The No Boundaries Coalition held its 18th Annual Community Block Party in Sandtown-Winchester this year at Cumberland and Carey Park. The Central West Baltimore-based nonprofit focuses on community support by focusing on features like civic engagement, youth leadership, and food culture. 

This year marks the organization’s second year in partnership with the Black Arts District. The groups alternate locations between Eutaw Street, where the program is traditionally held, and other locations where the Black Arts District is located. The event was full of resources, free food and drinks, vendors, alongside a host of performances.

This year’s theme was “arts as activism” as performances called for recognition of the crisis in the Congo alongside the support of the arts. The block party also had voters registration available as well as a health booth where people were able to check certain vitals.

“It starts with bringing community together to just be in fellowship and share space in something positive,” said Kenneth Something, award-winning poet and Director of Programs for Black Arts District. 

“We have about 16 different creatives that were hired to be able to be part of this and for us, it’s about building the creative economy. Most of the artists we hire are from this area so being able to get hired to work in your community is important.”

The post Photostory: The No Boundaries Coalition’s 18th Annual Community Block Party appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Local vendors, live music, and families filled the streets surrounding Hollins Market on May 25 for Sowebo Fest’s 49th year kicking off summer. The festival is produced and staff by volunteers from the neighborhood.

The post Photostory: SOWEBO Arts and Music Festival’s 42nd year appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

To age is a blessing and as a Black queer person, it is even more significant for me to recognize such. To be a queer elder, in today’s age, is to have defied the slaughter of the AIDS crisis, the numerous and consistent attacks on our community, and more on top of the other quarrels that can plague life — queer or not.

Zosia Zaks created the Elder Bus coming from a dream he had with his late friend Meghan Lewis, who was murdered in December of 2023. The two of them — in their 50s — recognized the need for older queer people to be able to celebrate Pride with the amenities and necessities that aging people require such as access to seating, cooler spaces, and a restroom. After she was killed, Zaks continued to realize the project in memory of his dear friend, and wants to develop it further in the years to come.

Pride, beginning as a riot, has become a celebration that despite all of the challenges our community faces, we are still here and we will remain. Accessibility in Pride is indeed an important conversation that we must have. It’s understood that as we get older, our bodies change, but those changes shouldn’t force us to be excluded from the world. I hope that 30 and 40 years from now I can gallivant through a vibrant and colorful Charles Street, whether it’s on my feet or on the bus.

The post Photostory: Honoring queer elders at Pride appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

June is Pride Month and Black Music Month, and what better way to celebrate than a free outdoor concert? 2024 marks the 40th anniversary of house music, which originated in Chicago but has deep roots here in Baltimore. 

Saturday, June 1, marked the return of Baltimore by Baltimore, a summer festival series that gives the city’s creative community a platform to showcase their talent. The event occurs throughout six all-day festivals through the summer months at the Inner Harbor. A different creative powerhouse or tastemaker curates each event, which is sponsored by the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore.

These photos were taken at Baltimore’s in the House, where Maya Gilmore and Charm TV curated a showcase of Baltimore (and global) house music legends. Gilmore is a multimedia producer, filmmaker and entrepreneur, and the executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Cable and Communications for Baltimore City.

“Baltimore’s in the House” celebrated Baltimore’s forty years of house music history. The event invited participants to experience the heartbeat of the city which started in basements, garages, and underground clubs and spread into a global phenomenon. Headliners included DJ Biskit, DJ Oji, DJ Pope, Sheri Booker, Ultra Naté, and Fatal Attraction Step Squad. 

Two members of The Basement Boys — DJs Teddy Douglas and Thommy Davis — also made an appearance. House music’s stronghold in Baltimore can be traced to the group’s basement studio and the production that started on a 4-track recorder in 1986. The original group, which included Douglas, Davis, and Jay Steinhour, produced dance music hits for Crystal Waters and Ultra Naté, many of which still play out in clubs worldwide.  

Ultra Naté brought the house down with a live performance. Wayne Davis, the former owner of the legendary Paradox nightclub, joined her on stage. The Paradox, known for its phenomenal sound, was an incubator and respite for Baltimore dance music culture and one of the homes of Ultra Naté’s Deep Sugar party. 

Baltimore’s impact on the house music genre can never be understated or erased, and events like this and AFRAM are honoring the legacies of these DJs, producers and performers. (Teri Henderson)

The post Photostory: BxB June 2024: In the House appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

These photos, captured by Baltimore-based artist and photographer Jeremy Collins, capture two different events that highlight Baltimore’s rich cultural heritage. Some were taken during SOS Baltimore Hip Hop Week, which was held at the end of January and featured local performers like Lowe Key, Wyso Hye, Martina Lynch, and Slangston Hughes.

The other photos were taken in early February at a dance competition held at Guilford Hall Brewery. Dancer Wyrmstar is featured in multiple photos.

The post Photostory: Dance and Music appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

The Final Fridays: Artist in Residence Renaissance Ball, the first ballroom event in the Enoch Pratt Public Library’s history, was the finale and celebration of inaugural Artist-in-Residence SHAN Wallace’s work. Wallace is a photographer, archivist, and conceptual artist from Baltimore. 

As part of her year-long residency, Wallace organized several workshops and events that allowed Black Baltimoreans to tell their own stories. The Renaissance Ball is evidence of SHAN’s mission to preserve the history of Black Baltimore in its multiplicity. Wallace’s practice documents the lives of Black Baltimoreans sincerely and beautifully.  

