At the beginning of the film “The Unveiling of God / a love letter to my forefathers,” the camera zooms in on a lone trumpeter — Brandon Woody — playing on a Baltimore street corner before cutting to two young men in a pool. One of them wears a silver chain with a pendant of Africa on it. Thematically and sonically, the film, which was produced by the collective of NIA JUNE, Kirby Griffin, and APoetNamedNate, is reflective and elegiac — JUNE created it as a tribute to the Black men prematurely taken from her life. Throughout the film, Black boys and men gaze inquisitively into the camera, sometimes bathed in golden light, sometimes neon, while the music of Baltimore-based artists or JUNE’s own spoken word compositions play in the background.
The film is one of the works on view in the group exhibition “Somewhere Over the Rainbow of Row Homes, We Fly” at UMBC’s Center for Art Design and Visual Culture, on through November 24. Like each of the works in the exhibition, “The Unveiling of God / a love letter to my forefathers” approaches Baltimore’s past and imagines its future with a keen and nuanced lens. It refuses to settle on a single narrative. While mainstream media appraisals of Baltimore tend to villainize this city for its crime rates or romanticize its “grittiness,” the artists in the exhibition interpret and envision the city from a more personal and expansive perspective.
“I was interested in exploring the ways emerging and mid-career Baltimore-based artists are reconsidering Baltimore beyond its geo-specificity and creating lucid dream-like representations about mundane life, inheritance, identity, family and systems of oppression,” said Angela N. Carroll, the exhibition’s curator (and a Beat contributor) in an email.
The title of the show is inspired by one of the long-form poems Carroll commissioned JUNE to write for another show — an exhibition of painter Jerrell Gibbs’ work at the Brandywine Museum of Art. The poem, entitled “B Sharp Haikus / Davon,” included a stanza with the line, “somewhere over the rainbow of row homes, we fly,” which Carroll thought would be a fitting title for a group exhibition about Baltimore-based artists working in experimental mediums.
The exhibition is a feast of colors and forms. Dramatic three-foot-tall portraits by SHAN Wallace hang from the ceiling on invisible threads, dynamic gestural collages hanging adjacent to geometric abstractions. Near the center of the gallery, two fused wooden chairs balance atop two stacks of books on a rug. The books include dense tomes on U.S. law and pharmacy practice as well as novels. Upon closer examination, there are several volumes of Playboy and Playgirl magazines beneath the rug. This piece is Jeffrey Kent’s “Justice, Peace and Genuine Respect for All People,” a sculpture constructed from heavily symbolic, repurposed objects to draw parallels between the Civil Rights Movement and the fight for marriage equality. It prompts us to consider how legal and scientific language has created systemic barriers to human rights.
“In my lifestyle as an artist,” said Kent during the exhibition’s opening reception panel, “I’ve always had a place where I could have a lot of junk, that most people call junk, but I see as art. It’s hard for me not to look at almost anything and see that it has a narrative.”
Perhaps the most striking piece in the exhibition, at least in terms of its size, is the massive 10-by-11-foot paper tapestry created by Kim Rice entitled “American Quilt.” For the piece, Rice assembled dozens of Home Owners’ Loan Corporation redlining maps and cut out the neighborhoods deemed by the HOLC to be “declining” or “hazardous” and ineligible for mortgage loans. These cut out neighborhoods, in both the tapestry and the historic record, are integrated and nonwhite neighborhoods. Rice gathered those pieces in a mason jar stationed below the hanging quilt. The tapestry appears fragile and transparent, perhaps suggesting the same about the discriminatory nature of the practices it shines light on.
When asked about her medium of fiber arts, Rice, who is white, said, “I came to it first because I liked the metaphor — the way that whiteness has woven into our everyday lives and the way in which we move through the world.”
Other artists considered lineage and legacy in different ways. In the film “Of Our Mothers,” Margaret Rorison projected hand-processed 16mm film loops that depicted images of her grandmother, mother, and sister and incorporated sounds from contact microphones and electronics. Her collaborator, Audrey Chen, improvised voice, cello, and electronic resonances in response to the images. The result touches on the cryptic, mesmerizing, and deeply intimate nature of many familial relationships. Rorison explained that while film can be a difficult and unforgiving medium to work with, she enjoys the rhythm of the process and the way that it forces her to think differently.
Brianna Faulkner, a graduate of UMBC’s Fine Arts department, displayed a collage entitled “Solitaire,” in which a mother and daughter seated atop a table on a city rooftop play with a deck of cards. An exotic bird perches on the girl’s outstretched hand and the mother regards the viewer discerningly, a butcher’s knife poised beside her hand on the table. Faulkner collected magazine clippings, pigmented paper, and textiles during phases of postpartum isolation to create the striking collage. The way the fragments come together in the piece is remarkably painterly. There’s a texture to the collage that feels deceptively like brushwork and the colors blend convincingly. Though the figures in the collage are still, there’s a dynamism to their posture that suggests they might be able to reach straight out of the page.
Faulkner cited the artist and author Faith Ringgold as an influence on her dreamlike work, and specifically the book “Tar Beach,” in which an 8-year-old girl flies over New York City from her rooftop in Harlem.
“That book was so important to me as a little girl because that was the first time I ever saw a Black girl fly on paper,” said the artist. “I don’t think I had language for that then, but I knew it was important for me to see somebody like me doing something impossible.”
As a whole, the exhibition serves as a representation for an experience of Baltimore that language doesn’t do justice. Though many of the artists represented are already established in their respective mediums, the exhibition underscores their continued capacity to innovate. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow of Rowhomes, We Fly” is a testament to the talent and invention in Baltimore’s thriving art scene.
The exhibition also includes work by Kelvin Bulluck, the late Roy Crosse, Darrius Fox, Lehna Huie, Ada Pinkston, Ernest Shaw, Jasmine Gabrielle Washington, and SHAN Wallace (also a Beat contributor who has a solo show at Current Space through November 7). The UMBC gallery will host a variety of public programs related to the exhibition through November 24.