You really shouldn’t miss the fantastic installation at the Creative Alliance, Ain’t Goin’ Home by Chris Stain and Leon Reid IV. It’s the first in a series entitled Urban/Appalachia, an exploration of connections between Baltimore and the region to our west.
Leon, a public artist from Ohio who trained in London, fills the center of the room with a towering statue of the historic giant, John Henry, a former slave who raced a steam engine only to die after winning the epic competition. The imposing statue of John Henry (made of recycled materials) stands on winding tracks that snake through the room. An exit leading to a behind-the-scenes area has been disguised as the entry to a train tunnel, presumably beneath a lofty mountain.
Chris, a native of East Baltimore living in New York, painted the entire Main Gallery with a mural featuring larger-than-life figures in a variety of settings. The figures and settings weave together a story of social dislocation; one that lies just below the surface of economic change. As you move around the perimeter of the room, a narrative unfolds in front of urban row homes with electrical wires woven across the sky, a windowless brick factory wall, and the bleak landscape of a small town and rural farm. This might be about the struggles of farmers eking a living out of the land and/or migrating from country to city to seek work in our now failed steel mills.
These murals may reach back to an artistic tradition, but they are executed here using the techniques of 21st-century street art. Jed Dodds, Artistic Director at the Creative Alliance, was kind enough to explain how they were made: Chris projected photographs on the walls and then created the stencil effects we see in his huge figures with black spray paint.
Much of what we see is spray paint used with total artistic control. I know that some of the best graffiti I’ve seen in alleys and on passing train cars was painted this way, but it is all the more impressive here, applied to depict figures whose bodies and faces express such recognizable weariness and sorrow.
I love these sorts of installations—so ambitious in scale and in idea—but I always feel sorry to see them disappear, as this one will, with so little but our memories remaining at the end of the run. It may be that this is what makes them such great experiences: it’s not about making an object into a commodity or even preserving the work, it’s about the meaning a piece like this will hold for all those lucky enough to see it and retain the memory.
- See this one before the components are disassembled and the gallery walls return to their white-cube state. But hurry! It closes Saturday, May 29!
- And while you are thinking about street art and the ways it has transformed contemporary art, check out Axis Alley 2010. For it, two dozen artists curated by MICA Professor Sarah Doherty have intervened in a three-block stretch of alley running parallel from 2000 to 2212 North Calvert Street.
- For a look at some of the most beautiful spray-painted art known to mankind, check out a mural in Axis Alley 2010 created by MICA graduate Gaia. What an amazing sight to encounter behind a row of disintegrating row homes! The monumental chicken head is apparently mounted on a human body, hands crossed over its chest.
Filed in: Creative Alliance.
Doreen Bolger is always on the move because she can’t stop seeing, supporting, and writing about the arts in and around Baltimore City. Her lengthy love affair for the arts began in Long Island when her father, an executive in the textile industry, brought home breathtaking fabrics every night from the heart of the garment district. 