Content Warning: This review contains language describing the genocide and ongoing violence in Palestine and incitement of violence against Palestinian people.

Every day since October, I have seen on my phone the worst things I’ve ever seen. These are photos mostly from Gaza, shared on social media, of Palestinians being bombed and brutalized; mothers cradling the lifeless bodies of their children; men and boys rounded up, stripped, bound and blindfolded; refugee camps on fire; hospitals exploded; babies starved. Just describing the images feels cruel — the acts themselves are unspeakable. Words are insufficient to convey them. But it is all happening. You have seen it too, this civilian reportage and documentation of Israel’s continuous devastation of Gaza after Hamas’ October 7 attacks.

These horrific scenes are daily reality for Palestinians. They are indecent and abhorrent scenes that go back through generations, and yet are also not the sum total of “the Palestinian experience” — no suffering or abuse is the sum total of a whole people’s existence. It is critical to hold onto that, and to hold the multiplicities. In a 2021 essay, around the time of “yet another round of Palestinian uprising against Israeli apartheid and its colonial war machine,” the poet and doctor Fady Joudah wrote about the challenges of exposure for Palestinian artists, in part because of Western audiences’ demand for performance. “The silken compassion toward Palestinians in mainstream English thinks the language of the oppressed is brilliant mostly when it teaches us about surviving massacres and enduring the degradation of checkpoints,” he writes.

I was thinking about that Joudah essay, and the right to just exist and create a self-determined life, and the forces that (violently) infringe upon that right, before walking into “We Will Be What We Want to Be: From Baltimore to Palestine.” The exhibition, curated by Quentin Gibeau at Area 405, features a family of Palestinian-American artists. The work of the artists/family unit — Zahi Khamis and Kim Jensen are the parents of Ahlam Khamis and Besan Khamis — is diverse in form and media, from painting and sculpture to installation, performance, and poetry, and is equally varied in subject and mood.

The show’s title repeats the title of a large painting by Zahi Khamis, originally derived from a Mahmoud Darwish poem. Zahi’s 2024 acrylic painting, visible from the door, depicts a fractured, cubist scene of figures seemingly staged in a room, rendered in geometric shapes in optimistic morning sun colors: pale yellow and gold, numerous blues, sharp black, hot reds. Given the fragmented context and the purposeful absence of identifying features of a person or place, we focus instead on the massing of shapes that coalesce to form an individual and the power of their gathering together.

Nearby is Jensen’s “Watch in Full” installation, a “documentary poem” featuring cotton banners hanging mid-air in rows like laundry. Printed on the banners are photos from Gaza paired with poetic texts that capture the urgency of paying attention from afar, as well as the impossibility of swallowing all of it — watching South Africa argue its case before the International Court of Justice that Israel is committing genocide; attempting to rally people of a certain generation to care; feeling a visceral anger about it all, about “the number of children who will never be born / genetic codes that won’t travel on / trees that won’t sift the sun into smaller and smaller particles / the catalogue of things that can’t be counted / weddings / quarrels / couches / roses / limbs / books / rabbits …”

Meanwhile, a performance piece by Ahlam Khamis tests bystanders’ willingness to engage. Photo documentation of three iterations of “Under the Rocks,” performed in Los Angeles in 2011, Baltimore in 2021, and on UMBC’s campus in 2024, shows the artist or her collaborator lying beneath a pile of stones in busy public spaces. Accompanying text tells us that in L.A., a bystander screamed, “you are hijacking our space,” while others helped the artists carry and replace the stones after security officers had them move eight feet away. In Baltimore’s McKeldin Square, “most people scurried by without making eye contact.” In May of this year in a UMBC campus courtyard, many students walked by, “whispered and asked questions”; one “asked if it was a protest to nonstop school construction,” while another “thought it was about Gaza.” Three students helped remove the stones at the end of the performance.

In the same room, Besan Khamis presents a revised version of a 2016 piece, “Freedom Printer.” For the earlier piece, Besan painted a printer with the fishnet pattern of the Palestinian keffiyeh, and the printer printed sheets that read “freedom” in Arabic and English — a cheeky demonstration that if you can imagine freedom, you can create freedom. At Area 405, in Besan’s “Freedom Printer 2 (From Under the Rubble),” a fishnet-painted printer sits on a small mound of dusty rubble, surrounded by printouts of drawings made by children at the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza, which Israel bombed on June 8. “Freedom Printer 2” is a collaboration with Camps Breakerz, which the artist describes as a “breakdance crew in Gaza that continues to care for besieged youth by spreading dance, art, therapy, and much more, to people seeking shelter during this genocide.” Prints are available for purchase; all the money goes back to Camps Breakerz.

Since “We Will Be What We Want to Be” opened in late May, the exhibition has been further activated by several community events highlighting Palestinian culture, music, and more. The closing reception, this Friday, June 28, from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., will feature remarks by Israeli human rights activist Miko Peled, a panel talk on art and resistance, and a performance by vocalist Nibal Malshi.

Acts of creation, like the dozens of artworks on display in this show and the supplementary programs bringing people into the space, strengthen bonds and affirm life at a time when that is desperately needed. Earlier in his 2021 essay, Joudah puts that sentiment into more beautiful language. “We sit at the shore of an acid sea lapping our being. The air we breathe is toxic. Even the wet sand corrodes our flesh,” he writes. “And yet we love, and love is, in the first place, common decency, and common decency is hard work. We carve light through impenetrable darkness. We, in the words of Gazan poet Hosam Maarouf, ‘manufacture spare hearts/ in case we lose the hearts each of us has.’”

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“I feel like I eat stress or something,” Alex Ebstein, wearer of many hats, tells me. Over the years she has run (or co-run) a few galleries, worked in media, written for publications like City Paper and BmoreArt (among others), and been an adjunct professor at MICA, Towson University, and American University, all while developing her own studio practice—and this is an abbreviated summary. With a seemingly tireless ambition, she has helped promote the notion that Baltimore is a site of rich artistic exertion.

This probably comes from her own praxis of multitasking: “In many ways [Baltimore’s art scene] is about collaboration and community-building and wearing multiple hats and having jobs that bring you into the community in a different way,” she says. “I think that’s as valid a way to participate in the arts as anywhere else.”

The past couple of years have felt particularly busy for Ebstein. But just over the last few weeks, she’s finished up new artwork for her two-person show with Leah Guadagnoli at Terrault Contemporary, “Cut, Copy, Paste. It’s Not What You Think,” and finished the build-out for Resort, a new gallery around the corner from Terrault that she’s co-running with her partner Seth Adelsberger. Renovations on Resort were finished mere hours before the Jan. 20 opening of its first show, “A Big Toe Touches A Green Tomato,” featuring artists Roxana Azar and Ginevra Shay. She also curates the art on display at Metro Gallery—the current show “Field Notes” includes Gina Denton, Jean Nagai, Tyler Keeton Robbins, and Katey Truhn and Jessie Unterhalter.

“The art world is so finicky that I just feel like when you get the opportunities, you want to take them,” she tells me at Terrault. “It’s like you’re your own limit.”

For Ebstein, many of those opportunities are self-made. Nudashank, the artist-run space in the H&H Building that Ebstein co-curated with Adelsberger, was a locus of the DIY art scene’s eclecticism and wave-making collaborations between local and non-local artists. A good example of such was 2012’s “Gran Prix,” a joint effort with New York curatorial project Gresham’s Ghost that felt more like a museum-sized exhibition than a DIY art show, featuring 29 Baltimore-based and New York-based artists and spanning the Nudashank and Gallery Four spaces and two storefronts on Eutaw Street.

