The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) presents an innovative thematic exhibition, Imagining Home, in conjunction with the Oct. 25 opening of the Center for People & Art, a new education area of the museum. A gift of $3 million from Patricia and Mark Joseph was announced Tuesday in support of the museum’s $4.5 million, 5,500-square-foot education center.

On view this Sunday through August 1, 2018, Imagining Home presents more than 30 artworks from across the collection in a lively space that incorporates video, audio, and other experiences that encourage visitor participation. More than a third of the objects in the exhibition are light sensitive and will change every six months so there will always be something new to experience.

The artworks in Imagining Home represent different ideas and aspects of the places in which we live—whether decorative or functional, real or ideal, celebratory or critical. Visitors can explore objects from many times and places as nearly every area of the BMA’s collection is included: paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, textiles, prints, and photographs, along with works from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, as well as four of the museum’s popular miniature rooms. Each object reveals something about the cultural values of its makers and users.

Visitors have three thematic areas to explore in the exhibition:

• Façades & Thresholds: Visitors will enter the exhibition through a designed threshold to see objects that reflect how we mediate public and private spaces such as Emile-Antoine Bourdelle’s sinister bronze Medusa Door Knocker (1925), Walter Henry Williams’ painting A Quick Nap (1952), and a colorful early 20th-century Suzani prayer rug from Central Asia.

• Domestic Interiors: Laurie Simmon’s Walking House (1989, printed 1997) and a selection of chairs, vessels, and other objects from an ancient Greek krater (440- 430 BCE) to a modern Toastmaster toaster (c. 1932) and a shower curtain with text by author Dave Eggers from The Thing Quarterly (2011-12) invite visitors to consider how we make home.

• Arrivals & Departures: Contemporary and historic objects like Alfred Stieglitz’s Steerage (1907) photograph of passengers boarding a ship and Susan Harbage Page’s Hiding Place No. 3, Laredo, Texas (2011), a large-scale photograph of a temporary shelter for someone crossing the U.S./Mexico border, show a world of constant transformation and movement. A variety of interactive elements are woven throughout