Another ailing city neighborhood getting the big mural treatment
Station North had “Open Walls,” now the Westside is getting “Articulate: Baltimore”
Above: A street artist working on a mural Saturday as part of an arts initiative on Baltimore’s Westside.
Clutching a can of spray paint in one hand and a photo of her mother and baby sister in the other, a lone artist did her bit Saturday to reverse decades of blight and neglect in Baltimore’s old downtown west side.
“I’m flying out of here on Monday so I’ve got to get it done by then,” said Vancouver’s “Indigo,” one of 10 artists commissioned by Articulate: Baltimore. Articulate describes itself on its website as “a public art initiative aimed at activating vacant space and integrating buildings, people, and culture along North Howard where it intersects with West Franklin and West Mulberry streets.”
It’s a tall order considering they’re focusing on one of Baltimore’s primo post-apocalyptic zones – in a town that’s swimming in such places.
Sketch for this mural which incorporates an image of the artist’s mother and sister. (Photo by Fern Shen)
And yet that’s the mission of this $41,000 campaign – to pump life into the once-lively-and-elegant now-ghostly-and-shuttered former city shopping district. The project is funded with a mix of city ($4,500), Maryland Transit Administration ($5,000) and private support, including The Robert W. Deutsch Foundation ($15,000) and The William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund ($4,500).
A Buffer Against Blight?
Curated by artists Stefan Hauswald and Jesse James, Articulate promises to link the west side’s new Bromo Tower Arts & Entertainment District to the Station North Arts & Entertainment District, which recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary and last year was the site of a similar big mural project, Open Walls.
“It helps create a kind of a buffer for an area that might be a little bit shady,” said Stefan Hauswald, working on another mural at 416 and 414 N. Howard Street.
He compared artists showing up in tough neighborhoods to skateboarders appearing there. “People may not be into skateboarding but they like to see it because they know it means drug addicts and pushers are not around so much,” Hauswald said by phone at his wall, as the light rail rumbled by.
Indigo said she likes old signage and is intentionally preserving some for the old China Inn on the side of this Park Avenue building.
With many of the murals to be located in the Howard Street transit corridor and near Franklin and Mulberry streets – leading to the infamous unfinished “Highway to Nowhere” – the organizers are framing the project as transit-oriented.
“Articulate: Baltimore will transform the experience that pedestrians, light rail, bicycle riders and drivers have as they arrive in or pass through this critical gateway to the newly designated Bromo Tower Arts & Entertainment District,” as they put it in their project description.
“People riding the light rail going to the Ravens game Sunday were looking up at me painting,” Hauswald said. “I bet they never thought about those buildings or just thought they were ugly.”
Other participating artists include Pixel Pancho (Italy), Never2501 (Italy), Chris Stain (New York, Baltimore), Billy Mode, Baltimore, Stefan Ways (Baltimore), J. Digital (Annapolis), HKS 181 (Northern Virginia) Jesse Unterhalter (Baltimore) and Katey Truhn (Baltimore).
Ghosts of Chinatown
Controversy may be swirling about whether city policies worsened or even created the landscape of boarded-up shops and rotting structures on the city’s west side, but Indigo had a simple task there on a crisp cool Saturday – finish this gray-scale image of a nursing mother on the side of 406 Park Avenue.
For Indigo, the area’s lost-civilization quality was just one more element to incorporate into her art.
Baltimore’s Westside declined but Morris Martick’s restaurant there hung in for almost four decades. (Photo by Jennifer Bishop)
Her mural, for example, was covering up words and Chinese characters painted on the side of the building, in the city’s small once-thriving Chinatown, advertising the old China Inn (more recently, The China Doll restaurant.)
“I really like old signage so I’m going to leave that part up,” she said, pointing to the top right-hand corner of the building.
On Mulberry Street, around the corner from Indigo and her spray cans, stood a hub of city artistic life that sprang up without any foundation support or city blessing – Martick’s Restaurant Francaise.
The side of the one-time China Doll restaurant is getting an “Articulate: Baltimore” mural.
The restaurant, the creation of iconoclast, philosopher, raconteur and total original, Morris Martick, is closed now. Martick died on December 16 last year. But for nearly four decades, his one-time speakeasy was a gathering place for artists, musicians, gays, journalists, bohemians and all sorts who appreciated Martick’s blend of fine French fare, Existential/Borscht Belt humor and personal warmth.
Fittingly, Martick’s spirit lives on in a long poem pasted to a door on the side of his former building and a sticker on the restaurant’s old blue-gray front door: “I’m honest with the people in my life.”
Street artist Indigo, at work in Baltimore. (Photo by Fern Shen)
A poem on the side of the old Martick’s Restaurant Francaise.