[Recording] Artist Roundtable – Confluence: Reimagining Baltimore’s Waterways

Watch this recording of the roundtable discussion at AREA 405 with the artists featured in the Confluence: Reimagining Baltimore’s Waterways exhibition!

Rhea Beckett

Rhea Beckett is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and founder of Black Artist Research Space (BARS). She works across sound, design, performance, painting, and photography, while BARS acts as platform for creative research and collaboration. Beckett received her BS in Art from Fisk University (Nashville, TN) and an MFA in Curatorial Practice from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Rhea Beckett is a classically trained musician and was a soprano in the world renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers from 2009-2013 (National Medal of Arts recipient, 2008, Grammy Nomination, 2009, Grammy Award, 2021). Rhea sings in four languages and has over twenty years of on-stage performance experience. She currently creates from Baltimore, MD where she has been a professor of art for eight years.

Bao Nguyen

Bao Nguyen (they/them) is an visual and performance artist born in Vietnam and based in Baltimore. Through performance, sound, video and interactive media, Bao’s practice creates empathetic connections between ourselves, each other and the landscape.

Bao completed their BFA at Maryland Institute College of Art and is pursuing their MFA at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. They have exhibited in the U.S and abroad, including shows at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Ewha Woman University, Korea. In 2022, they were awarded the Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award from the New Media Caucus. Bao recently completed their residency at Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art.

Jess Keyes

Jess Keyes is a Baltimore-based performer and composer exploring interdisciplinary music-making, ecstatic energy, and communion with the audience. Recent notable collaborations include Will the Great Water Remember, composed with Patrick McMinn for the National Aquarium. First a large-scale composition and performance for the Voyages series in 2022, Keyes and McMinn expanded the work into a permanent installation in the Harbor Wetland, which opened in August of 2024. In 2025 they released the entirety of Will the Great Water Remember as a digital 6-album set, available on all streaming services, and in 2026 as a vinyl release of “Past” and “Future”, funded by a Maryland State Arts Council Creativity Grant. In 2026 they adapted this work for installation in this exhibition as Will the Great Water Remember: Watershed. Keyes is a recipient of a 2024 Rubys Artist Award for Patien(t/ce), which explores her experience of chronic illness and disability through music for voice and synthesizer with wearable handmade controllers.

Jonna McKone

Jonna McKone is an artist and filmmaker whose work combines documentary, narrative, archives, and materials-based photography processes to explore the fragility of truth and the land and body as vessels of memory. Her work has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, a Rubys Artist Grant, the Puffin Foundation, and Maryland State Arts Council as well as a Center for Documentary Studies’ Fellowship. She has been an artist-in-residence at Monson Art’s Abbott Watts Photography Residency, Platteforum, Kent Cultural Alliance, Skidmore’s Storyteller’s Institute and Full Circle Fine Art in Baltimore, MD. Her work has been shown at Candela Gallery (Richmond, MD), Bmore Art Gallery (Baltimore, MD) Hamiltonian Gallery (Washington, DC), Resort (Baltimore, MD), Power Plant Gallery (Durham, NC), The Walters Museum (Baltimore, MD), Interloc Projects (Thomaston, ME), VisArts (Rockville, MD), Zo Gallery (Baltimore, MD) and the Midwest Center for Photography (Wichita, KS).  Jonna is a graduate of Bowdoin College and Duke’s MFA in Experimental & Documentary Arts.  

Alongside her studio practice she is an independent filmmaker whose producing work includes All Light Everywhere (Sundance Special Jury Award, 2021), To Use A Mountain (Special Jury Award, Visions du Reél), The Tallest Dwarf (SXSW 2025, Independent Lens), Margie Soudek’s Salt and Pepper Shakers (Sundance 2023, The New Yorker). Her films have been supported by Ford Foundation | Just Films, Sandbox Films, Sundance Institute, Points North Institute, SFFILM, Kenneth/Rainin Foundation, California Humanities, Cinereach, IDA and ITVS.

Valeska Populoh

Valeska Maria Populoh works as an artist, educator and cultural organizer in her adopted hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, unceded land of the Piscataway Conoy and other Chesapeake First Families.  She was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States as a child with her mother and brother. Valeska apprenticed on organic farms, studied permaculture, and worked on local food and environmental issues before enrolling in art school to pursue fiber and arts education. She has been teaching and facilitating learning in all kinds of settings since 2008, including the Fiber Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art and Black Cherry Puppet Theater, where she co-founded the Puppet Slamwich and organizes annual community parade builds.   Her years of working in community and learning from incredible cultural workers and organizers in Baltimore have shaped her place-based, anti-racist, feminist practice. Embracing a wide array of tactics, from puppetry to participatory performance and celebration, Valeska’s work is motivated by an interest in healing and repair, in our relationships to each other and to the natural world.

This event is moderated by Anand Pandian, a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, a curator of the Ecological Design Collective, and one of the organizers of Jones Falls 2076.