You, too, can discover Gallery 788. Just turn right onto Washington Boulevard and into Pigtown moments before you are swept onto 295 and on your way to the federal city. You will know you are nearby when you see an installation on a dark green storefront—a hand gently holding a bird and three menacing eyeballs.
Photographer Edouardo Rodriguez, a Washingtonian for 20 years, started Gallery 788 a year-and-a-half ago and runs a second venue 21G Gallery, in the same block. Proclaiming “there’s no other city like Baltimore,” he offers monthly exhibitions and frequent band performances that feature the dynamic emerging artists who are redefining Charm City aesthetics. Edouardo is already at work on a third venue and maybe a skateboard ramp nearby.
Blight, the current show, captures the energy and vision of today’s young Baltimore-based artists, whose work is shaped by music, popular culture, and a lifestyle with an edge. Some of these artists might work on the street, creating graffiti or applying prints and paintings to abandoned buildings, but their work is rich in meaning and in references to social and art history.
Gaia, best known here for large-scale drawn and printed work that was featured on the cover of Urbanite in October, exhibits an ambitious unfinished painting. The subject is a chicken-headed man, familiar from his recent work in Axis Alley, but here the model wears a regal red cloak, flung open to reveal a landscape view of Yosemite by Hudson River School Master Albert Bierstadt. For Gaia, this is a reference to Manifest Destiny—the claim of entitlement America made to expansion in the mid-19th century—and for the artist, it resonates with questionable 21st century claims on urban land and neighborhoods.
David Cogdill’s striking drawings of architecture are devoid of trees, people, and cars; this is a world seemingly without inhabitants, the demise we fear most deeply for some of our challenged neighborhoods. Building Block 2 shows us a whole block of uninhabited row houses and closed storefronts, with windows and doors covered over or filled in, others simply darkened in silence. Beside it, in Building Block 1, a suburban McMansion stands forlornly alone.
These are buildings and these may be blocks, but by naming these images as he does, David challenges us to ask ourselves whether we are building the basics into our urban fabric. He has made these large drawings by placing the paper on the floor of his Station North loft and making rubbings of its wood grain and floor board edges. The graining runs in different directions to articulate textures and forms—brick fronts and cement sidewalks, wooden windows and doorways—with blank areas of paper exposed to represent the pure white marble so often associated with domestic architecture in our city.
Paintings by Stefan Ways hover intriguingly between Street Art and Surrealism, but are unquestionably very much of the moment. The imagery in No Luv Inc. is particularly powerful. A huge cloud of grotesque green heads bursts from the neck of a miniature gentleman in business attire, their grimacing mouths, exposed teeth, wagging tongues, and furrowed brows frightening in their fury. The man stands atop a mound of skulls and bones, holding a skull in one hand and a briefcase labeled “No Luv Inc.“ in the other. The glowing orange background suggests the fires of hell.
Don’t miss this show. It’s open Thursdays and Fridays from 5 pm to 8pm; Saturdays from noon-8pm; and Sundays from noon to 6pm.
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. 