The end of Nudashank’s four-year-run in 2013 was the natural result of life and other work getting in the way. Adelsberger was offered a solo show in the BMA’s Front Room and Ebstein started working toward an MFA at Towson University. “We sort of had Dina [Kelberman]’s show and then just never came back,” Ebstein says.

While in grad school, the eye condition that Ebstein has been dealing with since childhood, uveitis (an inflammatory disease that damages eye tissue), had gotten worse. She had had two surgeries to alleviate pressure in her eyes and two more to remove cataracts that had built up over time due to the medicines she had taken. She went to grad school “expecting that all to be behind me” but scar tissue had built up, tearing a hole in her retina during her second semester of school and requiring her to have additional surgery.

“Having the expectation to produce [in school], I think it was really good for me,” she says. “It distracted me from what could have been a much worse, much more self-pitying situation, and it definitely made me keep going and find a way—like, at worst case scenario, what am I going to make?”

The unique, wobbly way she was seeing things worked its way into her visual language, guiding the forms in her compositions. Imprecise twine grids and un-straight lines, Jean Arp-like bean and ring shapes, and enigmatic stucco-textured forms reappear in her work. Sometimes the shapes look like letters, too, like those randomly arranged and graduated from seeable to impossibly tiny on an eye chart.

She started thinking more holistically about her health and had “medicine fatigue,” so she started doing yoga, but certain poses put more strain on her eyes (and generally yoga wasn’t helping her condition, she says) so she stopped. But the loss of that practice led her to using yoga mats in her studio. When she first started using the mats, she says, “they were white and filled with holes and they hung like Swiss cheese away from the wall, and they were like these sad objects.” She eventually started using more colorful mats and made them behave more like paintings, pushing them back into the frame.

The recent work has toyed with abstractions of the body, thinking through the way that fitness and health are marketed to select audiences (think: white people’s yoga, expensive gym memberships, lululemon and other expensive athletic brands), through almost childlike bright and playful compositions. Cutting out lumpy, slender, and curvaceous shapes that squat, bend, sit, or float, Ebstein inlays them with chunkier geometric backgrounds.

The yoga mat material—a highly malleable, plastic form, with a tiny allover grid pattern—works for her because of all the similarities it has to paint: It can cover large planes and has elasticity and a tactile quality that you can almost feel as soon as you see it. As a piece of exercise equipment (a site on which the body will move), the yoga mat implies the body without directly pointing to it.

The texture of Ebstein’s work in the Terrault show complements Guadagnoli’s impeccably smooth, sculpted, and colorful pieces that sometimes read peripherally like shallow stage sets, reconfigured baby toys, an architect’s desk, and abstracted aerobic blocks. The two artists both make art that seems hard-worked and well-loved and that, at least at first blush, conjures joy.

Three of Ebstein’s newer pieces in the show feature Miami-colored (dusty teal, sunset mauve, plucky coral) MDF frames, enclosed by a layer of Plexiglas, with an outer layer of pastel-painted aluminum shapes bolted to the Plexi. She wanted the shapely foreground figures that appear in her compositions to pop forward more, so she sketched abstractions of gym/fitness advertisements and seashells, enlarged them, and cut them out of aluminum sheets. She started to see the metal as a “hard bone” against the “more malleable, fleshy part” of the yoga mats.

The brands in these fitness ads present themselves “to a self-selected audience,” she says, “that this kind of fitness decides can afford and value health as a luxury.”

Ebstein recognizes that idea carries some parallels to the vast inequities of the art world. “There is that critique of fitness and putting it in the weirdest, most useless venue to be like okay, well, I’ll make a luxury good out of it,” she says. “To translate that critique into art is something I wrestle with a lot. And I think the thing that makes me still sure about that intention is health and fitness should be for everyone and should not be marketed and priced in this very elitist way.”

It would seem then that the name of the new space she and Adelsberger have started, Resort, is similarly somewhat cheeky. (It makes me think about how an expensive touristy getaway probably blinds you to a place’s real culture and life and people and so on. And of course when you google “Resort Baltimore,” what you get are Inner Harbor hotel listings.) The fact is that Baltimore’s art scene has never revolved around money—artist-run spaces make a little bit of money sometimes, but hardly enough to break even on the funds and labor they (and their artists) put into their programs. But an underlying goal for Ebstein and others in Baltimore’s artist-run spaces all these years has been to deprioritize making money as a signifier of success.

“I think money needs to stop being the thing that defines art and the valid art world,” she says.

Ebstein, Adelsberger, and a team of about 10 friends and former students have worked on the building since last April. The building’s previous renters, a nonprofit called Sharp Dressed Man that gives free suits to men re-entering the workforce, had to move out of the building when it caught fire in 2016. (It relocated to a spot on nearby Lexington Street.) The landlords did some structural and electrical repairs to make it safe, while Ebstein, Adelsberger, and co. went to work tearing down non-structural walls and putting up new ones, removing drop ceilings, and clearing out the junk—there was pigeon shit everywhere, evidently.

They got Adelsberger’s frame shop, New Standard Frames, up and running on the second floor before anything else so they could make some money while putting in work on the third floor studio space and the first floor gallery. Ebstein says they have about a year of programming in the works for Resort, and are thinking of other pop-up events they might like to host. Ebstein locates Resort’s program somewhere in between Nudashank and Phoebe—oh, by the way, among all of these other things, Phoebe was the gallery she ran on Franklin Street in 2016, which was, for her, a way to offer a platform to women artists she admired.

Resort’s first show, “A Big Toe Touches A Green Tomato,” features local artist and curator Ginevra Shay (former artistic director of The Contemporary) and Philadelphia-based artist Roxana Azar. Shay and Azar have been close friends for a long time but hadn’t shown their work together this way before, and there are just as many interesting visual tangents and offshoots between their artworks as there are parallels—hands and leaves, fine craft and clearly hand-wrought forms, crystals and rock formations and worn-down buildings. A sparse, black and white, school-portrait-style photo by Azar features the artist’s face staring blankly in the distance with dozens of flower petals arranged neatly in rows over their face. In Shay’s ‘Head with Holes,’ a sheet of steel in the vague shape of a cartoonish facial profile is amusingly perforated with similar face-in-profile shapes. There are different levels of austerity (the staid black and white portrait, the dark metal propped up on concrete) mixed with humor or candor.

Ebstein says if she could afford it, she’d make Resort her own full-time gig. But she finds more nourishment being able to fit into an arts community in so many different ways—especially, she says, as an adjunct, teaching studio and professional development courses.

“I’m happy to be in the academic creative community and I’m excited to see what new, young, creative people are thinking, and be there to work with them through writing artist statements,” she says. “That really gives me as much life as being in my own studio. I think it’s a good balance. I think if I was only in my own studio I’d resent the work.”

“A Big Toe Touches A Green Tomato” is up at Resort through March 3. For more info, visit resortbaltimore.com. “Cut, Copy, Paste. It’s Not What You Think.” is up at Terrault Contemporary through Feb. 17. For more info, visit terraultcontemporary.com.

The post With new gallery Resort and a show at Terrault, Alex Ebstein talks keeping up studio and curatorial practices appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Eve Babitz makes scrambled eggs alone, ostensibly preparing for a night in at home, in one scene; another day, she takes a bite of scrambled eggs in a restaurant booth with a musician friend as part of a “sinless breakfast” along with bloody marys, after a round or two of Scotch in her friend’s home. The mundanity of these images from Babitz’s drink- and drug- and love-laden biographical fiction “Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.,” originally published in 1974 and reissued in 2015, has seared in my memory.

