written by Trisha Daigle

The American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) is home to some of the most eccentric, and unusual art pieces in Baltimore (and possibly the world).  A former whiskey barrel warehouse, the physical space espousess the art on display becauof the art is constructed of recycled materials, found objects, and other odds and ends.

This guy is made of wire, and metal and all sorts of things.

Founded as an art space for artists that exist outside the traditional art circles.  These innovators are self-taught, have their own vision of art and reject the notion that art/artists should be taught to follow a set of standards. The museum further bucks tradition by one of the only museums in the US started by a woman.

The museum displays art from all over the world, but there’s a certain homage to Baltimore embedded in the architecture and the art.  A mosaic of glass stretches across much of the main building, and it is made mostly of Baltimore blue glass, a unique cobalt blue glass once made by the Maryland Glass Corporation in Baltimore.  The work was done by artists who are also at-risk youth.  These young people are taught the trade of working with glass, and create these mosaics as part of their education.  Afterwards, they get jobs maintaining stained glass windows.  And anyone who’s walked around this city knows there’s plenty of churches full of stained glass windows to be maintained.

Elephant on wheels. Kinetic sculpture participant.

The back building is a full on song to Baltimore.  Not in music, but in art.  There’s replicas of the stone row houses, and painted screens of Baltimore past, and it houses a few of the kinetic sculptures used in the annual kinetic sculpture race.  Oh, and don’t miss the robots getting married!

If one measures a city based on its museums, then AVAM is truly a treasure.  The work represents the passion of artists on the fringe, of artist’s misunderstood and dismissed.  There’s an unpolished edge to much of the art, but it all has so much heart.  Just like Baltimore.

written by Trisha Daigle

Ironworking, ship building, nursing, teaching, artistic and scientific advancements are just a few of the ways African American people contributed to the building of this country, and the building of Baltimore.  So often the history of African Americans is viewed through the lens of the slave story and the Civil Rights Movement. However, The Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore is dedicated to more than this narrow narrative.  This museum highlights the contributions, dedication, and success of African American people across many fields and disciplines since their first arrival in the US.

The permanent collection winds in chronological sequence, beginning with the ship builders, and iron workers from the late 1600’s to the contributions of African Americans through today.  The story starts with labor.  Interactive models of ship walls (you can give ship caulking a go), and oyster tongs greet the visitor at the entrance of the exhibit.  Dried tobacco hangs from rafters, and fishing boats, and nets dominate the space.

Of course enslavement is a part of that history, and the museum doesn’t ignore that. But not all Black laborers were enslaved.  Instead, they worked alongside white immigrants, and American born people, and enslaved people—caulking ships, digging oysters, and doing  highly skilled jobs such as iron work.

A small replica of the Statue of Freedom stands near the start of the exhibit.  The real statue, which sits atop the Capitol Building in D.C., is there thanks to the work of Phillip Reid.  Reid developed and implemented a pulley system which

Statue of Freedom

allowed iron workers to piece together the statue and raise it to the top of the building.  Ironically, Reid was enslaved at the time.  He later gained his freedom during the Emancipation Compensation Act of 1862.  He lived the remainder of life in Washington D.C.

Harriet Tubman is notably the most well-known woman of the era. Born enslaved in Dorset County, MD, Tubman escaped from slavery and became a conductor on the Underground Railroad.  Conductors and others relied on word of mouth to send and receive messages along the Underground Railroad to people escaping and those helping them move north. Given the extreme danger, and consequence of the underground railroad, communication along the route was quiet and coded.  For example, the quilt code allowed messages about safe houses, transportation, and routes to be communicated through symbols patched into quilts. (for more information about the meaning behind the symbols, go here: http://www.broward.k12.fl.us/corecurriculum/tahgrant/resources/19_Century/Lucy_McGuire_Freedom_Quilt_Codes_Handout.pdf

An example of a coded quilt

Coded spirituals was another way messages were passed between communities of enslaved people and the underground railroad.  The most famous spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” contains hidden meaning about the hope for freedom, but also specific coded messages about where to hide, and the path(s) to follow.

Deeper into the museum, you stumble onto Pennsylvania Avenue, amidst Billie Holiday, Chick Webb and Cab Calloway. In the 1920’s, the African American cultural and artistic explosion known as Harlem Renaissance spread from New York, to Ohio and Chicago, across the whole country.  In Baltimore, Pennsylvania Ave and was the epicenter of Black music, art and theater, and was the home the famous Royal Theater.

