STATEMENT 2025: The Baltimore Met Gala Art Exhibition

Baltimore Met Gala’s STATEMENT 2025 Art Exhibition, Timeless, curated by Ainsley Burrows, Laurielle Noel & Ernest Shaw, brings together artists from multiple generations whose practices span abstraction, conceptual approaches, and experimental forms. Each artist challenges the viewer to expand how we think about art—how visual language can reach beyond the present moment to touch time, memory, and imagination. In this exhibition, urgent and deeply personal expressions invite us to pause, look closer, and join an evolving dialogue. Timeless reminds us that art is never static: it expands us as viewers and participants, opening new ways of seeing ourselves, each other, and the world we shape together.

As the curators of the art component of the Baltimore Met Gala, our responsibility was not simply to choose "good" artists. It was to find voices. Visual storytellers. People whose work doesn't just sit on walls, but calls something out of you.

These artists aren’t just skilled technicians—they’re cultural translators. Their work speaks to memory, identity, and possibility. It carries the weight of the past (Melissa Sutherland Moss), the urgency of the present (Qrcky), and still dares to imagine a bold, beautiful future (Noreen Justis).

They were chosen because their visions are expansive (Alma Roberts, Ainsley Burrows). Because they are not afraid to ask big questions (Mr. James Phillips). Because their work is alive (Ernest Shaw)—and they demand that we, too, stay awake.

Whether you go to galleries every weekend or this is your first time stepping into this kind of space, I promise you this: their work will meet you where you are—and take you somewhere deeper.

*Note: Qrcky will unveil an installation on September 13th at the Baltimore Met Gala

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