Last night, we celebrated the end of another amazing year with our GDMA community ♥️✨
An evening full of laughter, surprises, delicious food, and so many shared memories. Watching our students reflect on how far they’ve come — and celebrate one another with so much warmth and care — made the night incredibly memorable.
Special thanks to @michelleghiotti and @sara.aust for joining us to celebrate, and to @marksande for helping capture our group photo 📸
@gallery_alley_ is open 🎨🌿
MICA's new open-air gallery on West Trenton Street features work by alumni, faculty, staff, and students — celebrating the creative vibrancy of @StationNorth and the ecological heritage of the @JonesFallsWatershed . An initiative of MICA's Center for Creative Impact, making a positive impact in Baltimore and beyond.
Thank you to all of our partners for making this possible!
#galleryalley #publicart #stationnorth #baltimoreart #mica
✨Alumni Highlight✨
Congratulations to Bhoomi Mistry, @bhoomi__mistry GDMA alumna, for receiving a STA 100 Award of Typographic Excellence for UKA Clothing! @typographic_arts
Created for a fashion brand founded by two mothers, UKA Clothing centers labor, care, and handcraft within its visual identity. Drawing from Indian embroidery traditions, the branding system reflects the time and care embedded in each handmade garment through evolving symbols and typography.
✨Faculty Highlight✨
Congratulations to Sara Austin, @sara.aust GDMA faculty, for receiving a STA 100 Award of Typographic Excellence for Horbar Typeface! @typographic_arts
Inspired by the whimsical lettering above the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, Horbar transforms local vernacular typography into a custom typeface that balances legibility with playful irregularity. Expanding beyond the original all-caps source material, the typeface includes both uppercase and lowercase characters while preserving the charm of the original forms.
✨Student Highlight ✨
Congratulations to Archie Pareek, @archie.etc@archietype__ GDMA ’26, for receiving a STA 100 Award of Typographic Excellence for her thesis project, The Dead Letter Archive! @typographic_arts
The Dead Letter Archive is a speculative archive of asemic and imagined writing systems that catalogs scripts that cannot be read or translated. Through typography, visual identity, and exhibition design, Archie created three original scripts that explore what makes a writing system feel believable and alive.
We are so excited to share that our show has been EXTENDED and will be up through Baltimore’s always anticipated ARTSCAPE!! So while your down town looking at art come check us out! We couldn’t be more excited and hope to see many of you there. Stay tuned for more programming.
We are proud to present NONET, the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Paintings’s 2026 Graduate Thesis Exhibition, marking the 200th anniversary of MICA.
📍 Peale Museum, Baltimore 225 Holliday Street Baltimore, MD 21202
📅 April 4 – May 11, 2026
✨ Artscape May 28-29
Featuring nine artists from the graduating class of 2026, NONET brings together distinct practices that engage painting across material, image, and space. Installed throughout the historic Peale Museum, the exhibition unfolds as a set of conversations that reward sustained looking.
Free and open to the public.
✨Studio Spotlights! ✨ Get to know the people behind the second years at the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting
Introducing Giovanni Stanley!! ( @gio_st_ )
Giovanni Stanley explores the tension between structure and improvisation, using painting as a space where studying foundational principles becomes a way of locating where intuitive, expressive marks can emerge. Grounded in lived experience, the work treats freedom not as escape from responsibility but as something accountable to form, presence, and time.
Photos by 📸: The Man Himself @gio_st_
✨Studio Spotlights! ✨ Get to know the people behind the second years at the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting
Introducing Summer Elliott!! ( @summere.art ) also the one running this account hehe
Summer Elliott is a painter and printmaker working with found 35mm film slides — vernacular photographs that have lost their original context and slipped out of circulation. Through silkscreen, painting, collage, and deliberate misregistration, she subjects these images to successive translations that make the conditions of their survival visible rather than restoring what they once depicted. The work investigates what persists when an image is held long enough to accumulate rather than optimized to circulate, producing surfaces where photographic source, material process, and painterly intervention coexist without resolving.
Photos by 📸: Seungju Lim @im.archive and Olivia Kays @oliviackays
✨Studio Spotlights! ✨ Get to know the people behind the second years at the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting
Introducing Hanwen Wang!! ( @han.wen.wang )
Hanwen Wang’s paintings emerge from fleeting moments when perception becomes unusually vivid. Through color, surface, and spatial tension, she keeps these moments open, allowing them to unfold within the painting.
Photos by 📸: @summere.art Summer Elliott
✨Studio Spotlights! ✨ Get to know the people behind the second year’s at the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting
Introducing Leigh Bell-Koch!! ( @thepainterleigh )
In their dynamic group scenes, Leigh Bell-Koch explores the complex psychology of leisure spaces, such as bars and concerts. They transform moments captured through live sketching into rich compositions onto which the audience can project their fantasies and anxieties of contemporary life. They build relationships through composition and gaze, while strong atmosphere and light imply the overarching systems that bind us together.
Photos by 📸: @summere.art Summer Elliott
✨Studio Spotlights! ✨ Get to know the people behind the second year’s at the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting
Introducing Taylor Ramsey!! ( @madeinramseyville )
Taylor Ramsey is a New Orleans born painter whose practice begins and ends with storytelling. Her large-scale watercolor paintings recontextualize classic works from the Western canon into the iconography of Southern Black folklore and the personal mythology of her New Orleans upbringing. Through a visual language of color, pattern, and text, her work is meant to be read as much as they are meant to be seen.
Photos by 📸: @summere.art Summer Elliott
