Cara Ober

Founding Editor, BMoreArt

Cara Ober is a Baltimore-based artist, writer, cultural organizer, and producer of digital and print media.

Ober writes about Baltimore's unique cultural landscape from the perspective of a creative maker, activist, and feminist. She approaches the art community from a constructive and critical perspective that is informed by material culture, history, social movements, and politics. Over the past decade, Ober's critical reviews, essays, and opinion editorials have explored the political and economic impact of the arts in Baltimore and the way artists maintain a professional practice and thrive in a city full of rich and diverse cultural traditions as well as deep and troubling social issues.

As the founding editor of BmoreArt, Baltimore's online art magazine and print journal, Ober has spent a decade building a local, national, and international audience for arts and culture produced in Baltimore. She founded BmoreArt in 2007 to encourage accessible and rigorous dialogue about arts and culture in the Baltimore region. Named "Best of Baltimore" by Baltimore Magazine in 2017 and 2014, BmoreArt questions and analyzes issues of gender, race, social justice, and cultural institutions with emphasis on artist-centric issues of material and process and how they influence content and artistic output.

Ober launched BmoreArt: A Journal of Art + Ideas in 2015. The bi-annual, full color print journal explores Baltimore's cultural landscape thematically, offering a deep and diverse perspective on individuals and cultural institutions, as well as a curated content-laden experience, more like an exhibition in print than a traditional magazine. In both the online and print publications, Ober seeks to ask challenging questions, to build community dialogue through digital, printed, and in situ formats, and to celebrate the rich and diverse cultural landscape of Baltimore.

Cara Ober earned an MFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2005 and a BA, Phi Beta Kappa, in fine arts in 1996 from the American University. She is a recipient of grant funding from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, as well as the winner of a Mellon Arts Innovation Grant from Johns Hopkins University in 2015, a Grit Fund Grant from The Contemporary via The Andy Warhol Foundation in 2015, and a Warhol Grant for Emerging Curators in 2006.

From 2010-2012, Cara was the online arts and culture editor at The Urbanite Magazine. She has penned art reviews for Art Papers, ARTnews, Hyperallergic, and BurnAway and numerous other national publications. In addition, Ober taught Professional Development, Online Journalism, and Painting classes for a decade at MICA and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

2019 Presenters