2026 Asia North Art Exhibition 👟SHOES AT THE DOOR🚪
Image: Heejo Kim, Dalonga, 2025, oil and baking soda on canvas, 24.5” × 36”
Guest curated by Dylan Kaleikaumaka Hill
SNF Parkway Theater | 5 W. North Ave | During Asia North and Parkway events
Currency Studio | 16 W. North Ave | Thu-Friday 1-5pm; Sat 12-3pm or by appointment
»Featuring Artists«
Hannah Atallah | Thea Canlas | Rosa Chang | Aishwariya Chandrasekar | Michelle Chen | Riya Devi-Ashby | Anna Davinagarcia | Heejo Kim | Anthony Le | Nadia Nazar | Lynn Nguyen | Katherine Pon-Cooper | AX Qin | Artie Sadahiro | Julie Sayo | Asma Waheed | Amelie Wang
Artist Thea Canlas’s interactive installation at SNF Parkway Theater.
Every household is familiar with the pleasures and pains of hospitality. Hours of unseen preparation yield specialty dishes and spotless interiors for strangers and family alike. For many of us who are part of the APIMEDA (Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern and Desi American) community, guests are not expected to do anything, but leave their shoes at the door. This simple act–rooted in respect and ritual–demonstrates the way in which hospitality creates space for communal exchange.
Shoes at the Door brings together works by seventeen artists living in the greater Baltimore and DMV region whose artworks consider hospitality as a malleable practice shaped by diaspora, cultural tradition, inheritance, colonial commodification, and celebration. The works in this exhibition capture the breadth and diversity of hospitality customs and notions of home through installation, ceramics, painting, sculpture, drawing, and textiles, displayed throughout SNF Parkway Theatre and Currency Studio.
Some of the featured artists engage explicitly with intergenerational practices associated with welcoming others into our homes, reimagining household objects that evoke familial gatherings and celebratory meals. While such works incite nostalgia and joy, they also excavate the gendered labor and colonial legacies that inform them. Select artists also offer meditations on hospitable conditions within our built and natural environments, gesturing to the complexities of diasporic placemaking.
Shoes at the Door offers a nuanced glimpse of what it means to prioritize the care of others through acts of hospitality, which have the ability to both strengthen our ties to distant homelands and subvert cultural expectation.
P.S. Unlike the title suggests, you will not be asked to take your shoes off at any point.
Detail of …. installation in Gallery II at SNF Parkway.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Dylan K. Hill joined the Contemporary Art Department at the Baltimore Museum of Art as the Meyerhoff-Becker Curatorial Fellow in 2024. While at the BMA, she has supported projects including Crosscurrents: Works from the Contemporary Collection (2025), Amy Sherald: American Sublime (2025) and the upcoming Meyerhoff-Becker lobby commission. Dylan also co-curated the group exhibition, Exquisite Relations (2025), at the Rubelle and Norman Schafler Gallery at the Pratt Institute, NY.
She received her M.A. in the History of Art and Design at Pratt, where she also served as a research assistant, and holds a B.A. in Art History from Portland State University. Her research interests explore the ways in which Native Hawaiian culture, settler colonialism, and tourism manifest in contemporary art and design.
Photo Credit: Lena McBean
Shoes at the Door photo credit Vivian Doering unless noted otherwise.