BMA Presents Frieda Toranzo Jaeger: The Perpetual Sense of Redness

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) is installing a new work by Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (b. 1988, Mexico City) created especially for the museum’s John Waters Rotunda. The perpetual sense of Redness (2021) is a multi-panel contained structure using hinged and folded canvases to create an electric car and spaceship hybrid that serves as a potent symbol and platform through which to consider the complexity of identity comprised of race, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality. For the artist, this installation is an unclaimed site for hope and escape, removed from the impossible paradox of the colonized Indigenous person suspended in a continual state of resistance. Frieda Toranzo Jaeger: The Perpetual Sense of Redness is on view from June 6 through October 3, 2021.

Toranzo Jaeger’s seductive paintings and constructions collapse traditional depictions of hyper-sexualized femininity—often employed to market the masculine appeal of a vehicle—and reclaims the latent power of the car as an embodiment for unrestrained female sexuality. By using the visual vocabulary of slick cars and the forms of the female body, she creates compelling metaphors that shift gender and power roles. Her new work for the BMA combines oil paint with an embroidery style particular to her Indigenous heritage. The artist’s family members were employed to craft the embroidered canvas, which she has painted, stretched, and configured into the hybrid structure presented in the round as a free-standing structure. Each panel is connected with representations of organic and inorganic links, specifically painted blood vessels and the pipes and tubing of a car engine. As visitors circle the piece, the artwork progresses endlessly from sunrise to nightfall, never arriving, never leaving, and is laden with allegory creating a passageway to visceral human experience—to the redness of pain, love, and the inner machinery of being.

This exhibition is curated by Leila Grothe, BMA Associate Curator of Contemporary Art.

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger

About the Baltimore Museum of Art

Founded in 1914, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) inspires people of all ages and backgrounds through exhibitions, programs, and collections that tell an expansive story of art—challenging long-held narratives and embracing new voices. Our outstanding collection of more than 97,000 objects spans many eras and cultures and includes the world’s largest public holding of works by Henri Matisse; one of the nation’s finest collections of prints, drawings, and photographs; and a rapidly growing number of works by contemporary artists of diverse backgrounds. The museum is also distinguished by a neoclassical building designed by American architect John Russell Pope and two beautifully landscaped gardens featuring an array of modern and contemporary sculpture. The BMA is located three miles north of the Inner Harbor, adjacent to the main campus of Johns Hopkins University, and has a community branch at Lexington Market. General admission is free so that everyone can enjoy the power of art.