Babitz, as the book’s narrator, an artist in her late 20s and early 30s in 1960s Los Angeles, offers Technicolor observations of the city’s sunset glow and its heaving dryness to decorate other details a reader can cling and relate to: an arts scene, a creative community of sorts whose fruits and delights are elided to make room for gossip, like who’s sleeping with whom; for pondering the inner lives of the rich and powerful; and for lazing and lamenting how much was drunk the previous night, and why.

Babitz writes a universe that’s so suffused with sex and romance and all their permutations among her people that everything seems attainable, and basically everyone is a big ol’ flirt, including God, and you can make him send you something—or someone—nice, depending on your little ol’ actions down below. Scrambled eggs, an easy, innocuous, no-commitment effort, are like a burnt offering to God: “So, if you want to get invited to something not quite dinner, you could make scrambled eggs with no bread on the side but melted cheese in the scrambled eggs or something, to show God that you are serious about staying home and being virtuous,” Babitz advises in the story ‘Dodger Stadium.’ “His interest is then piqued as He seeks to devise an appropriate temptation for you to succumb to.” An occasional lover, an older married man in town from New York, calls her up and invites her to a baseball game (of all things) just as she finishes her “last delicious fluffy bite.”

But mostly she’s being clever, which she is throughout the book, full of funny logic, rules, and self-made mythologies. In the story ‘Sirocco,’ Babitz spends a few pages meditating on having given up a traditional love life—that is, an illusion of stability through monogamous marriage and children, or something—and then later gets into a threesome, which doesn’t exactly go the way she wants it to. But first she describes how she only hangs with three groups of people: lovers, “just friends” (men who are not lovers), and women friends, who seem far better than the first two because, as she quotes her agent Erica, “You know that when you have dinner with a girlfriend, you’re going to come home a whole human being.” Nothing is actually perfect; even the loveliest lovers wear on you.

And that boundary-breaking threesome (featuring one of her dear, previously-“just friends”-William) was the result of “passion from boredom and vodka,” but also the sirocco, or the Santa Ana winds. “Just think, if we didn’t have the Santa Anas, how straight we all would be,” she observes. And in a way, the morning after, the Santa Ana really pulled her away from William and Day, a woman she desired more than she did William, and flung her into the arms of another just-friend and later-on-in-another-story-lover, Shawn, who comforts her with this short lesson: “Sometimes if you can’t get what you want, you get what the person you want wants.” Shawn is, of course, heartsick for the man who left him in Charleston, which drove him to L.A., and it all grows more web-like from there.

There are all levels of drunkenness apparent in each story in “Slow Days” that range from purely exuberant to blithe and bored to miserable to angry, culminating in the final bender of ‘The Garden of Allah,’ where Babitz gets utterly hammered with two women (one of whom doses her with LSD), Mary and Gabrielle, whom she had spent the earlier portion of the story describing in alternating tones of admiration and fear.

Among those drunk-levels there is also a kind of lovelorn drunk person who at some point of the night, fully sloshed, spills it all. I mean, maybe she spills her drink or has to vomit some “gorgeous waterfall of yellow” (as Babitz describes Mary’s) but also, more so, she seems intent to unspool certain details of her private life. I have been her, perhaps you have too, and that figure is built into the whole conceit of “Slow Days.” Trying to reach some lover, “since it’s impossible to get this one I’m in love with to read anything unless it’s about or to him,” Babitz prefaces many of the stories with italic notes to him, almost like a “wish you were here” scrawled on a souvenir postcard. At some point along the way you forget that the italics are asides to someone who apparently wasn’t paying her enough attention—it is simply how things go sometimes, and her world didn’t stop moving for him or anything like that.

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An orange buffoon was elected president, and with fresh urgency everyone told each other, “Don’t mourn, organize,” a phrase often attributed to Industrial Workers of the World activist and songwriter Joe Hill, who supposedly said it before he was executed by the state of Utah in 1915. It is true; there is always work to do. But sometimes you have to make space to mourn, leaning into grief’s motivating, enervating, void-like manifestations all at once.

“Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief,” an anthology of 24 pieces by various authors (many of whom are also activists), edited by writer and anarchist activist Cindy Milstein, takes those notions and pulls them apart, asserting that mourning and organizing can intermingle. This collection was borne out of personal pain, which is “inseparable from the pain of this world” as Milstein writes in the prologue. Too often we are expected to hide pain, an expectation that Milstein calls “a lie manufactured so as to mask and uphold the social order that produces our many, unnecessary losses. When we instead open ourselves to the bonds of loss and pain, we lessen what debilitates us; we reassert life and its beauty.”

And so in the opening essay, “Feeling is Not Weakness: On Mourning and Movement,” writer Benji Hart carves out space for vulnerability and mourning within the fight for racial justice—it is, of course, natural to feel hurt in the midst of it, they write: “[Experiencing hurt] shows that I have not given in, not accepted the current, violent reality as inevitable, not forfeited belief in my own right to life.”

The topics in the book’s essays flow and circle back around to each other, creating some cathartic conversation, vital and heavy as it grapples with uncomfortable truths. Following Hart, Claudia Rankine’s “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning” goes deep into the deaths of Emmett Till, Michael Brown, the six black women and three black men killed by Dylann Roof at Emanuel African Methodist Church in 2015, the four black girls killed in the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963, and others, noting the dangerous ways “the white imagination” views black people (“black bodies”), historically and presently, “as property and subsequently three-fifths human.”

Rankine also considers the body as “evidence”: Mamie Till Mobley’s decision to have an open casket service, a call for public/collective grief and witness to what had been done to her son Emmett; Michael Brown’s body left to sit in the street for hours after he was murdered, and in that his own mother “was denied the rights of a mother, a sad fact reminiscent of pre-Civil War times, when as a slave she would have had no legal claim to her offspring.”

White supremacy has encoded a certain, serious anxiety into black Americans’ lives that can’t be simply swept aside, neutralized, or depoliticized—it is, clearly demonstrated, still extant. “It’s a lack of feeling for another that is our problem,” Rankine writes.

Moments like this that dwell in a trough of seemingly interminable pain or inconclusive reality move in waves throughout most of the essays, along with rousing, rallying, sometimes enraging crests. In “Dust of the Desert,” Lee Sandusky writes about working in direct aid in the harsh, hot Sonoran Desert, through which people try to cross from Mexico into the United States. Sometimes people die in transit through this desert, and sometimes their bodies are never found, so their families don’t get closure.

“Border work is predicated on ending the deaths of those crossing—currently an insurmountable task—and much of the action we take is in response to grief, but also anger and hope; the three are inseparable motivations that sustain organizing and action within our community,” she writes. The stories of those who made it through help keep them going, too.

Kevin Yuen Kit Lo’s kinda meta-essay “Fragments Toward a Whole” touches on personal ramifications of trauma, unveiling both the source of his repressed pain (he was repeatedly sexually abused as a child) and the pain of essentially reliving it while writing about it for this project, by way of notes sent to Milstein, the editor: “This has been a difficult text to write, and I had lost my momentum for a while. But the darkness and movement seems to be coaxing me toward some sort of ending, if not any sort of real conclusion.”

