Street Cred: Two Community Arts Exhibitions in Baltimore

How do you bring the richness of the community arts experience into a gallery and transform it into visual art? Not many try. Stilling that magic into wall works or installations is just as complex as placing 50 community members on a stage and crafting their presence into a performance. Theater puts the audience in the presence of living community, but the gallery experience is almost another realm. The viewer is removed in time and space from the immediacy of the interaction between the artist and his/her community partner.

Two exhibitions at Baltimore's Maryland Institute College of Art in February 2006 offered an unprecedented opportunity to mull this over. It was also a chance to get a glimpse of the difference between the approaches of mature and beginning community artists. It is especially interesting to think about the position of the artists themselves in relation to these works.

The two shows are "Crossing the BLVD" by Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer in MICA's Decker Gallery and "Two-Way Street," a group show by the inaugural student artists in MICA's new Masters of Community Arts program (MACA) in the Meyerhoff Gallery, both February 2-March 12.

"Crossing the BLVD," a traveling exhibition that premiered at the Queens Museum of Art in New York in 2004, is spectacular in its commitment to documenting the artists' exploration of their own neighborhood in Queens, "the most ethnically diverse locality in the United States." To get your own lip-smacking taste of the project, visit the elaborate Web site: http://www.crossingtheblvd.org.

But that's only the tip of this enormous iceberg. "Crossing" also comprises a 400-page W.W. Norton book (in both hardcover and paperback), a CD, live performances, residencies and lectures. Craving a deeper connection to their diverse community, Sloan and Werner started seeking out their neighbors in 1999 with storytelling workshops in libraries, high schools and community centers throughout Queens. They emerged in 2004 with exquisitely detailed portraits of the people who live around them – and are now, says Sloan, some of their dearest friends.

The experience of wandering through this exhibit was astonishingly rich, like eating baklava. Of the highest technical quality, it can also be so intimate it almost has a smell. The artistic expertise displayed in the deft oral-history gathering, the jewel-like photography and the immaculate sound work can lead directly to a tender familiarity with each of the people wrapped in the heart of this work. Looking into their eyes and listening to their voices and their music can put the listener right in their laps. In some cases, individuals are grouped together as whole families and you can literally feel the ties that bind them to each other as the immigrant experience threatens to tear them apart, one generation from another.

The exhibition was somewhat colored by the performance by Sloan and Lehrer at the Theatre Project in Baltimore on February 25. The two artists stood at microphones on either side of the proscenium stage, flanking projections of the photographs. Sloan is a professional actress and she physically portrayed most of the characters in the piece, speaking their words in the first person. From time to time, recordings of the actual speakers would be used, sometimes with projected written translations in the case of people with strong accents. At first this was a bit off-putting. It brought up the ever-hovering fear that the artists were objectifying their subjects. But as the performance continued, their profound affection for these people came through. It was even more apparent in the question-and-answer period, where they claimed their lives had been forever changed by this experience. (Sloan said that, when possible, the actual people from the piece perform onstage with them, but this is not possible on the road.)

"Crossing the BLVD," the exhibition, maintains a perfect distance. The viewer can get as far away or as close as s/he wants. For formalists, it is possible to view the work as cool, still and beautifully finished. For community arts fans, it fires up a hunger to make it go on – to set off immediately for Queens, go straight to Moustafa Rahman's restaurant, Mombar, on Steinway Street, sit down with him and talk about art. One imagines that Queens is now full of celebrities thanks to Sloan and Lehrer.

"Two Way Street," installed in the very next gallery, was a completely separate experience. The title refers to the fact that these 13 pieces represent the artists' relationships with groups in the Baltimore community where they are serving yearlong internships for their Master's degree in community arts.

The wall works and installations, some with sound or slides, were delightfully unique and surprisingly sophisticated. A giant graffiti canvas loomed near the entrance to the gallery, with a soundbox and earphones attached. Next to it was a massive and colorful tiled arch, not far from an installation with live grass growing out of it, fed by water tubes. Around the corner was a video installation flanked by a photo gallery of local residents. An enormous three-dimensional figure bumped his head on the ceiling in the next room, surrounded by pottery and photographs, not far from a huge, framed quilt inscribed with angry and energetic comments. Slides of a blighted urban neighborhood were projecting onto the wall around the flat, cutout figure of a white man, who peered through a line of clear Plexiglas figures lined up in front of him. Further on, a card catalog sat stolidly against a staircase with some of its drawers open; inside the drawers were stories on paper in gorgeous typography.

The graduate students who crafted these works are between their 20s and 40s. They learned very early into their degree program (which is about 15 months long) that they would not only be expected to choose a community organization with which to intern, but they would also have to feel their way into the relationship with that partner while learning how to do it in their classes at MICA. At the same time, they would have to prepare this exhibit, showing artworks that communicated their relationships with their community partners. Essentially, they had to come up with a thesis show not at the end of their educational experience but at the beginning.

