Current Exhibition:

Brighter Skies

June 28 - August 9, 2025
(By Appointment: info@cpmprogram.com)

Zoë Charlton
Erin Fostel
Charles Mason III
Taj Poscé
John Ruppert
Thiang Uk
Dolores Zinny

CPM is pleased to announce Brighter Skies, a group exhibition bringing together painting, sculpture, and works on paper by seven artists currently living and working in Baltimore.

As an exhibition title, the expression "Brighter Skies" gestures both towards hope for renewal and ironic hopelessness when considering environmental degradation, social turmoil, or performative politics. Amidst this, the natural world continues to unfold with a rhythm that is at once ancient and immediate.

The artists in this exhibition engage with the symbolic, metaphorical, and spiritual qualities of nature, offering a way to remain in relationship with the world, with ourselves, and with something larger than the systems we can’t control. The works on view express the power of slowly and attentively engaging with earth and sky.

John Ruppert casts a giant shard of tree struck by lightning in iron, monumentalizing a moment of nature’s immensity. Erin Fostel uses charcoal to sensitively render nighttime landscapes of a local park and city street. Charles Mason III creates a suite of mixed media works on paper that use the flower as a vessel for language, emotional transportation, and stand-in for the black body. Dolores Zinny makes meticulous and meditative colored pencil drawings that evoke the skies of Rosario, Argentina, where she was born, and Baltimore, Maryland, the city where she currently lives. Thiang Uk’s paintings envision shifting abstract landscapes as sites for ancestral memory and formal discovery. Zoë Charlton’s mixed-media collage works use imagery of plants, animals, and African masks to construct intricate political allegories addressing race, gender, family, and climate change. Taj Poscé thickly layers, constructs, and burns various materials and ephemera to create densely rich paintings, sometimes referencing the grime and dirt of the burnt earth and other times pointing towards the cosmos and the stars.

The sky does not have a border. The sky is a continuity, shared and inhabited by everyone.

Zoë Charlton (b. 1973, Eglin AFB, FL, lives in Baltimore, MD) creates figure drawings, collages, installations, and animations that depict her subject’s relationship to culturally loaded objects and landscapes. Charlton received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and participated in residencies at Artpace (TX), McColl Center for Art + Innovation (NC), Ucross Foundation (WY), the Skowhegan School of Painting (ME), and the Patterson Residency at the Creative Alliance (MD). Her work has been included in national and international exhibitions including: The Delaware Contemporary (DE), the Harvey B. Gantt Center (NC), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (AR), Studio Museum of Harlem (NY), Contemporary Art Museum (TX), the Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Poland), and Haas & Fischer Gallery (Switzerland). She is a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner grant (2012) and a Rubys grant (2014). Museum collections include The Phillips Collection (DC), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (AR), Birmingham Museum of Art (AL), Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), and Studio Museum in Harlem (NY). Charlton is currently a tenured, Full Professor of Art and Director of the School of Art at George Mason University.

Erin Fostel (American, b.1981) is a visual artist who creates representational drawings with charcoal. Her work often depicts the everyday moments of life, from images of intimate home interiors to the shared public space. She holds a BFA in Drawing and Art History from the Maryland Institute College of Art and has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, including: the C. Grimaldis Gallery (Baltimore, MD); Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (Virginia Beach, VA); Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Salt Lake City, UT); Neon Gallery (Wroclaw, Poland);  Moving Poets Novilla (Berlin, Germany); and the Academy Art Museum (Easton, MD). Fostel is a 2019 recipient of the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore City Artist Travel Prize and a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. Her drawings are in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Maryland Center for History and Culture, CFG Bank, and the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. Her studio is based in Baltimore, MD.

