Despite what a certain type of purist might say, art is rarely just about the paint on the canvas or the shape carved into the stone. And despite the boosters and critics of the art-industrial complex, it is more than museums, galleries, collectors, and mural programs. No matter how we try to reduce art to an establishment of gatekeeping and value-setting, it will always go beyond that.
As machines overwhelm us with artificially generated images inaccurately called “art,” we’re reminded that art actually serves a purpose much deeper than “content creation.” It has been — at least since the days when people painted representations of the animals they hunted in the caves of Lascaux — something closely tied to magic. Art is one of the ways we speak with our dead.
I was struck by that series of ruminations as I walked through “Let Them Speak: Their Beauty, Our Hearts,” the stunning show at The Peale Museum through July 26. The show features art created by victims of police violence, most strikingly a number of portraits painted by Tyrone West, who was killed by Baltimore Police officers on July 18, 2013, when they pulled him out of his sister’s car by his hair and brutalized him.
Tawanda Jones, his sister, has never let West’s name die with him, hosting West Wednesday protests every single Wednesday night since he died for the last 13 years. She refused to take a settlement so she could continue to talk about the case. She helped Marilyn Mosby defeat Gregg Bernstein to become state’s attorney because Bernstein would not press charges against the officers. Mosby then failed to bring charges, but Jones outlasted her. She had West’s body exhumed for a new autopsy. And she was vindicated in 2025 when an extensive audit of the now-disgraced Chief Medical Officer David Fowler’s cases determined that West’s death should have been ruled a homicide. Now-State’s Attorney Ivan Bates has not reopened the case.
If you follow the news in Baltimore at all, you know some of this, so it’s stunning and surprising to walk into a room and see a series of acrylic works on denim canvas that West painted before the Baltimore Police Department took his life. West’s artwork was not well-known outside of his circle of family and friends, but the surprise is not that he made art, but the specificity and style that unites the images and points to the hand of a single living and breathing person, to all of the complicated gestures that create style and identity.
While incarcerated in Hagerstown, West primarily painted portraits of famous people modeled on magazine pictures: Jay-Z, Barack Obama, Elijah Muhammad, Martin Luther King. In one, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale stand in leather jackets and berets, rifles slung over their shoulders, the words “Black Panther Party” above them and a Black Power fist between them.
But there is another more intimate portrait of his sister Jones going to the prom with a friend. There’s something about seeing his representation of her, after spending years following her attempts to tell the world who he was, that took my breath away.
Each of the paintings is signed “Weeda.”
“Our Mom and our Aunties would come up with all of our nicknames and they were struggling coming up with one for Tyrone,” Jones explained in an interview, included as wall text for the exhibition. “Our Aunt Emma had Tyrone at the park when he was really little and was pushing him in the swing. Every time she pushed him forward, he’d say ‘Weeeeeee!’ and as he was coming back made a sound like ‘Daaah!.’ Aunt Emma came back home with Tyrone and said, ‘Well, I guess he named himself! He’s Weeda!.’”
That is the kind of detail that brings someone out of the news, out of the tragic last moments of their lives and into the present in a way that is akin to magic.
That is the kind of detail that brings someone out of the news, out of the tragic last moments of their lives and into the present in a way that is akin to magic.
The walls of the large gallery are appropriately sparse, with West’s portraits and other works evenly spaced, leaving room for each of the images to breathe.
Among the works in the show are two clothing ensembles designed by Donnell Rochester, a queer designer, influencer, and Nicki Minaj superfan who BPD officer Connor Murray shot and killed in February 2022 when Rochester was 18 years old.
At one end of the room, there is a shirt and shorts combo in pink and white, both featuring an upside down ice cream cone splattering into the word “Raw.” At the other end, there is a life-sized cutout of him wearing that outfit beside another one of his looks, a frilly pink dress over a vintage rock ’n’ roll T-shirt, which, according to the artist’s statement, “he wore on his 17th birthday. He had a hotel party and walked the stairwell as if he owned it.”
The exhibition is truly expansive, going far beyond Baltimore and featuring, for instance, fascinating sneakers painted by Xzavier Hill, who was killed by Virginia police during a traffic stop in 2021, and a portrait of him, painted by his mother, with the sneaker to his ear like a telephone. The sneaker, his mother says in the artist’s statement, is “a symbol of communication,” and “represents creativity, individuality, and the belief that every step can create new connections.”
The show also features works by artists such as Beat photo editor J.M. Giordano, whose large-scale portraits of activists dominate one wall. In one of those portraits, we see Duane “Shorty” Davis, who also has a display set up in the gallery’s foyer, just as you get off the elevator, allowing viewers to scrawl onto one of his infamous art toilets, which will later be installed in a public place.
In addition to the art, in a smaller room, there is a video loop featuring an astounding number of mothers, sisters, and other survivors speaking about their lost loved ones. On the other wall in the smaller space is an exhaustive timeline of the West case and the struggle, led by his sister, against police violence and repression.
The show was organized by the West Wednesday coalition, a rotating group of activists who have organized the weekly protests with Jones since her brother was killed and have seeded many other activist groups and communities around the city. They spent roughly nine months putting it together, applying for grants to fund it, creating a massive timeline of the West case, and helping the families of other victims deal with the difficult process of going through their loved ones’ artworks and getting them ready to display.
The Peale Museum — the nation’s oldest public museum — is perhaps the only museum in the city where such a show could really work. Nancy Proctor, who led the museum from its re-founding in 2017 until 2024, told Baltimore Beat in a recent interview that the museum’s importance lay in “social history, telling the stories of not just the rich people but the working class, and telling it through modest architecture rather than grand monuments, and artifacts, and things like that.”
It is a “museum of stories,” she said. “We could really showcase some of the stories that represented the aspects of the city that I felt were underrepresented.”
On July 1, in the middle of this show’s run, the museum announced that John Suau, who replaced Proctor as director, no longer holds that position, placing The Peale in a moment of uncertainty and transition.
Whatever the future of the museum, this show demonstrates the archaic and overwhelming power of art and the importance of a museum of stories that addresses and honors the heart of our movements.