Some student artists chose to collaborate with the community; some chose to gather materials in the community and make something of their own. A few were still in the very early stages of their partnerships, and simply created a meditation on the situation. Others were already surefooting their way to larger community projects based on their pieces in this show.

For example: Aleks Martray's video installation. A mural artist, Martray is working with a "coalition of neighborhoods" called Operation ReachOut Southwest (OROSW). This ambitious bunch of community leaders has a strategic plan to revitalize southwest Baltimore, which is experiencing "urban renewal" and an inevitable attendant fracturing. Martray determined that he could best play his role as an artist by compiling an oral-history video documentary of the testimonies and insights of the OROSW leaders. The video monitor showing the documentary was installed in a corner of the gallery flanked by still portraits of the speakers and their biographies. The pristine installation honors its subjects, elevating them as pillars of their community. Martray is firmly committed to expanding the project and installing it in a community center at the heart of the OROSW neighborhoods.

Jessie Reid's "Arch on the Hill" is a stunning ceramic tile archway to be permanently installed in an outdoor garden. It was created in collaboration with Kids on the Hill, a dynamic organization of 50 young people, ages 7-18, in the struggling Reservoir Hill neighborhood who want to be part of reshaping their community by making art in and with it. Working with Reid, they researched, designed and built an archway 14’ high by 10’ wide, decorated in ceramic tiles and emblazoned with the motto "DON'T BE ASHAMED OF WHO YOU ARE. YOU ONLY GET TO BE YOU ONCE." If things have gone according to plan, the piece is now standing proudly in a garden on Reservoir Hill.

Kristen Faber's "Lucha de Gigantes" (Fight of the Giants) is one of the huge figures she made with a group of teens including Latino immigrants living in Brooklyn and Curtis Bay. Together they made recordings about the circumstances of their lives as aliens, then incorporated positive and negative images into the large puppets they made from found objects. The fact that the figure was bent to make it fit into the gallery said something graphic about difference – how often it's the unseen giant in the room.

In her residency at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Amanda Smit noticed staff members were proud of lapel pins they wore with their library attire. She engaged them in dialogues about the pins and their significance in their lives, then borrowed an aged wooden card catalog from the library and installed the stories in the drawers, beautifully typeset on colored paper. The form of "Pin Stories" was perfectly appropriate to its setting, and the preciousness of the story installations in the drawers mirrored the reverence with which they were cherished by the storytellers.

When she started her residency, Nicaraguan-born Maria Gabriela Aldana entered the rapidly changing environment of the Academy for College and Career Exploration, one of Mayor Martin O'Malley's new "innovative" public schools. She found a diverse student body of ninth and tenth graders grappling with issues of a brand-new curriculum, a dress-code policy and cramped space shared with another school. She asked both students and faculty to inscribe their concerns on fabric squares, then sewed them together into a enormous quilt, framed and mounted in the gallery as "A Crowd of Voices Is Louder than One Alone." The piece is a cogent solution to a knotty problem: how to manifest ongoing troublesome dialogue in a visual artwork.

Perhaps the most striking piece in the gallery was Tracey J. Hill's "A Sense of Invisibility." Standing directly in front of the piece, the viewer looks through several standing Plexiglas figures and into the eyes of a lone white man positioned in front of slides of an old, decrepit and apparently empty neighborhood. Hill is artist in residence at the Franciscan Youth Center in a neighborhood afflicted with drug, housing and crime problems. The residents are rarely seen on the street and that reminded Hill of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." She constructed the installation on the theory that the community is vanishing because its people feel invisible, unnoticed, overlooked. Crafted with a high degree of skill, the installation was insightful and chilling – and only a first step into a community where Hill will work all year.

Other ambitious works in the show included Eric Imhof's "The City Speaks," a huge piece by local graffiti artists, accompanied by their recorded remarks about their lives and work; Carol Krawczyk's "Pick Up What You Drop," a growing patch of greenery as a model for a children's project on the health of the urban environment (she's at Child First Authority); Elizabeth Morisette's "Kvitl Project" on faith and community with participants at the Jewish Community Center: a suitcase full of rolled paper messages; Rachel Robinson's "Vessels," self-portraits in clay by teens working at Baltimore Clayworks; Ashley Clemmer's "I Remember When…," an oral-history project with seniors in the Highlandtown neighborhood around the Patterson Theater, location of her residency with the Creative Alliance; Sean Keelan's "Music Making Memory," an investigation of the function and importance of music within the families of a team of performers from his residency site, WombWorks Productions; and Christy Zuccarini's "In the Eye of the Youth Dreamers," a personal-identity photography project with The Youth Dreamers, a youth-run organization of kids in grades 7-11 at the Stadium School.

Some projects were more successful than others at articulating the proposition of the show: that community art is a two-way street. But the show was a remarkable achievement for these artists who are only beginning their journey down that street and into the wilderness of urban community, learning as they go.