controversy: Baltimore Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro Jr. saw a Walker painting, In a Room, during a 1955 Peale exhibition, and, declaring it obscene and "morally objectionable," ordered it removed. The painting showed a nude man and woman lying on a bed. The museum's director, Wilbur H. Hunter Jr., put the painting on display in his office, and other painters protested the mayor's order by removing their works from the exhibition. In a Room is included in the UBalt gallery show.
A year later, the Baltimore Sun's art critic, Kenneth Sawyer, called Walker "a draftsman of sensitive imagination, a technician with few peers in Baltimore." Walker remained at the center of the city's art scene for many years, continuing to paint and teach throughout his four-decade career.
Student Center Gallery hours are Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Friday, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
For more information, call 410.837.6022 or send an e-mail to scd@ubalt.edu.