The tour takes us through the Jim Crow years, the fight for the push for education equality in Baltimore.  Highlighting such brave folks as Esther McCreedy who won right to attend nursing school at the University of Maryland, becoming the first black woman to graduate from their nursing program.

The collection ends at places of cultural significance in the Black community.  There’s church pews, and barber poles, set up to remind us that life is happening all around us: in church, at the barber shop, and in the city of Baltimore.

Walking through the Reginald F. Lewis Museum is a stroll through another kind of history.   Not of enslaved people, but of resilient, talented and intelligent people who made significant contributions to science, engineering, math, art, and music and to the making of this country.

written by Trisha Daigle

Have you ever walked past something ordinary like a park bench carved with names and hearts, or perhaps a crumbling fence and felt a sense of intrigue or beauty?  Maybe you noticed the way the sunlight struck at just the right angle, and suddenly you felt like you were looking at a painting.  This accidental art is what inspires much of Amanda Burnham’s drawings.  The human imprint on the composition of the city.

Baltimore has not only been the subject of her work since she moved here to take job teaching at Towson University, but it has also influenced the direction her work has taken.  Amanda used drawing as a way to explore the city, often drawing the view from her window, or from a corner of her neighborhood.  At first, she just admired the city for it’s architecture.  But, her interest in Baltimore changed as she started talking more with the people of this city.  Often, she would be out drawing and someone would come over and start talking to her, or she began noticing how the city was never the same from one day to the next.  It was then she began to see how Baltimore was less like a tapestry, and more like a living, breathing organism.

At first, Amanda was creating two-dimensional drawings, but her work changed when she began thinking of the city as fluid and always changing.  She notes that drawing privileges a particular point of view, and she wanted to move beyond that limited scope.  Here she moved her work into the third-dimension.  By expanding her drawings beyond the page, she was able to represent multiple perspectives.  Viewing her work from different angles, one can get a sense of the city as both narrow and expanding, but also that the same scene can look a lot different when seeing it from the other side.

Another way Amanda explores the concept of how things change depending on our view was through her use of light.  She began working with light as a means of creating mood and tone in her installations.  She said:  Light is powerful.  It plays a huge role in our perception of a space.  When we walk through a neighborhood and we see lights on in houses, we see that people are home, that light shapes our feelings of the neighborhood.  It’s inviting and cozy.  A much different experience then if we walk through a dark neighborhood.

Though she doesn’t feature people in any of her drawings or installations, the human presence is evident in her work through her representation of architecture.  She believes architecture reinforces our interconnectivity.  Buildings are connected via pipes and wiring and how they connect to the city.  In her more recent work, she has started doing more interactive pieces that allow people to add drawings or writings to the installation thus increasing the human presence in her work further, and representing more deeply the human impact on the fabric of the city.

Written by Jacob Ferragamo

Joaneeth Spicer, an art historian of the Walters Art Gallery, visited class today to discuss the painting of Maria Solvati de’ Medici and Guilia de’ Medici, 1539. This painting features the first formally painted child of african decent. However, the  when the painting was originally discover, the little girl was painted over with black pigment.

Guilia de’ Medici was daughter of Maria Solvati de’ Medici and the duke of Florance. His parents where an african slave and the Pope. Having such a painting made was a statement, it was rare to see a portrait of a women, but renaissance era paintings of people of african decent where rare. Often paintings featuring people of african descent were reserved for royalty, or those of wealth. There were examples presented to us in class of the exceptions to this trend.

As to the significance of paintings at the time, they were often commissioned in order to show the power of an individual. People like Francis I, King of france has 20+ realistic paintings of himself made, and hung around france. This not only served to popularize realistic painting even further, but popularized and familiarized his image to his subjects.

It was the significance of portraits that built up that lead to portraits of famous people being worth a lot, and then there reselling. As it turned out the Medicis ended up selling the painting when they hit a tough time. The buyer painted out the girl so she would resemble a renowned poet, Victorica Calono. Since Victorica had no children, and Maria resembled her slightly, the painting was an easy resell. Ending that mystery, and the ending of that half of class.