Bry Reed: No singular solution exists for young artists

My life as an artist did not begin when I got published in print or won an award. 

It began in the smaller moments. As a kid, I asked my mother every loose question rolling around in my dome on the bus rides back home from whichever errand we ran that day. From there, likely motivated by her own need for peace and quiet, she encouraged me to find my own answers in books — not dismissively, but practically. She walked me to the library and footed the bill for my curiosity at every bookstore we entered until I was seventeen.

She trusted me to seek knowledge and practice my skills firsthand. This was her style of parenting, setting me up to learn and supporting me in failure and success without prescriptions. She didn’t map out my life. She had a simple wish: that I live to 18 and take over the world — my world — from there. Once my 18th birthday rolled around (and, truly, in little ways before), she confidently handed me the reins to my own life and wished me luck on the choose-your-own-adventure of adulthood. 

In a lot of key ways I am my mother’s daughter. My opinion on how Baltimore needs to support young artists and youth arts is much like her caregiving philosophy: listen and provide resources. I’m not overconfident enough to suggest that I have the comprehensive strategy for a city full of artists. My only wish is that we build infrastructure for young people to realize their own deep capabilities, not frivolously, but practically. And capability depends on resources.

As a still-young writer, I’m not far removed in age or geography from the programs that shaped my artistry. I started writing “for fun” (meaning outside of graded assignments, not meaning painlessly) in high school, building on my early childhood as a voracious bookworm. 

Reflecting on my young artistic beginnings is a rambling story on grief and “luck.” My artistry and grief are connected because my biggest artistic revelations happened while I was drowning in grief. The summer after ninth grade, my grandfather died suddenly in his sleep beside my grandmother. My father swears the old man knew he was going because of his favorite suit, hung up in the closet. The suit, for a man who attended religious service weekly and drove a Lincoln Town Car with pride, could’ve been written off as a part of his weekly ritual, except there was no meeting in the morning. To add to the mysticism, the ironed socks and shined shoes laid out for our family to find when it was time to dress the body are even less explainable considering they weren’t part of his usual ensemble. A Virginia man, son of morticians and funeral directors, left us in the night and took care of all the little details. 

A few months after his death, I lost two more grandparents. Each year came and I mourned another loss. And those losses weren’t distant send a card in the mail for my birthday and maybe call once a month grandparents. In all respects, my grandparents were my mother’s co-parents. Present, loving parents who shuttled me to school, wiped tears, and affirmed me like any other parent. 

By 2015, when the last casket descended down below, I’d lost three parents before getting a driver’s license. In my dissociative fugue state, I read lots of Toni Morrison, Jenny Han, and watched “Rent” (the 2005 film starring Jessie L. Martin singing devastating ballads about love and grief and bitterness) on repeat. The running theme between the novels and the film, which I see clearly now but did not note consciously as a teenager, is grief. Their plots echo the everlasting thump of my own grief, a gothic daydream of anguish. 

Years passed like this with me in a macabre limbo. Then it’s junior year at City. Between classes and my more personal composition books, I was writing a lot. With one hand, I was writing bad poems about regrettable teenage love affairs, and with the other attempting to write personal statements on who I thought I was for college admissions reps. 

As one does, I shared my shitty melodramatic teenage breakup poems with a friend, and she suggested I apply to writing camp. I’d heard of math camp. I’d done other academic summer camps with the other “um, actually” nerds of the greater Baltimore metro area on scholarship since elementary school, but writing camp was a new concept. After filling in the Google form and telling my mom I planned to write in the woods with my friend for a week, I was at a writing camp, aka a summer writing studio, on the western edge of Maryland, learning about poetry and essay writing from local professionals. Writing camp is where I met Lisa Snowden. 

When I got back home from camp, I hugged my mother, who, in her own dissociative grief and anger, maintained a deep belief in my honest capability. We didn’t know what I’d do after high school graduation, but we both knew I’d do it to the best of my little ole ability, and that usually went in a good direction. 

A decade out from writing camp, I know my own capability is not enough. Never has been. My capability depends on a lot that I did not and still cannot control. My artistry depends on infrastructure, and when I think back on my early childhood, I recognize where access to resources marked the difference in my work. Sometimes that’s called “luck.” 

Looking back, the root of my “luck” was growing up with decent enough public resources: the public elementary school and rec center within walking distance of our project apartment, the public library a few blocks down, and a grocery store a 20-minute walk away. From there, the “luck” continued as teachers pulled my mom aside to tell her about magnet programs and citywide extracurriculars. 

I’m worried my childhood as a young artist in Baltimore City is still “lucky.” I don’t want to be “lucky.” I don’t want it to be rare for a working-poor mother and child to access clarinet lessons and theatre classes. I’m worried conditions worsen year after year for poor families with more exploitation, less public housing, and fewer resources for young children to nourish curious lives. I’m worried that our youth arts strategy will put a singular focus on programmatic budgets when poor kids may never get to the programs in the first place.  

And I’m in favor of more funding for independent galleries to open. I’m in favor of citywide art festivals and markets. Artists are at the art fairs… and in algebra… and waiting on the bus. Artists are on every block of this city, and we can’t focus on arts programming for youth arts culture. Because young artists emerge at parties and while grief-stricken in their bedrooms as much as we emerge in permitted and structured programs. 

I’ve told this rambling story to say I don’t believe a single solution exists on the subject of supporting young artists in the city. And each time we chase a single solution, we lose. Art won’t be created in one mode through one program or grant or incubator. Too many variables exist. Too much class stratification exists. And truly, I don’t want a singular Baltimore arts conveyor. It gives me nightmares of uniform artists christened by a singular philosophy and carbon-copy methods. Copy, paste, scream, repeat. 

The fiscally unpopular answer to the question of how Baltimore as a city and Maryland as a state supports youth arts culture includes funded public schools, public housing, and public transit in addition to dedicated arts programming. Funding a city full of curious people, and thus curious children, is the only “universal” method for galvanizing the next generation of young artists across race and class. My mother did not declare me a writer. I did. In part because I had the time, space, and means to figure it out.