The Artists

So I decided to do a little snooping. Some of the murals had the artists' contact information on them and I followed up on it.

Who is Joel Bergner? His website http://www.joelsmural.com/ says that he hails from the Windy City and his art work has been heavily influenced by time he spent in Honduras, the Dominican Republic and later both El Salvador and Brazil. He has several upcoming projects, including a mural in Silver Spring, Maryland based on interviews he will conduct with clients of the local International Rescue Committee.

Access Art Inc. was founded by Tony Shore and is a Pigtown based program. As Shore says that if for no other purpose, the program is "a distraction [for the kids] from all the negative things going on in the community...The best way to keep kids off drugs is to keep 'em busy." After growing up in Baltimore Shore attended MICA on a full scholarship and later received a masters of fine arts degree from Yale. It's funny because as soon as I read that he had attended Yale, Shore's story began to sound eerily familiar; I think, in fact I know, I heard it while I was volunteering at the Paul's Place’s summer camp. Someone was babbling off statistics about the horrific high school dropout rate (which currently hovers around 60%) and the even smaller number of graduates who actually went on to college when someone sighted a local artist who had gone on to Yale as if to assure us that all hope is not lost. While at MICA Shore developed his trade mark, paintings on black velvet, which he would later take to New York in an attempt to launch his career. But, as he says, "I was in New York, going to all the right gallery openings, shaking hands, but I started feeling like I was using my powers for not necessarily good--closer to evil." And so goes the tale of how Tony Shore came full circle and back to Baltimore.

The Junior League of Baltimore is a volunteer organization for women in the city that was founded in 1912. The Baltimore branch is part of the Association of Junior Leagues International which counts 292 branches in four countries as its members. Some of its current initiatives are the School-Parental Engagement Project (SPEP) and the Wise Penny Internship, where four women are mentored for a 12 week cycle at the Wide Penny thrift store owned by the junior league. The women learn skills in store management, sales, inventory, and customer service. The oldest continuous initiative in the league has been its choral group which is not only recreational, but also reaches out to the old folks' homes in the area.

The Baltimore Police Foundation has taken some hits in recent years (http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.kane18aug18,0,5837230.column) for what many see as misuse by the Police Commissioner. The foundation does not exclusively fund philanthropic project, but also provides moneys for business trips and department apparel.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation was founded by Jim Casey and his siblings in honor their mother who as a young widow struggled to support the family. Striving to help vulnerable children and their families who are in circumstances similar to those that the Casey family endured, the foundation began in 1948 in Seattle after Jim Casey had amassed substantial savings from his messenger service (which would grow into the global, multi-billion dollar UPS). The foundation's headquarters moved to Baltimore in 1994.

Two very influential women are responsible for this next mural painted in 1997, called "My Sister's Garden." Mary Carfagno Ferguson is a studio painter and self-identified "middle-class white lady" and Patti Prugh is an art therapist at Sheppard Pratt.

Fergusen branched out into the Pigtown area and worked with skaters to create the "Skaters of Pigtown Recognition Wall" after she helped them to raise enough money to build a skateboard park on un-used tennis courts at Carroll Park.

Positive Youth Expressions was founded in October 1993 by Dr. Denise L. Folks and is one component of the Greater Church of the Risen Savior's outreach program. This mural is on the side of the ministry building.

Here's is a great article in the Baltimore City Paper from August 2001 that provided me with a lot of information http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=3488

The article traces the history of murals in Baltimore. Once informally known as "The Monumental City" because of the many tributes to fallen military heroes, Baltimore used to set aside 1% of the public-building budget for art work. In the 1970s, Mayor William Donald Schaefer directly encouraged mural-painting as a way of breathing new life into the city. As a result, however, many murals were vandalized: "Some neighborhoods shun murals entirely, residents believing them to be signals of decline, a sign that the city considers the community to be in need of sprucing up." I wonder then, how can any of those communities improve themselves if they can't admit to themselves that they've gone into decline? After all the first step is admitting you need help and what better way to be rewarded than with a face life.

