Baltimore is a city that’s famous for its murals, which probably has something to do with the city’s surplus of neighborhood pride, arts-oriented citizens and blank walls left behind after vacancy and demolition.

Visiting Baltimore’s murals is a great way to see the city, and the Office of Promotion and the Arts (BOPA) provides a handy online map with their locations. If you visit them, in person or online, you’ll notice a curious pattern: probably the most common single subject in Baltimore’s murals, besides people, is rowhouses.

Why do we paint pictures of rowhouses on rowhouses? It’s easy to forget, and it often bears repeating, that the best art always changes the way we see the world. If that’s true, then the best public art is art that changes the way we see places.

Baltimore murals frequently depict ideal, sunny rowhouses in a diverse green leafy city, because they reflect Baltimore’s perceptions and aspirations.

Beyond the Self-Referential

We need public art that reassures us about what places are and reminds us what we want our places to be. But we also need public art that foregrounds aspects of our places that we might not be as comfortable with.

We need public art that’s critical of what we’ve let our places become and how.

To raise those issues to broader attention, we sometimes need public art with specific viewpoints and methods that might not be available from within the city.

To broaden the range of things that are in our attention, we need art from artists with different backgrounds, and from different places, who work in different ways to point out blind spots and opportunities we might have missed.

In the second iteration of Station North’s Open Walls project, some of the best work brings up aspects of place that are otherwise difficult to discover or talk about.

The piece by German artist ECB is a six-story high portrait of the father of the owner of the Seoul Rice Cake Factory. The piece foregrounds the longtime presence and contributions of Korean-Americans in what’s now Station North, alongside more well known histories of the neighborhood.

Another piece, part of a larger series in several cities called “Stop Telling Women to Smile,” is by the African-American Iranian artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh.

This series illustrates another aspect of place, the continuous harassment borne out of the widespread assumption that women exist in public to be looked at, critiqued, and validated by men. In one image, a woman looks directly at the viewer, while the caption beneath reads, “I am not public space.”

New Way of Thinking

This recognition that public art can operate in different ways to highlight different elements of a place is not new or revolutionary. Even in traditional art, one painter might come to a landscape or a portrait to see, and therefore represent, completely different things than another painter.

The artists themselves always have their own agenda, too. They have ongoing experiments that might stretch through several works, trying to build and hone a language that draws equally from the specific aspects of a subject or place, and a general set of goals and methods for working.

When the process clicks, the people who come along later and interact with the artwork have gained a new way of thinking about the world.

In the public artwork of Steve ESPO Powers – now under microscopic scrutiny by The Brew (here and here) and criticism by City Council President Jack Young – traditional sign painting, community outreach and interaction with architectural space and place all come together.

Powers uses words and phrases drawn from the surrounding people and environment. He filters them through his own sense of language to create messages with the punch of advertising or poetry, and the graphic clarity of safety signage.

It’s clear that these are “Love Letters” because they are sent to a place from an outsider, using language skillfully, but it’s also clear that Steve Powers loves letters themselves, their shapes, lines, and colors.

Powers’ Ambiguity and Wordplay

The piece above does a great job of wrapping up all the implications of “Love Letter” really well. It’s got good wordplay, and the typography interacts with the architecture in an interesting way.

The simple ambiguity of Powers’ language can leave the viewer thinking that they have the message figured out, only to realize later that there’s often other layers of meaning.

Is a project “FOREVER” if the buildings are due to be torn down next month? Or will it last because the images will survive on countless web pages and hard drives, as people come to visit an obscure Baltimore neighborhood, to take photos of a controversial artwork that they heard about on the news?

What does it feel like for someone who comes here to visit and snap a photo for Instagram to be reminded that for many, this is “HOME”?

In a city that has mostly seemed to paint images of the fronts of rowhouses on the blank side walls left by the removal of neighbors, it’s shocking to see the actual fronts of an entire block of vacant houses turned into canvas for text.

This is the kind of intricate interaction and awareness that the best public art can provoke. There are many muralists and artists in this city today that work critically with place, but it’s also good to invite those from outside to add to that conversation.

It’s fascinating to see Powers’ apply his methods to Baltimore, and I’m looking forward to seeing his “Love Letter” project unfold in the coming months.
_________________________________
Fred Scharmen is an artist, designer and researcher. He teaches in the architecture program at Morgan State University’s School of Architecture and Planning.