Feeling overlooked, some Baltimore neighborhoods hope eye-catching murals help their stories break through

Sanya Kamidi, Baltimore Sun
·6 min read
3

In the mostly majority-Black neighborhoods outside Baltimore’s core, residents can feel forgotten — invisible to the people in power and to outsiders who commute by them.

With the city itself their canvas, some neighborhood organizations are using art to be seen and feel heard. When painted on a building, their symbols and stories become harder to ignore.

Arts & Parks, a collaboration between landscape artist Ebram Victoria and muralist Justin “Nether” Nethercut, specializes in such works. The longtime friends and Baltimore natives turn Baltimore’s bricks into statements. Who lived here? Who lives here? What do they value?

“Everything starts at the neighborhood,” said Victoria, underscoring how people are affected by their surroundings, but also alluding to his and Nether’s creative process, which begins not in a sketchbook or on a computer, but with listening to residents, face-to-face.

“As designers and artists, we can create anything … but it’s for whom is the question that we’re asking, that we’re most interested in,” Victoria said. “We cannot do anything without their voices”.

In four neighborhoods where Arts & Parks has formed partnerships, residents say that shaping something tangible that both represents them and physically becomes a part of their environment gives them a sense of agency.

Publicly and privately funded murals and parks in Johnston Square, Curtis Bay, Mount Clare and Four by Four seek to bridge divides, heal suffering, inspire calm and uncover hidden history.

Johnston Square

Somewhere along the way, bees became the symbol of East Baltimore’s Johnston Square neighborhood.

Over the decade that Regina Hammond, founder and executive director of Rebuild Johnston Square Neighborhood Organization, has been working there, the insects have drifted into a crosswalk painting meant to slow traffic near a school, among other installations.

And then Charm City Meadworks, which brews alcoholic beverages from honey, opened on Johnston Square’s western edge.

“I believe it’s divine intervention,” Hammond said.

The golden yellow mural of bees and native plants on the side of a newly rehabbed rowhouse neighboring the meadery, painted by Nether and paid for by Charm City Meadworks co-owner Steve Marsh, heralds community-business partnerships.

“I think it would have less value … if it just said “Charm City Meadworks” because it wouldn’t deliver the message that the neighborhood is here and that the neighborhood cares,” said James Boicourt, the meadery’s founder.

Nether, who has painted dozens of murals across Baltimore, declined to be interviewed, saying he wants his art to speak for itself. His Instagram account, @nether410, however, annotates his works. He writes that the Johnston Square mural at East Biddle and Barclay streets is “a more welcoming entrance to an old dividing line.”

Johnston Square has long been split from prosperous and majority-white Mount Vernon by the Jones Falls stream, now covered for the expressway, and by discriminatory lending practices that discouraged investment in the neighborhood.

Curtis Bay

Longtime residents of South Baltimore’s Curtis Bay have mourned the loss of multiple lives near Pennington Avenue and Hazel Street, including Baltimore Police Officer Keona Holley, who was shot in an ambush in 2021.

The area became associated with violence and suffering. But it also hosts a playground, which should be an asset.

The Greater Baybrook Alliance and other neighborhood leaders worked with Arts & Parks on a mural there expressing unity and healing. Covering an entire side of a vacant house, the artwork shows the backs of six people of different skin tones holding hands, with nods to Baltimore’s sports teams and a dove in flight over a Ravens purple background.

“Making sure that that mural is something that is positively activating that space, as opposed to creating fear, is a part of [crime prevention through environmental design] work,” said Meredith Chaiken, the alliance’s executive director.

The mural was funded by a Community Health and Safety Works grant from the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development.

Kellie Gaither and Rodette Jones, the longtime residents who shaped the design, chose subjects they thought would resonate with neighbors. On the far right is the landmark Curtis Bay Water Tower. On the left, is the jersey of former Ravens tackle Jonathan Odgen, who spent his entire Hall of Fame career in Baltimore.

Mount Clare

Kintira Barbour wants her Southwest Baltimore neighbors to stop and smell the flowers. While she’s worked on green spaces in Mount Clare, she also means this figuratively.

“In urban communities, we’re always in a rush and hustle and bustle,” said Barbour, a financial examiner and president of the Mount Clare Community Council.

So when she walks by a mural by Nether on the side of a rowhouse at Cole and South Mount streets, depicting a woman of color smelling flowers next to a bird in flight, she feels a sense of calm that she hopes her neighbors feel, too.

A third-generation Baltimorean from the east side, Barbour said the work also is meant to counter the message she heard growing up that the city was a place to escape, and to bring art to a community miles from Baltimore’s big art institutions.

Barbour, who first spoke with Nether about murals in Mount Clare five years ago, said the wait to obtain grant funding for the Cole Street mural and 11 others nearby, some with adjacent green spaces, by Arts & Parks was worth it.

“When you step out your door, you have access to this original art that still does what art is supposed to do — make you think, make you wonder, broaden your perspective,” she said.

Four by Four

Just north of Northeast Baltimore’s Four by Four neighborhood, sacred ground lies under the asphalt.

For nearly a decade, Elgin Klugh, a Coppin State University anthropologist and professor, and Ronald Castanzo, an archaeologist and associate dean at the University of Baltimore, have led the Laurel Cemetery Memorial Project, an effort to confirm burials under the development that became the Belair Edison Crossing shopping center, record who was buried there and publicize the history.

At Elmley and Longview avenues in Four by Four, feet from the cemetery’s former southern border, a mural on a community land trust’s model home honors some of the people buried in the historic Black cemetery — the city’s first nondenominational cemetery for African Americans — as well as those who fought to preserve it before the cemetery was demolished in the late 1950s.

Founded in the 1850s, Laurel quickly became a popular burial site for Blacks across social classes, including 230 Civil War veterans, according to the cemetery project’s website.

The right edge of the mural portrays the Rev. Harvey Johnson, a preacher born into slavery who became a beacon for the Black community after the Civil War. Below him is a depiction of a historic photograph of unidentified Civil War soldiers and a portrait of legendary Baltimore activist Lillie May Carroll Jackson, who was among those who tried to save the cemetery.

Related Articles

Funded by the model home’s nonprofit owner, North East Housing Initiative, the artwork also captures porch-front homes and gardens in the neighborhood today.

While the cemetery memorial project also is working toward a memorial park and historical marker, the mural’s function is more open-ended.

“A mural is much more eye-catching. A mural becomes much more of a landmark. It’s almost a picture by which people give directions,” Klugh said. “If you see it, and you see it again and you see it again, it becomes imprinted in your mind, such that it plants a kind of curiosity for you to learn more about it.”