Biking Around Patterson Park

I finally got to go biking on Tuesday! In case you weren't aware, my original intention for this project was to bike EVERYWHERE and take pictures of murals that way. Unfortunately, many of the neighborhoods were a little dangerous for biking (either because they were, well, dangerous or the streets were too busy). The day got off to a rough start because we were missing a small bolt that attached the bike rack to the car and my parents had to make two separate trips to two different stores to find it-- thanks mom and dad!
Here is a photo of me at the first mural. We parked across the street from it and biked through to the other side of Patterson Park. Note the fire decal on the bike. This is NOT my bike. My bike got stolen when I was taking a class at Georgetown next summer, but I WILL be getting a new bike before I go to college (as a late birthday present).
And we're off...
This first photo is for my mom.

I on the other hand was fascinated by the port-a-potties. In this park they had fences (albeit with a star and moon) around them or were simply tethered to a tree. It's funny how many familiar sights I saw. First there was Matthew's Pizza which my family's first cleaning lady took us to (maybe because her friend owned it or she waitressed there) years and years ago. And then my mom pointed out the Patters Theatre where my parents went to see my "on-site supervisor" preform at a cabaret night.

And then there was Koko Market. My Arabic teacher showed my class an article featuring the store (http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=17820), but marketed it to us as a music store. He suggested we check it out so one Saturday morning I headed downtown... In actuality Koko Market is, well, a market (as its name implies) which just happens to sell some Arabic music and DVDs. Don't get me wrong, there was Arabic food and religious merchandise available for purchase but there are many typical products as well. So when my dad said he was thirsty when we were looking at a mural in Greek town, I remembered Koko Market. My mom insisted that I go in and speak Arabic with the shop owner, but I stayed outside and watched the bikes instead. The last time I went I was extremely embarrassed because the owner and I could hardly understand each other (in my defense he was Egyptian, thus speaking in dialect while I study Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)) and I consciously hid my arm so that I wouldn't have to explain my tattoo Allahu-Akbar to him-- after all spandex yoga pants don't exactly fall under the guidelines of hijab.

As we were bike riding in Patterson Park we came across the park's swimming pool which I immediately recognized. A few summers ago I had gone there when I volunteered at the kids' summer camp at Paul's Place.

But let's get to the murals. RPCS was represented at one of the murals, if only on a car parked in front of it.
The artist's style on this mural reminded me of a book I used to read when I was little. The book was Strega Nona by the artist Tomie dePaola. In fact the resemblance between the figures is uncanny. This mural was still in progress! Since the mural was on the side of a busy underpass, the artist used orange cones to block on the outer lane. I wonder if he asked for permission from the city...

I was disappointed that this mural in Greek town had been desecrated.

On our way back to the car we found this run down shop covered in artwork. It always amazes me that there can be so much vacant space in Baltimore. In India there were squatters everywhere. People lived on the sidewalk not because they were to poor to find shelter, but because there was no room in any shelter.


I liked how this mural blended into its surroundings, but I can't help but wonder: yes, the mural makes the area more beautiful, but wouldn't a real house with a real family been even better? I can't help but think that art can only go so far in restoring a community.

I just loved these dogs...

And am curious to now why the boards covering the windows of this vacant building are green. Is this art?

Apparently Lenny's Delicatessen is a famous Baltimore institution, who would have known?

American Visionary Art Museum

On Sunday my parents and I went to the American Visionary Art Museum conveniently located in the Federal Hill Neighborhood and across the street from the Ritz Carlton apartment complex.

Three buildings compromise the museum, but unfortunately photos can only be taken in one. On the ceiling of that building were the Seven Days of creation, on the floor a game of chess pitting angles and demons as if some sort of final judgement.

On the left are the angles in silver (hence the halos) and on the right in bronze are the devils.