Three pieces, one after another, rotate the issue of AIDS all around, like a gem. Sarah Schulman’s “The Gentrification of AIDS,” excerpted from her book “The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination,” makes sharp and complex connections on the epidemic and the rapid gentrification of cities in the middle of it. (Also, how the severity of that battle has largely been erased, and how people with AIDS’ “‘friends,’ coworkers, presidents, landlords . . . stood by and did nothing” and have never been held accountable.) Artist David Wojnarowicz’s tumultuous epic “Postcards from America/X-rays from Hell,” written a few years before he died of AIDS, recounts a kitchen table commiseration with a friend about AIDS, then yanks the reader around mourning lost friends, anger toward the government and society’s rampant homophobia (and complicity), and on. And anti-imperialist activist David Gilbert, interviewed by Dan Berger, discusses his organizing efforts that led to a peer education system about AIDS for fellow prison inmates—what Berger describes as “a stark example of a revolutionary commitment to confront state violence through a transformative politics of care.”

That “transformative politics of care” ethos surges throughout this book as well as, more significantly, the fight against social ills in which many of these writers are involved. There is beauty and life and other heartening themes, as Milstein hopes for in the prologue, sewn into these stories. What “Rebellious Mourning” suggests is that taking care of yourself and others takes many forms—and it sometimes looks like doing the work.

Cindy Milstein will present “Rebellious Mourning” at Red Emma’s on Jan. 21 at 3 p.m. For more info, visit redemmas.org.

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“We must be massive and ugly to find something new,” the late Abstract Expressionist painter Grace Hartigan wrote in a journal in 1951. I let that swim around my mind as I squint at a reproduction on my phone of her 2004 lithograph titled ‘Marie Antoinette’s Headdress,’ its prominent, marker-like, smeary black lines bending and dawdling atop a warm yellow background.

The print was on view for the opening of “Pre-Verse,” a show at St. Charles Projects, curated by Dominic Terlizzi, featuring three contemporary artists—Joshua Bienko, June Culp, and Delphine Hennelly—whose work is “in conversation with” Hartigan. The print was a gift to Terlizzi from Hartigan for helping her teach at MICA’s LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting, where she was the director from 1965 until her death in 2008. (Visitors can also ask Terlizzi to view the print; I was not able to see it due to scheduling conflicts, which is why I’m viewing it on a screen right now. Full disclosure, I once took a class taught by Terlizzi at MICA.) In the piece, four or five large, bulbous shapes splatter and linger on the paper; a train of curls emerges from below the bulbs, and leafy, feathery shapes crowd near the top of the composition. The shapes make it look at once like some bourgeois wig and a few abstracted assholes.

Thinking about Hartigan’s storied boldness and volatility, and looking at the rest of the work in this show, that reading doesn’t feel too crude. Each of the three artists in “Pre-Verse” all paint the figure, sometimes provocatively—and in different modes, they abstract it, obfuscate it, and make caricatures of it. The show’s title is a play on the word “perverse,” though it also alludes to links between poetry and painting and intuition, and how Bienko, Culp, and Hennelly may be driven to paint before they have literal words to describe their intentions (that is, the curatorial statement notes, they paint “pre-verse”). Make a painting and learn from it, and then make another, and another, and another.

In addition to providing paintings for the show, the artists were asked to provide “external forms of influence,” which are displayed as relatively anonymous xeroxes on a table: scans of sketchbook pages, Japanese idioms and their English translations, a photo of houseplants and children in kimonos, mysterious textures, poetry, and so on—these pieces of information and influence, it would seem, are also part of that intuitive process. We are left with a lot to chew on.

Many of Baltimore-based artist Culp’s small-ish paintings in the show share a common subject: a naked, wrinkly, squat red or blue dragon/demon figure whose breasts and genitals are often on exaggerated display, like some combination of a Venus of Willendorf and a Sheela na Gig—the former often considered a fertility symbol, the latter a way to ward off evil. Culp often paints the creature’s horned face with a fanged and whiskered red mouth grinning and open and eyes glaring.

Though this often-central creature herself is somewhat frightening, the tension in Culp’s paintings often lies in the periphery. Hanging in a short dark hallway near the back of the space, ‘Bruised Green Girl’ stands out—instead of a demon figure we find a stony, gray and mint-colored girl, whose stump-like legs seem to be set in motion. Yet, disembodied red claws—another demon/dragon’s, maybe—hold her in place, grabbing her side, arm, and thigh. She stares blankly away to the right and she holds her hands up, as if in defense from the veiny, fire-engine-red dick in the painting’s upper left corner. Nearby, in ‘Small Lightening,’ a blue creature, accented with highlighter pinks and greens, seems to be contained by a web of bright green lightning. In these paintings it becomes unclear who is the menace: whether it’s the creature or the background actors, or both.

Compared to the sexualized/demonized, vulnerable/scary creatures in Culp’s paintings, Bienko’s and Hennelly’s paintings feel more subdued. But there is drama in each of the works—and the tensions are heightened and stretched, moving in the gallery from a pair of Culp’s small paintings to a wall-sized Hennelly painting to a pair of small Bienko works. Like the idea of the “pre-verse” and the multitude of artists’ influences, the display highlights how we see the work in relation to one another, and the meanings we make of them diverge from there.

Bienko’s untitled painting and its neighbor, ‘Table Cloth,’ both use a color palette of pinks and warm and cool grays, and vague bodies, and patterns that feel delicate but also, well, just laid down there. In the untitled one, a pink fleshy daub of paint in the shape of what looks like a curvy body emerges from the right edge of the canvas against a swath of forest green. An orange and blue pattern reads like a Persian rug hanging over the left side of the painting, and between these, in the middle of the canvas, is a snow white, dappled, jagged shape—like snow falling over spindly mountains, and then along the bottom edge is possibly a cityscape, suggested by what look like silhouetted architectural domes and peaks. It is unclear, but I fall in anyway, trying to pick up the logic.

‘Table Cloth,’ meanwhile, has what I can only see as two peachy, pinky nude bodies tenderly boning in front of a background that also feels snowy. Painted wispily and thin, the pink body, which is spread atop the more orange-peach one, causes me to search for some mental association other than the one that stays stuck in my head (Matisse’s ‘Large Reclining Nude’).

On an opposite wall are two paintings from Bienko’s series “Hit it from the Side,” an experimentation in visual rhythms. The one on the left, a matte black swerving tangle of brushwork on top of a glowing green, all crowded in by ultramarine blue—colors that meld so that I can’t even really see what is happening here. And then my eyes travel to the painting next to it, featuring a noodle-like Gumby-colored worried-looking guy, his spindly fingers awkwardly grasping something as he marches. Elsewhere, in another piece from this series, Bienko uses  black oil paint that bleeds into its ground so that it appears more like ink, and that mysterious object the figure awkwardly holds looks more like a marching bass drum.

The motion of marching crops up in Hennelly’s paintings too, though the action stays somewhat shrouded by her technique. In one large painting, ‘Walk on Mars,’ two flat, cartoony bundles of pink and blue flowers frame the painting’s top edge. The main “scene” here is covered with horizontal stripes of high-key pink and yellow shades, among orange and mud-colored shades. It’s only with some optical exercises like squinting, blurring, and stepping closer or away, that I start to be able to discern what I’m looking at. Two similarly postured figures seem to be marching, and carrying what look like small children on their backs. Those Looney Toon flowers crowd over both figures’ heads.

Across from that is another large painting, ‘Run Through the Fiesta,’ with a similar approach: pastel colored cartoon flowers and two figures in blue moving in step, carrying small children on their backs, obfuscated by a system of horizontal lines. Those lines could seem like a glitched-out screen, like a VHS tape causing static, the way screens appear to vibrate when you’re looking at them on another screen, captured by a camera.

