Image: American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore
The American Visionary Art Museum’s 30th-anniversary exhibition ‘Fantastic Realities: Truth Stranger Than Fiction’ is entering its final week, with the Baltimore presentation scheduled to close on September 6, 2026. The exhibition, on view in the museum’s Zanvyl A. Krieger Main Building, brings together more than 130 artworks across painting, ceramics, printmaking, sculpture and handcrafted objects.
Running from October 4, 2025, through September 6, 2026, ‘Fantastic Realities’ is organized around imagined and depicted worlds. According to the museum, some of the artists represented in the exhibition draw on visions of other dimensions, while others imagine possible futures, reflect on the present or issue warnings about what may come. The exhibition’s stated premise is that fantastical images can carry recognizable or unsettling truths.
The works span a deliberately broad range of materials and visual approaches. The museum describes radiant and surreal oil paintings, colorful ceramic scenes, haunting lithographs, posable handcrafted action figures, chainsaw-carved minotaurs and hand-painted science-fiction galaxies. Together, the works place highly individual forms of making alongside a shared interest in invention, transformation and alternative realities.
Among the works listed by the museum are Dickens 44’s ‘Cap Bathing Moligator with Angelic Visitation’, a mixed-media work on canvas; Promethea’s ‘Thanatos Wave’, an oil painting on wood; and Stephanie Lucas’s acrylic painting ‘Tomorrow the Dogs (Demain les Chiens)’. The exhibition also includes pieces by Cuong “Mike” Tran from the ‘Cyber-Punk Series’, Romaine Samworth’s painted-plaster work ‘Enough is Enough’ and Edward Woltemate Jr.’s mixed-media work ‘Whitesand’.
Ceramic and sculptural works extend the exhibition’s engagement with constructed worlds. ‘Unexpected Subway Living’ by Jordan Laura MacLaclhan uses glazed and unglazed terracotta clay, while the museum’s exhibition materials also point to handcrafted figures and large-scale carved forms among the works on view. The top image for the exhibition features Antar Mikosz’s mixed-media canvas ‘The Gateway’; the museum’s featured image in its newsletter highlights works by Ruth Sanger.
The American Visionary Art Museum presents ‘Fantastic Realities’ as its 30th-anniversary mega-exhibition and makes admission to the exhibition available through general museum admission. The show is installed at the Zanvyl A. Krieger Main Building, at 800 Key Highway in Baltimore, and remains on view through September 6, 2026.