Charles Mason III (b.1990, Baltimore, MD) received his BFA from University of Maryland Baltimore County and an MFA in Studio Art from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (2019). Mason’s practice explores notions of love, loss and life amidst his community, family, and society. Mason creates layers of symbols, language, and expressive color in his paintings and works on paper, and his titles convey his emotional approach to each piece. Recent solo shows include: Screaming in Silence, My Salvation is Love (The End), Anna Zorina Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 2022, Goya Contemporary, Baltimore, MD, 2023 and 2021, and Spillway Collective, Philadelphia, PA, 2019. Group exhibitions include: Creative Alliance, TENT Rotterdam, & Baltimore-Rotterdam Sister City, Walk On By, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2024-25, The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) 2023-25, This Too Shall Pass, Venus Over Manhattan, New York, NY, 2023, and Radical Reading Room, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Harlem, NY, 2019. Permanent collections include: the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum Grunwald Center Collection, and the James E. Lewis Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD.

Taj Poscé (b.1995, Philadelphia, PA) is based in Baltimore, MD. He recently earned his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art's LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting, and holds a BFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University (2018). Taj Poscé builds his compositions by collaging archival research materials, construction materials, and studio-based materials. Employing iconographic and symbolic motifs, his paintings are loaded with emotional rigor, spirit and imagination that respond to and reclaim imagery connected to Black histories, culture, and experiences. Taj's work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions at notable venues such as Vox Populi in Philadelphia, the Bishop Gallery in New York, the Eubie Blake Cultural Center in Baltimore, Sean Kelly in Los Angeles, and more. His solo exhibitions include shows at Rush Arts Philadelphia, the Black Rock Center for the Arts in Germantown, MD, and most recently, at the Dimin NYC in Tribeca, New York. Recent awards include: including the Bertha Lear Painting Award, the Mural Arts Black Artist Grant and Fellowship, the LeRoy E. Hoffberger Fellowship, the Congressional Black Caucus Artist Award, and most recently the Creative Baltimore Fund Grant.

John Ruppert (b.1951, American) lives and works in Baltimore. Over the past 4 decades, Ruppert has been working in cast metals; manufactured materials such as chain-link fabric; mixed media; and more recently, video, digital 3D printing and digital composite photography. His work stems from a long tradition of artists who have been inspired by the grand and sublime beauty of the land, from the ancient Chinese poets and artists of Tao to the 19th century American landscape painters and more recently, to artists working directly in the landscape considering our relationship to the environment. He has exhibited widely at institutions in the US and abroad including Adkins Arboretum, The Academy Art Museum, Kreeger Museum,  Katonah Museum, OMI International Sculpture Park, and DeCordova Museum.  He is the recipient of many awards and grants including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, and Maryland State Arts Council Individual Awards, as well as commissions at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport and The American Visionary Art Museum. Ruppert received his MFA from the School for American Craftsman, Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, in 1977.

Thiang Uk (b.1993, Myanmar) migrated to the United States with his family in 2004, fleeing potential violence and the instability of Myanmar’s government. Uk’s paintings investigate notions of holding manifold identities, inhabiting ever-shifting landscapes, as well as exploring ancestral memory through  animism, metamorphosis, distance, mystery and the formality of painting. Uk is currently based in Baltimore, MD. He received his M.F.A. in the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), his B.F.A. at Hunter College in NYC in 2017, and also completed a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 2023. Recent solo exhibitions include: Breathing Surfaces, Silver Art Gallery, Goucher College, Towson, MD (2025); Shadow’s Edge,Bureau, NYC (2025)

Dolores Zinny (Argentinian, b.1968, Rosario, Argentina) Lives and works in Baltimore, MD and Berlin, Germany). She received her six-year degree as Licentiate in Fine Arts at the Universidad Nacional in Rosario Argentina (1992) with a thesis on Installation Art. She is currently the director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College Art. Dolores Zinny has worked independently, as well as in collaboration (since1989) with Juan Maidagan. From 1995 to 1996, Zinny and Maidagan attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. They received a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1998; a Pollock Krasner Fellowship, 2000; and a DAAD Artist in Berlin Program Fellowship Award, 2002. Recent commissions and work in public spaces include projects such as: Word for Word: decór, for distance, 2017, for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s façade during the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA and Trade Winds, 2023, for the Singapore National Gallery.