In the middle of the gallery—right between more bawdy Bienko and Culp paintings—is ‘Blue Storm,’ an idyllic oasis in another piece by Hennelly. It feels so saccharine in comparison to its neighbors, a piece of sentimental antique-shop-kitsch: a blue-gray bonneted woman sits arm-in-arm with a gray, ponytailed girl on some grassy bank near perfectly blue water. With scarce visual drama in a show full of it, I search. Where her other two paintings with the figures’ identities obscured seem mostly formalistic, in this one I read into what looks like a mother/daughter relationship. And then I go back and read into the others, wondering what they’re trying to tell me. There are things to care for, to carry or console, things to run towards or from.

And that blue is so calm, and some of these thoughts feel too facile or convoluted, and that is the pit I keep falling into here. Perhaps that is by design; art is hard to make and hard to un-knot through writing, the writing after the painting adds another layer. Terlizzi has also invited poets to see the show and respond to it, and all of this theater adds to these tangled chains of inquiry and intuition that go into “a work,” whatever that is (a painting, a poem, a show, a review). My review is finished and I haven’t even mentioned Hartigan’s best friend Frank O’Hara yet.

“Pre-Verse” is up at St. Charles through mid-January. For more info, visit stcharlesprojects.com.

The post Three painters at St. Charles Projects, Joshua Bienko, June Culp, and Delphine Hennelly, consider what comes before words appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Yesterday afternoon, the downtown multi-use arts project Le Mondo fired Ric Royer, cutting all professional ties with its former executive director who resigned in August after the board was presented with allegations about his behavior. Recently, Royer had accepted a position with Le Mondo’s real estate affiliate company, Howard Street Incubator, LLC.

He was fired because he contacted someone he was specifically barred from contacting, according to a press release.

Allegations about Royer’s abusive behavior toward women started to come out on Facebook this past spring, just before Le Mondo was gearing up for a soft opening of its multimillion-dollar, multi-use arts space located in the Bromo Arts District this summer.

In a press release dated Nov. 17, which was posted to Le Mondo’s Facebook page three days later, the staff and board announced that in August, the board met with “members of the local arts community to evaluate the gravity of the accusations made against” Royer. This statement did not elaborate on or clarify what kind of “allegations” were made, though it did note that “[t]hese allegations reflected this individual’s personal conduct in the arts community and its detrimental impact on others.”

Le Mondo’s code of ethics, posted on its website, spell out what kind of “artist-owned performance venue, live/work studio space, and community-focused cafe and bar” it aspires to be. Among other standards it lists: “Creating and maintaining live/work spaces that are safe and accessible to all people and walks of life, free from harassment and discrimination.”

According to the statement and Le Mondo’s recorded timeline of events, the Baltimore Arts Accountability Coalition contacted the board on June 24. On Aug. 17, the board met with women from the BAAC and heard testimony about Royer, and after the board expressed concerns, Royer resigned as executive director on Aug. 24. He was also removed from the board. At that point Royer was “no longer involved in guiding the general direction of Le Mondo, working directly with artists in any capacity, or managing productions in the space,” the statement read. He still retained a job with Howard Incubator LLC, however, which deals with Le Mondo properties.

“Guided by ideas of restorative justice,” the board voted to approve “continued provisional employment” for Royer as a development consultant for Howard Street Incubator, LLC. In order for Royer to keep working in that capacity, he was supposed to follow a set of rules, which the board would monitor and evaluate over a six-month period. (Full disclosure, one of the 15 board members at the time was my friend Lydia Pettit, who has since resigned.)

In the days after Le Mondo posted its first public statement, many local artists and community members took to Facebook to voice their frustration about keeping Royer on even in that capacity.  

“You ask for funding, you ask for patience, you ask for artists to take you seriously . . . and when the survivors of sexual abuse that YOU enabled ask you to act, you fail them,” anonymous theatre critic the Bad Oracle commented on Le Mondo’s post.

When the Beat asked Le Mondo for clarification on the nature of the allegations, co-founder and current co-director Carly J. Bales responded in an email, “We were approached about allegations of emotional abuse and manipulation, not sexual assault.”

“Several affected women submitted their personal experiences confidentially to the Le Mondo board. The women described experiences that ranged from sexual harassment with emotional manipulation to sexual assault,” says Cynthia Blake Sanders, a lawyer with Maryland Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts who is assisting one of the women.

Several commenters took issue with Le Mondo’s use of “restorative justice.” Restorative justice is a more compassionate alternative to the criminal justice system, wherein a survivor’s safety and needs are prioritized in order for the community to hold the perpetrator accountable for the harm they have caused.

Royer is an artist, writer, and performer who founded the avant-garde performance group Psychic Readings Co. in 1999. He was an organizer of the Transmodern Festival from 2005 to 2009. In 2015, Psychic Readings opened as a venue on Park Avenue downtown, after Royer returned to Baltimore from Providence, where he had worked with the arts space AS220. In 2014, Royer, Bales, and Evan Moritz submitted a proposal to turn three buildings on the 400 block of Howard Street into a performance art incubator—this project became the nonprofit Le Mondo. Royer told the Sun in an article that was published in June that Le Mondo would take a couple more years and somewhere between $4 million and $6 million to complete.

In a statement provided to the Beat (quoted in part below), Royer neither confirmed nor denied the allegations and said, “I feel a sense of relief that my absence from Le Mondo will give the arts community some listening space through which generative conversations can follow. I hope my departure from the project is a means of bringing some closure to this painful psychic period.”

In a press release dated and timestamped Nov. 30, 2017, at 12:30 p.m., which was posted to Facebook seven hours later, Le Mondo’s current co-executive directors Bales and Moritz wrote that “Le Mondo, Inc. has terminated the employment of Ric Royer as Development Consultant for our real estate affiliate company.”

Before noon that morning, the statement notes, “the board of Le Mondo learned that Ric Royer had acted in direct violation of the terms of his employment. Evidence was brought to the attention of the Board that demonstrated his communication with a party he had agreed not to communicate with, in a manner that infringed upon previously established boundaries and expectations of conduct.

“Ric Royer is expressly prohibited from having any connection, in any capacity, with Le Mondo, ever again,” the statement continues.

Here Le Mondo also invokes “the principles of transformative justice,” and pledges to provide community discussions “about this and other issues of injustice and oppression.” They also say they are reaching out for “training assistance in facilitation and system design to move forward in the most responsible and informed way possible.”

Before noon today, Le Mondo posted a timeline of events from April 24, the date the organization became a nonprofit, through Nov. 30.

Still to come, according to Le Mondo’s statement, are “the principles of transformative justice, that have guided Le Mondo’s actions to this point, in order to help clarify Le Mondo’s decision making process and solicit critique.” The organization is also in search of a new executive director.

Additional reporting by Maura Callahan.

This story has been updated to include a response from Cynthia Blake Sanders.

The post Downtown arts development Le Mondo fires former executive director amid allegations of abusive behavior appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

On a Thursday afternoon, Da’Shawn, Ali, and Kendrick sit in the Baltimore Youth Arts gallery space on Mulberry Street with staff members Marketa Wilson, Leisha Winley, Bomin Jeon, and Joey, a volunteer through MICA’s Community Art and Service program, and plan what to sell at their table at their upcoming holiday sale. Da’Shawn wants to paint on pants and sell them, but pants are hard to sell, Ali points out. They fit everyone differently and people gotta try them on before they buy them. Plus, Ali just doesn’t think painted pants are cool.

