The sculptor Joyce J. Scott and the photographer Shan Wallace represent two generations of Baltimore visual artists, both committed to depicting the city’s African-American history and its present-day existence through their respective mediums. Scott, 70, creates beautiful, troubling sculpture and jewelry, which often incorporates delicate traditional beadwork and confronts the horrors of the country’s racial history: Her piece “Lynched Tree” (2011-15) is a large, amorphous sculpture that depicts a body hanging upside down by the legs from the ceiling, spilling chains, beads and bones onto the gallery floor below.
Wallace, 27, is part of the new guard, a photographer whose work shifted after attending a rally held in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. She photographs, she wrote to me, “the essence of this city, the black communities, the resistance and resilience of black people.” She gives the subjects of her work copies of the photographs in order to demonstrate “the value of archiving with the goal of empowerment.” Her work draws its force from its insistence on the beauty and significance of everyday life among communities that have not historically been recorded with such careful attention.
Baltimore has thus far resisted the overdevelopment that has sanded off some of the weirder edges of other cities with thriving arts communities like Austin, Tex., Portland, Ore., and, most notoriously, San Francisco. Rather than lamenting the bygone days of some artistic peak, the city is able to point to a living lineage, a continuity that is renewed with each new generation. I think of Ali and their peers like Butch Dawson and Jpegmafia, for example, responding directly to the legacy of Baltimore club, a genre that remains largely unknown outside the city. Rather than tearing things down and starting new, the artistic tendency of the city is to create layers, riffing on what came before and changing it in the process.
In the course of writing this essay, I was surprised by the number of people who, even as they protectively warned me against essentializing or pigeonholing the city, posited Baltimore as a microcosm of the country as a whole. On some level, I understood what they were telling me — don’t ignore the complicated history, the glaring inequality, the struggle to make beauty out of darkness. But Baltimore also feels, in its insistence on maintaining a local culture through community and self-identity, like a holdout from an older tradition, one that can get lost under new construction. The city will change, one hopes — socially and economically — for the good. But, with any luck, it will continue to be the odd, ambitious place where murderous drag queens roam the streets. You still can’t do that in D.C.
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