In the second installment of the Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker Biennial Commission at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), artist Raúl de Nieves (b. 1983) bathes the lobby in colored light. The central feature of the public exhibition is a twenty-seven-paned window that spans the length of the building’s east facade. The Mexico-born, Brooklyn-based sculptor hand-crafted the panels from everyday materials like tape and sheets of acetate to recreate the look of stained glass. Monumental in size and dazzling in effect, the installation presents a series of vignettes, each depicting creatures that reappear frequently in de Nieves’s iconographically rich work. Frogs and butterflies line the edges of the window; brightly winged cicadas frame the falcon at its center. The “stained glass” overlooks three highly embellished effigies that don vibrant arrays of feathers, beads, and bells. The window installation serves as a fitting anchor for the exhibition, which evokes the rhythmic changes of the natural world—migration, hibernation, metamorphosis—as a mirror for cultural transformation. Raúl de Nieves: and imagine you are here succeeds as an immersive installation precisely because it communicates its place in the Baltimore museum to be both a consequence and catalyst of institutional transformation.

The BMA has weathered several changes of its own since the Meyerhoff-Becker Commission was first established in 2018. News of the biennial program came shortly after the institution incited a firestorm of controversy over its decision to deaccession several objects and commit the proceeds to acquire new works by underrepresented artists. The Meyerhoff-Becker Commission was part of this ongoing effort to diversify its collection. “How do you remake the faith in a public institution in such a way that far more diverse populations see the museum as a welcoming environment?” asked then director Christopher Bedford in an interview with Artnews. The inaugural commission by painter and patternist Mickalene Thomas answered Bedford’s call and converted the two-story lobby into a well-worn living room representative of the artist’s seventies-inspired style. When Bedford departed Baltimore in 2022, interim codirector and chief curator Asma Naeem stepped in as custodian of the museum’s future, which was to include a major renovation of the Patricia and Mark Joseph Education Center, the reinstallation of its Asian collection, and the acquisition of more than one hundred works. De Nieves’s exhibition further reflects Naeem’s vision for the museum as the site of urgent “dialogues about the history and evolution of art, about museums as community spaces, and about the relationship between internal culture to external experience.”

Upon entering the east lobby, visitors encounter a playful reimagination of the museum, where de Nieves relaxes the Euro-American norms of proper gallery etiquette. The artist invites the audience to join his humanoid sculptures on the benches where they sit and touch their beaded forms. These are chimeric creatures. A frog-headed figure rests to the right of the lobby doors. Gold and silver baubles adorn her arms and legs, the rest of her a kaleidoscope of flashy pinks and greens. The colorful beadwork is characteristic of de Nieves’s practice, which incorporates the Mexican craft traditions of his childhood. It was in the colonial city of Morelia that de Nieves first learned needlecraft and embroidery. De Nieves attributes his careful craftsmanship to his mother’s example. “She never stopped working,” he said of his mother in a 2014 interview with BOMB Magazine, “she taught me to be the best at what I do with my mind and hands. She always expressed the craftsmanship of the human . . . That’s where the love of labor comes from in my work.” This deft handiwork is also evident in the hundreds of semitransparent resin-cast flies that dot the lobby walls, containing beads, dirt, and the delicate tangles of de Nieves’s own hair. De Nieves is especially adept at repurposing these commonplace and castoff materials. Under his artistry, detritus seems to sparkle. The glittering beads that encrust his sculptures appear almost crystalline. Only after placing a gentle hand on the structure does one recognize them as the cheap plastic stuff of schooldays.

Just as de Nieves transforms these everyday materials into gaudy embellishments, Raúl de Nieves transforms the austere space of the museum into a place where visitors of all ages and experience can see themselves. The sculpture seated opposite the welcome desk sports a look not unlike many one might encounter at The Crown, the no-frills venue nearby where DJ Trillnatured (Jessica Hyman) and emcee Kotic Couture host a monthly dance party for queer and trans people of color. The creatural figure dons shoulder pads, a pair of open-toed pumps, and a manicure. In his work, de Nieves invokes the club culture and punk scene in which he came of age. After an early childhood in Michoacán, de Nieves moved with his mother and siblings to San Diego. There he identified a formal similarity between the ribboned costumes of Mexican folk dances and the leather fringe of California punk. When de Nieves moved to San Francisco at twenty years old, he found his place in the drag scene. The bedazzled heels he often wore to the dancefloor were among his first sculptures. Now based in Brooklyn, de Nieves continues to amass an eclectic collection of references: the tarot deck, Catholic icons, baroque ornamentation, ziggurats, and ballroom vernacular all recur throughout his work. One imagines then that de Nieves felt at home in Baltimore, a city long regarded for its rather queer character and thriving counterculture. If John Waters is Baltimore’s “Pope of Trash,” de Nieves has rightfully secured his place as archbishop.

But the titular “here” of de Nieves’s exhibition remains somewhat ambiguous. Much like he plays upon unexpected associations between forms, de Nieves likes to chart otherwise unfamiliar paths between places. His is a queer geography, an amalgam of diverse regional symbols and environmental markers. In his monumental stained glass, there are the Brood X cicadas, also known as the Great Eastern Brood, that last emerged from their seventeen-year slumber in 2021; the Crested Caracara, a formidable bird of prey endemic to Central and South America; and the brilliant orange Monarchs that pass through Maryland every fall as they migrate southward to Mexico. For de Nieves, the very experience of moving is itself a kind of placedness. To “imagine [one’s self] here” is to be present in the process of change, a perennial process without any one destination. A similar claim serves as the theoretical foundation on which trans studies stand. Today, “transition” names the process of moving across the social and juridico-medical boundaries that define gender. But, as many trans studies scholars have observed, that process is rarely if ever complete (see, for example, Julian Carter in Trans Studies Quarterly). Because gender itself is contingent, the measures by which a person or the regulatory state in which they exist might determine a transition has occurred are subject to change: if the destination is always already unfixed, how does one ever arrive there? The works in Raúl de Nieves thereby provide an ecological analog for this open-ended experience of queer becoming and a necessary reminder that—while much anti-trans rhetoric relies on staid references to “science”—transness and transition are in fact integral parts of our so-called natural world.

The formal centerpiece of the exhibition, the stained-glass window suggests that if transition is natural, it is also sacred. Cast in its light, the rest of the exhibition takes on a cathedral quality. Three bejeweled creatures perch like gargoyles atop the adjacent terrace. Visitors move through the lobby like they would a nave, glancing upward at the four-tiered chandelier suspended over the east staircase. The fixture features an enrobed body at its center, floating overhead as if an angel might, haloed in the electric glow of LED candles. De Nieves does not shy away from these religious resonances but integrates them into his syncretic practice. His stairway installation is an adept intermediary between the second-floor galleries, which presently feature works from the museum’s robust European collection in one wing and a vibrant exhibition of more than one hundred works—wall hangings, sculptural costumes, beaded jewelry, and performance footage—from Baltimore visionary Joyce Scott in the other.

Raúl de Nieves: and imagine you are here owes its success to the dexterity with which the artist maneuvers between these many points of reference. The exhibition prompts audiences to reconsider the space of the museum—as a site for reverence, for performance, for play—and their place therein. Recognizing that the lobby is itself a transitional space, de Nieves harnesses its metamorphic energy. Visitors who return to the lobby as they exit the museum are likely to find the installation changed. The shifting sun reflects a new light through the stained glass; the many beaded sculptures shine in different colors, and their forms leave new shadows. De Nieves embraces these changing conditions as one hopes the Baltimore Museum might embrace its changing audience, and the art world, a changing BMA.