“You can walk around with paint on your pants,” Ali says, cracking everybody up.

Young people come to the community studio downtown pretty much every day. The size of the group varies naturally—people come by less often when they get jobs, or if they have to take care of their families, or because of school. But this fall there’s been a steady group of about five to 10 regular attendees.

Founded in 2015, BYA provides an afterschool program and a platform for young people, many of whom are involved in the juvenile justice system (or are transitioning out of it), to create and sell art and to be in community with other young artists. It is a shining example of the kind of community-based program that can be a balm for youth in Baltimore who face enormous, systemic issues of poverty, trauma, and inadequate education and housing. The type of program that the police commissioner admitted the city needs more of, in a recent press conference where he also said that the city needs to be tougher on youth who cause violence.

BYA’s approach is holistic and interdisciplinary; the days in BYA’s community studio vary in structure and activity. Mondays are for job readiness training with Wilson, the studio apprentice program coordinator, who finds ways to get the participants excited about the hunt, looking for opportunities for youth based on their individual interests, going over resumes and applications with them too. On Tuesdays the youth work on design, zines, and blogging with Jeon, exhibition and outreach coordinator, and volunteer Gabriella Souza, former arts editor of Baltimore Magazine, who helps them with writing and interviewing techniques for the BYA blog and their publication The Gathering. Wednesdays are open studio; Thursdays are for screenprinting and meetings to figure out what’ll happen in the gallery space. On Fridays, it’s just the staff there to catch up on other work and planning, but sometimes students pop in just to say hey.

Ali, 19, has been coming to BYA for about a month. When he first heard of BYA from his friend Da’Shawn, he thought they probably just made drawings and that was that; he said he wasn’t expecting to see screenprinting or zine-making or the job readiness info, which he says will “help me out in the long run because I like to know a lot of stuff.” Ali tells me his plans for his career, which include getting a commercial drivers license so he can make a lot of money and then maybe he’ll do some house-flipping and real estate, and also, all before he’s 30, he wants to sell cars with his brother. (He’s also a Capricorn, he tells me later on.)

He also claims he’s not really an artist: “I can’t even write straight, when I write on a blank piece of paper my words be slanted,” he tells me. “So then when I draw, everything ain’t gonna be even.” But he walks me over to the fireplace in the gallery where his drawing sits, leftover there from the Halloween party fundraiser BYA hosted. A disembodied, blood-dripping hand holds a branch blooming with skulls, surrounded by blocky, bare trees and dark clouds. “Came out alright . . . for me,” he razzes.

Ali says he appreciates “the vibe” of BYA, and he’s motivated to learn from everyone he meets—the instructors and volunteers at BYA, the visiting artists, and field trips to galleries and museums.

“Some people don’t take advice well, don’t want advice, but me, I want all the advice I can get,” he says. “I’ll get 10 different people to tell me they all do the same thing, but they tell me 10 different ways to do it, so I can put it all the way together so I know what not to do.”

A couple of weeks earlier, I’m sitting in the basement studio, the walls of which are accented with shades of teal, green, and aquamarine, and built out with cubbies stuffed with student artwork and shelves for art supplies, art books, and magazines.

“All three of them went to the job fair this morning, Kendrick, Da’Shawn, and Ali,” Wilson, the studio apprentice program coordinator, tells Gianna Rodriguez, BYA’s director and founder, when she comes into the studio.

“They didn’t even come here, they went by themselves,” Wilson continues, excited. “They called me! I got here early and I thought they was gonna meet me here cuz I was gonna go with them and they all text me, ‘We on our way to the job fair, what’s the address again?’ So they all three of them are there.”

A bulletin board near one door is tacked with job opportunities and job training info; printouts of artist calls for entry, Kondwani Fidel’s “A Death Note” essay, and stories on aspirational local artists like Amy Sherald and the Balti Gurls are taped up near another door that leads to a room for the staff members’ desks and student computers. Among photos, to-do lists, and awards from local papers, hanging high above Rodriguez’s desk, is this quote by Angela Davis: “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”

Rodriguez says she wants to paint that quote really big somewhere in their studio, maybe on the ceiling, or in the bathroom upstairs.

BYA acts as a conduit for youth to other services that it can’t directly provide. Citing the mural projects BYA members have worked on for the past two summers, through the city’s YouthWorks program, Wilson emphasizes that connecting young people to communities is vital: “That’s how we all get our jobs,” she says.

The program’s approach, according to Rodriguez, involves “pretty much looking at a young person as full circle; what are the pieces? They’re not just artists or potential artists, they’re also in transition from a detention facility and are 19 and not in school and don’t have a high school diploma and need food stamps and a job—so what the hell do we do at that point? It’s just developing connections to other programs and people so that what we can’t provide we’re able to send them to or connect them with.”

Baltimore Youth Arts has provided art classes, job readiness, dialogue circles, and more at various sites, including the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center (BCJJC); Thomas J.S. Waxter Children’s Center; Lillian S. Jones Recreation Center, which started as a partnership with Friend of a Friend, the organization co-founded by Dominique Stevenson and former Black Panther Eddie Conway. Its YouthWorks partnership paid young people to paint murals at the Waverly Ace Hardware’s garden section and Playworkz Learning Center.

A small and motivated staff—which includes Rodriguez, Wilson, Jeon, special projects and development associate Leisha Winley, and youth opportunities coordinator Jonathan Jacobs, and three volunteers—works with youth in the community studio, located in the basement of Platform Arts Center, every day. Visiting artists like photographer Shannon Wallace, painter Jerrell Gibbs, graphic designer Jermaine Bell, and many others have come through to work and share with youth.

And you’ve probably already encountered these young people and their work at all kinds of art shows and art markets around town too: at Gallery CA, Platform Gallery, the 2640 Space, Open Space’s Publications and Multiples Fair, and elsewhere.

Not all of the youth who participate in BYA are involved in the juvenile justice system—some are just there for after school, because a friend told them about it.

“Having a mixture of youth who are and aren’t in the prison allows for anonymity, and also peer mentorship,” says Rodriguez.

Amani, a kind, sharp, and talkative sophomore at the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, has been coming to the BYA studio around the corner from her school since May. She says it feels comfortable, open, and friendly.

“Rather than being out anywhere or getting in trouble—like, I’m not a troublemaker at all but I feel like this is one of the places I feel most comfortable being,” Amani tells me, “especially coming right after school, because once 3:20 hits I’m here at 3:25.”

The community studio is about to become even more robust, with a shop and gallery which will be curated and run by young people. BYA took over the first floor gallery space after Platform Gallery closed this summer. (Disclosure: my friend Lydia Pettit owns Platform Arts Center, a studio building; Lydia and my friend Abigail Parrish previously co-ran the gallery.) Every week, staffers and youth discuss what the space will become—a multivalent gallery/shop/community-gathering space, not just for BYA but also for other youth programs, people BYA has worked with at the detention centers, and others in the community. (The youth are still deciding on a name.)

The first official event BYA hosted in the space was its recent Halloween party/fundraiser/art auction: Local artists donated work for the auction; there was a photobooth with terrifying cardboard masks that youth made and tarot readings from a deck the youth designed. Daydrin, 17, interpreted the cards I drew (Mr. Clean, an antique map, and stacks of cash) to mean that unfortunately, I was going to go bald, but I was going to get to travel to China, and also I’d be receiving a million dollars sometime soon. (I’m totally cool with all of that happening, for the record.) The opening of the combination shop/gallery will coincide with BYA’s holiday sale on Dec. 16.