Jeremy Collins photographed the Renaissance Ball. Collins is an artist and photographer based in New York City. His work centers Black folks and marginalized identities in the stories told through his camera lens. The Ball was held on June 30 at the Central Library, and the festivities included a Ballroom catwalk with prizes, performances, and food vendors. The event’s theme was Club Renaissance, according to the library, “in acknowledgment and honor of the ongoing history and importance of Queer Black art’s cultural significance.” Visitors could experience the history of voguing, ballroom, Kiki culture, and all things queer and fashion at the after-hours series. (Teri Henderson)

The post Photostory: Renny Ball appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Mecca Verdell says she’s at least 30 percent psychic and intended to be an actor instead of a poet. Writing and performing as “Meccamorphosis”, Verdell, who represented Baltimore proudly last year, winning second place in the international Individual World Poetry Slam, is one of the Baltimore poetry scene’s most resounding, resonant voices.

“This is the first place I’ve been homesick about and also the first place when someone says something about I’m gonna say something back,” Verdell said.

We’re sitting at XS in Mount Vernon—it’s a place that means a lot to her. She has done a great deal of writing on its third floor. The last time I’d seen her was just after she’d performed for a standing-room-only Baltimore Queens of Poetry event hosted at The Arena Players, the oldest, historically Black community theater in the city. The youngest in the line-up, Verdell performed with other poets in the Baltimore scene, including the renowned Gayle Danley and Verdell’s mentor,  Lady Brion.

Verdell grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey and moved to Baltimore in 2013, where she attended Western High School. She’d been active in theatre in New Jersey—performing in school events and with organizations —and wanted to continue here, but Western didn’t have a theater club. A school friend recommended she join the poetry club. It’s there she met poet Brion “Lady Brion” Gill, who was a teaching artist at the school and ultimately became Verdell’s mentor. 

“She’s so smart and intelligent,” Verdell said when Brion came up in conversation, her voicing rising, her smile widening. “She’s everything I wish I would’ve stayed in college for.”

After graduating high school, Verdell attended the Community College of Baltimore County in a program that would allow her to transfer credits to Morgan State University. She didn’t finish the program and fully committed to her art instead.

Moving to Baltimore connected Verdell to Blackness and pride and poetry in a way she had never experienced before. Just two years after moving to the city, Verdell competed with the Baltimore team in Brave New Voices, a global poetry slam competition, helping the city take first place in 2016, and deepening her commitment to poetry. Her performance energizes without entering into the caricature of the “slam poet”—a cliché, predictable approach Verdell is mindful to avoid. Her passion is instead, like that of a trained actor, rather than a spewing tea kettle of words. Each poem becomes its own world and onstage, Verdell radiate self-assurance and confidence even when her work gets reflective.

And when her poetry isn’t deeply personal, it addresses Blackness in its broad complexity. Her poem “Duck You Autocorrect” is an astute, pun-filled piece that critiques the autocorrect function and intertwines notions of erasure and censorship: “Ain’t it to be Black, to look back at a sentence and see something wrong/ something not add up/ poster say 10 days and now you got 10 years in an auto-correctional facility.”

Black womanhood features heavily in her poetry, with many poems inspired by Black women’s struggles and upheavals, including her own.

“A lot of Black women have been…writing about all the shit people ignore about us and I want to write about it too,” Verdell said. “I have no choice but to write from a Black woman’s perspective.”

In a video of Verdell performing her poem “Penny Dreadfuls” at the Texas Grand Slam, she captures the audience with her voice and her eyes as they dart from left to right pulling everybody watching in closer. And she ends the poem by asking “where is the change?”—a pointed play on words illustrating how Black girls are sometimes treated as though they are as worthless as pennies, and at the same time demanding that conditions improve.

At the premiere of her video for “Penny Dreadfuls” at the now closed Annex Theatre in late 2017, the audience seemed inspired by its DIY ethic and tableau—Black women posed in white gowns in the Peale Center—but Verdell admitted she’s no longer a fan of the video, dismissing it, two years after she conceptualized it, as basic—and cliched. 

“I hate it. I feel like it’s the standard Black girl video. All we’re missing is some flower crowns,” she said. “I appreciate the step for what it was. I appreciate it because that’s where I made my first mistakes and mistakes I’ll never make again.”

Verdell is always thinking of different ways to improve and incorporate all the pieces of herself into her work. She brings up Beyonce’s work ethic, and slam poetry’s place in the literary community and stresses the amount of detail, and scrutiny she puts into her projects.  She has released a chapbook “Things To Unlearn,” was the Youth Poet Ambassador of Baltimore in 2017, completed an east-coast poetry tour from Boston to Virginia alongside friends Katana Carson and Wifty Bangura, and is currently working on a poetry opera.

“I never want to give anyone anything that’s lackluster. I always go back into my poems to see what can I change,” she said. “I just want people to see me for what I am capable of.”

On Saturday, Nov. 16 at 1 p.m., Mecca Verdell performs as part of Poetry Salon: Black Women in Their Splendor at the Reginald Lewis Museum. Other poets include Lady Brion and Hannah V. Sawyer.

The post No Choice But To Write: Mecca Verdell’s life and poetry in metamorphosis appeared first on Baltimore Beat.