There was a corky little playground too,

and it of course came with its own graffiti.Although I missed it, this definitely looks like something that I'll keep on my radar for next year. The event is the Kinetic Sculpture Race where allegedly the most coveted awards are those for mediocre performance and next-to-last place. The sculptures are powered by humans (i.e. they sit on top of a bike) and travel a fifteen miles race course around the Inner Harbor that is composed of land, sand, mud, and the Chesapeake Bay. Check out the website http://www.kineticbaltimore.com/ it looks like tons of fun.
One of the featured artists at the museum who I thought was cool is Kenny Irwin Jr. He claims to have visions of a futuristic Pakistan, but the only place you can really find information about him is his my space page http://www.myspace.com/kennyirwin which is perhaps telling of not only his popularity but legitimacy as well.

Inner Harbour/ Little Italy

After riding the MTA bus from the first stop on the route (Cromwell Bridge Road, surprisingly very close to my house) to the last stop on the route (Charles and Pratt Streets, near the Inner Harbour), my mom, dad, and I arrived downtown. This was the first time that I've taken a public bus in Baltimore. I took one in DC and later wrote about the experience in my why I want to go to GW essay (and I guess it must have been interesting if I got in!)-- let's just essay that I didn't intend to take the bus, but an elderly woman insisted that I should after I asked her for directions and she explained I was very far from where I wanted to be.
In India I made a habit of taking the bus. For starters I had to ride a school bus (at RPCS we only ever ride a bus on field trips) and to be honest that was probably one of my favorite parts of the day. The Indian host school was very big so there were two bus shifts: we rode into school on the earlier bus with kids our age and took the later bus home with the younger kids. I had to switch buses when I moved to my second Indian host family, but I will always be an F bus kid. I met some of my closest friends on that afternoon bus. So you have to understand that these buses were VERY VERY VERY crowded with four or five people to each bench seat and many kids forced to stand. For this reason I was glad that the younger kids were excited by us Americans and would want us to sit with them. And this is how I met my friends: everyday I would head to the back of the bus to my guaranteed seat. Over the next four months I would meet their families, go over their houses, and (unknowingly) break their dietary restrictions-- they're Hindu and thus strict vegetarians (what Americans would consider Vegans) which btw apparently means marshmallows are off limits.

(If you couldn't tell, I'm the white kid in the back.) Those were the school buses, I also rode the public buses. In school we studied Hindi. But Regardless of the fact that there were complications with the teacher to say the least, the official language spoken in Andrea Pradesh (the state were Vizag is located) is Telagu which makes communicating with locals pretty damn hard. Now Telagu and Hindi are probally as far apart as Latin and Arabic: they have different alphabets and grammatical structuring. So of course, everything on the buses (i.e. the direction and stops) was in Telagu. Let's just say I got on the bus that looked like it was heading in the direction I wanted to go in and prayed the bus conductor spoke English. In all seriousness though towards the end of my stay I did start using the bus as part of my regular commute, thus spending 5cents instead of the approx. $1 fare charged by the auto-rickishaw drivers.

About the Inner Harbour...
The first thing I noticed was the smell. The water taxi driver later told us that the pesticides from farms were draining heavily into the water supply because of all the rain (the Harbour area was nearly flooded). He said this caused the dead fish too.

Besides the smell though, I found the area to be quite nice and much more colorful than I last remember it. Many of the dock cleats (or mooring bollards) had been painted as well as the benches (which by the way had no dividers).

There were also many bicycle racks shaped like bicycles.

I came into this day without any listed murals that I planned to see. My dad and I had driven past little Italy on our way to Fells Point the other day and saw many murals so we decided to go back and just walk around. Here's some of what we found:

This next mural was very intricate and appeared to almost be divided into two. On the first half, the town appeared busy on a normal Friday night. But on the second half, a funeral precession was occurring. The two halves are split by a piece of ivy. On the left you can see a bartender fixing drinks, while the church procession is beginning on the right.

Here the restaurant doors blend into the artwork:

I came across this old church. Not only did it had a beautiful mosaic, but also a cross outside on the side walk.

And of course, what would Little Italy be without a Bocce court?Note the painted benches (which do not have dividers).