The number of young people who comprise Baltimore Youth Arts and who come through its community studio every day fluctuates throughout the year—that’s partly because of funding, Rodriguez says. A few young people have been with the program pretty much since it started. Since the spring of 2016 until this past August, BYA had been able to pay youth to be studio apprentices, thanks to a grant. They didn’t receive that grant this year, which Rodriguez says was kind of a blow to the program: Some young people who’ve been paid through the studio apprentice program for a long time had to step aside to find work elsewhere. In the few weeks this fall that I spent hanging out in BYA’s community studio, there was a pretty steady group of five to 10 people, a lower attendance than they’ve had in the past. Winley and Rodriguez are working on ways to expand their capacity, and mostly that means applying for a ton of grants.

But these challenges, Rodriguez says, are leading the team to think about how BYA can retool its approach, and shift more toward advocacy for youth. She has been doing work like this for years—not just in Baltimore—and she would like Baltimore Youth Arts as an organization to be able to be more public about the impact of the arts on youth inside and outside of the justice system, as well as the impact of the justice system on youth.

“It’s not just an art education program,” she says, pointing to the myriad other important but less publicized ways she and her staff help young people with job and college and FAFSA applications, driving them to the DMV to get an ID so they can get a job, supporting them at court hearings.

Rodriguez, an artist and teacher, founded Baltimore Youth Arts in Jan. 2015, shortly after she moved here from Providence, Rhode Island. She knew she wanted to teach art and work with incarcerated people—she modeled BYA in part after a similar program in Providence, AS220 Youth, where she worked for six and a half years. She notes that though she’s been affected by the criminal justice system—witnessing its injustices, seeing family members and friends get locked up—she knows it’s not her own experience, which is why feedback from the communities and facilities she’s worked with so far have been invaluable.

“We’re not going there to save someone,” she says. “We know the impact the arts can have, we recognize that there is a lack.”

And although creative outlets are vital, BYA isn’t solely an outlet. When BYA is present at art shows and markets to display and sell their work, young people have the chance to talk to people about their art, sell it, and then keep most of the money (BYA takes a small cut, usually about 10 to 15 percent, to recoup the materials cost).

“When we have our art shows and I have to talk to people it builds my communication skills more,” Daydrin, a junior at BLS, tells me, “because I usually don’t talk.” In select professional or school settings, that is; she’s pretty vocal in the studio, cracking jokes. Daydrin has worked on murals the past two summers with BYA through YouthWorks. “It can be, like, distracting sometimes,” she says and laughs, “you be with your friends and you not getting the job done—and that can be a problem for me too, because I like to hang out with my friends.”

Outside of its community studio, BYA’s other consistent site presence this fall has been at BCJJC. BYA is the only arts and job readiness program offered in BCJJC, and until they run into some more money to pay more instructors (and to go back into other facilities) Rodriguez is the only instructor. Over the course of three days a week, she teaches 18-22 young people the basics, like painting and drawing.

“I’ve done screenprinting in prison before,” Rodriguez says. “I think that would be exciting but difficult. It’s hard, you can’t have scissors, you can’t have wire, they had an issue with clay, so it has to be pretty basic.”

BYA staff conduct dialogue circles and help with resume writing and other job readiness activities sometimes too. The size of each class at BCJJC varies because most youth are only there for a week or so, awaiting their court dates. And because of the high turnover she says the structure winds up feeling open and collaborative, with young people who have been in there longer helping out those who are newer to it.

Rodriguez understands she’s not necessarily training up a swarm of young people who will all pursue a career in the arts, but sees how the arts can provide youth with skills they can use.

“They gain something from it because they worked with other people, they learned how to express their ideas, they learned how to think critically,” she says. “Art is a tool to develop relationships. It’s very much about mentoring, connection, and in the future employing young people.”

When Rodriguez and other staff try to recruit young people at BCJJC to join BYA when they get out, they meet youth who are interested but have been charged as adults and might have longer sentences.

“That’s reality,” Wilson says. “It’s a lot of them who was expressing major interest—‘I wanna work with y’all, I wanna work with y’all in the community . . . ’ but when I give them the form to fill out [they’re] like ‘I got some time here, I could fill that out later.’”

Dante Scancella, a social worker with the Maryland Office of the Public Defender’s juvenile division, has so far worked with two youth connected to Baltimore Youth Arts. He sees the impact that BYA and community programs like it can have on youth—not only while they’re involved in the juvenile justice system but also as a way to ideally prevent them from having to enter the system at all.

“I think we see the end result—the youth being charged with a delinquent act—but we do have to look more holistically,” Scancella says.

Scancella works with young people at various points in the justice process and he says that a huge part of someone going back into their community is “after-care planning,” which BYA and programs like it can help with. “From a social work perspective I see a relationship as the vehicle for change,” he says.

“In particular for youth, and the youth that we frequently see in the juvenile justice system who have limited family supports, sometimes no family support, those supports [like BYA] are even more important,” he says. “Not suggesting that BYA or other any other entity can take over the family role, [but] they can definitely supplement and support.”

Just a couple of weeks ago at a press conference, Police Commissioner Kevin Davis called for a crackdown on “violent juvenile repeat offenders” whose adult charges, he said, keep getting waived down back to juvenile court. Davis acknowledged systemic issues—poverty, family instability, addictions—that are linked to crime, but maintained that locking up more youth for violent crimes is the best way to hold them accountable. This reeks of the paranoid rhetoric on youth in the ‘90s—the mythic “superpredator” generation of violent youth—which led to legislation that caused more youth (predominantly African-American youth) to be sentenced far more harshly, instead of being funnelled through the juvenile justice system, which, in many jurisdictions, including in Maryland, purports to rehabilitate youth or divert them from the system.

Pushing to charge and sentence young people as adults also ignores the fact, as numerous studies and reports have shown, that locking up young people ultimately causes far more harm than public good. The statistics also indicate that youth of color are disproportionately locked up more than white youth are. The Annie E. Casey Foundation has looked into this extensively; in its 2011 report on juvenile incarceration “No Place for Kids,” the foundation wrote that incarcerating young people is ineffective in terms of rehabilitating them—nor is it proven to reduce juvenile crime—and it’s a waste of public resources and money.

“[T]he states that decreased juvenile confinement rates most sharply (40 percent or more) saw a slightly greater decline in juvenile violent crime arrest rates than states that increased their youth confinement rates,” the report reads. The report also notes that young people who get detained are more likely to recidivate, and that likelihood increases the deeper one goes into the system. Without proper resources and community support and intervention, it can be hard to break that cycle.

“If we want to decrease violence, we have to decrease the motive. We have to make sure that kids have adequate housing, that they have adequate access to job training, to those that have been pushed out of school, have a real, concerted, trauma-specific mentor who can bring them back in,” Jenny Egan, a public defender who works with youth, said in a recent Real News segment with Baynard Woods. Juvenile crime has been steadily decreasing, she said, and sending the youth deeper into the system will likely do little to curb violence that’s happening now, and only increase long-term violence.

It is also a waste of money to detain youth, when detention is not proven to help them. Baltimore City funds the Baltimore Police Department’s almost-half-a-billion-dollar budget; meanwhile, so many of the community-based, citizen-run, and citizen-led initiatives and programs (like BYA) depend on grant funding—which can be sparse and competitive—donations, and an occasional city sponsorship or partnership (i.e. Youth Works). These programs, which provide the type of community supports that a city needs, are essentially DIY.

When young people work with BYA, it is all documented: They sign in when they come into the community studio; at detention facilities the staff records young people’s attendance; there are photos of young people working together in the studio or out on field trips to galleries and museums. And their work—their art—becomes proof of their participation too. Recently, BYA staff went to court to support a young person (who will remain anonymous since he was a minor at the time) who had been charged as an adult, hoping that the judge would knock down the boy’s charges.

Rodriguez shared with the boy’s social worker and lawyer images of him working with BYA and wrote letters of support for him, providing proof that he was working in his community and trying to get right. The boy had been a member of BYA since early 2016, before this recent incident. BYA’s presence at the hearing, along with his family and a youth coordinator from the boy’s church, helped get his charges waived down to juvenile court. He is currently detained at BCJJC.

In gathering information for his case, his social worker, Scancella, said that this youth told him about the relationships he had with staff and his peers at BYA, how they had benefited him.

“He was getting things there that his own family couldn’t provide him,” he said.

The youth’s mother (who wanted to remain anonymous) said that the workforce guidance from BYA helped him, and that BYA kept him busy and out of trouble.

“[I] just hope he stay positive and take this as a learning experience,” she says. “I love my son and just want to see him do right and become what he set his mind to.”

“It was amazing,” Winley says, about the court support. “After that Gianna was like, ‘do you see?’ and I was like ‘I get it.’ I really get what we’re doing because if he didn’t have all of this, if he didn’t have BYA, if he didn’t have a resume of art selling, a portfolio, what would have happened? And if he didn’t have five people [at BYA] supporting him aside from his family, his church members and community members, what else would’ve happened? And so many youth, they fall through.”

The past year has been particularly hard for BYA. A girl that Rodriguez had worked with at the Lillian Jones Recreation Center was killed in a drunk driving accident. A young man who had been in a class at BCJJC was shot. Two young men who were close to BYA were killed within a few months of each other: Amoni Grossman, 19, was shot in September 2016 in the Greenmount West neighborhood. And this past January, BYA staff and members woke up to the news that Dasean Mcelveen, aka Smoke, a 17-year-old who had joined the group’s studio apprentice program last fall, had been killed. According to police, Mcelveen had been walking around the Coldstream-Homestead-Montebello neighborhood with a 20-year-old man when a black van pulled up alongside them, and a passenger shot at them. Rodriguez described Mcelveen as a very driven painter and graphic designer.

“The last time we spoke he said that BYA was the only thing he had going for him,” she told me in January.

In this line of work, Rodriguez says, you understand very clearly the complexity of people.

“And I think if you are committed to this work you’re committed to seeing the good in youth and others,” she says. “It’s hard to witness youth in prison, it’s hard to witness young people walking in shackles, and imagining the prospects of a young person being put behind bars for years for an adult charge.”

On a Tuesday evening class at BCJJC, Rodriguez counts out the paintbrushes, pencils, and paint tubes before the seven young men come into the classroom. She has to keep inventory before and after class because if something goes missing, the boys’ spaces get searched. She counts everything out twice. This particular group has been working with her for a while—many of them have been charged as adults.

Throughout the hour-long class, the boys mostly stay seated at their benches and work on paintings that they’d started in a previous class. There are a lot of hearts on their canvas boards tonight: a broken purple heart; an ultramarine blue heart, in memoriam to someone who has died; a cherry red, perfectly symmetrical heart; a slightly less symmetrical one with a pink crown painted on.

One young man focuses on smoothing out the blue, white, and yellow gradient background in his painting. In the middle, a red heart with a black Charlie Brown-like zigzag in the middle of it bleeds red and black drips down to the bottom edge of the canvas. He’s concerned that his super neat hand lettering, “NO LOVE,” is uneven, but it seems pretty precise to me.

Rodriguez floats from station to station to help the students draw out a hand here, or a banner there, advising them on color palettes or resolving backgrounds or how to cover up an errant brush stroke and make it look intentional.

“You can never make a mistake with paint,” one student says to himself, squeezing a tube of white into a well in his plastic palette.

“So when I leave you gonna hook me up with a job, Miss G?” asks another, sitting near the back. She tells him they’re trying to raise money so that they can employ youth again, and lets him know that the goal is to “find a more stable job outside of us.”

She points out that his neighbor sitting next to him, the one working on the dripping heart, has already made $35 or so on prints that BYA made of one of his paintings. He’ll get that money when he gets out.

Outside on the noisy stoop at Platform, Kendrick tells me he started with BYA through YouthWorks in 2016.

“I wasn’t really interested in art until I came to BYA ‘cause to be honest before I started working . . . I thought it was boring,” he says, laughing. “And then when I got to BYA I got into it, I was like, this is fun.”

He says he’s usually more of an abstract artist because he doesn’t really like to draw people—he prefers to “throw things on the canvas and just work with that,” he says. He masks off parts of his surfaces with tape and paints over it, an analogue version of a technique that he uses in his graphic designs too. Kendrick says he learned a lot about Illustrator and Photoshop at BYA, and he shows me a few of his designs on the computer, including a T-shirt design collab with a friend, an illustration of Goofy with gold fronts and a chain.

At BYA Kendrick has designed shirts and buttons, and he made the cover art for the second edition of their publication The Gathering. He shows me the original painting, two light brown hands with thick black outlines against a stark white background. He says it’s a reference to the “hands up, don’t shoot” chant; he painted this the summer after Freddie Gray was killed.

Kendrick says he’s not exactly sure how his attitude about art changed, but he notices that making art can be restorative.

“Well I would usually be a little grumpy in the morning but when I would get to BYA my whole mood changes,” he says. “Painting really helps me get away from my anger.”

Daydrin, a 17-year-old junior at BLS, got placed with Baltimore Youth Arts two summers in a row through YouthWorks. Now she comes to BYA after school, and she wants to become a fashion designer. She’s looking into a school on the eastern shore where she can major in fashion.

“I’m here just to work on things that I feel passionate about,” she says.

For the spring, Jeon is trying to help plan a fashion show, which Daydrin is excited about. She’s working on some designs for a class presentation (“mine will be short and sweet,” she swears), experimenting with watercolor pencils. The figure she’s drawn has an olive green mini skirt and a beige top with puffy, sheer sleeves.

She has been into fashion since she was 14, but felt like she needed a push.

“Now I wanna really do this, this is my passion,” she says. “I really wanna try and see where I make it with this.”

Tenasia and India, both seniors at BLS, heard about BYA from Daydrin, who told them how much she liked it. They’ve been coming through for a couple months.

“I like how we can just sit here and have open conversations and express our ideas not just about art but real life and stuff,” India says, while sketching a superbly round bird in pencil. “It’s like a family here.”

“Yeah, the support system here is really strong, you can just get help with anything and they not gonna tell you no,” Tenasia affirms, and then pauses. “Well, it depends on what it is. Most of the time it’s yes.”

Both Tenasia and India, who have been friends since they started attending BLS in sixth grade, have been accepted to several colleges, and they’re trying to decide where to go. Tenasia wants to study mortuary science, she says, because she felt strange after her grandmother’s death.

“I was sad, but I knew I had to get over it so I was like that’s really something I really wanna do, see what actually goes on behind the scenes at a funeral home,” she says. “I’m nervous but I’m gonna do it.”

India wants to be an OB/GYN; she says she’s just always been interested in childbirth and babies and health, so it seemed like the right fit for her. At BYA, India says she’s open to trying all sorts of new things. She started making a zine about “girl power” which she thought could be about feminism but also female health and hygiene. “I’m not just interested in drawing or making videos or making sculptures,” she says, “I wanna do everything.”

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