Social Stoops (from baltimoreopencity.com)

Since mid-December the Bal­ti­more: Open City site has deliv­ered a steady stream of thought­ful ideas and dis­cus­sion about urban devel­op­ment, plan­ning, and renewal–particularly as they per­tain to Bal­ti­more. The site is the out­growth of the Mary­land Insti­tute Col­lege of Art’s Exhi­bi­tion Devel­op­ment Sem­i­nar (EDS), in prepa­ra­tion for the inter­ac­tive exhi­bi­tion Bal­ti­more: Open City slated to open April 1 at 16 W. North Ave., the site of the for­mer North Avenue Market.

Work­ing with vis­it­ing artist Damon Rich, the founder of the Cen­ter for Urban Ped­a­gogy, the EDS class aims to envi­sion Bal­ti­more as an “open city”–which the 28 stu­dents in the class define as “a place where every­one feels wel­come, regard­less of such things as wealth, race or reli­gion.” The 2010-’11 EDS project is being led by MICA assis­tant pro­fes­sor in art his­tory, the­ory, and crit­i­cism Daniel D’Oca, along with Historian-in-Residence Antero Pietila, the Cit­i­zens Plan­ning and Hous­ing Asso­ci­a­tion, the Bal­ti­more Neigh­bor­hood Indi­ca­tors Alliance-Jacob France Insti­tute, forward-thinking design hybrids D:center and Dale Glen­wood Green of Green & Tice, Thomas L. Hol­lowak of the Uni­ver­sity of Baltimore’s Langs­dale Library, and the Johns Hop­kins University’s Cen­ter for Africana Stud­ies’ East Bal­ti­more Oral His­tory Project.

EDS’ Bal­ti­more: Open City project arrives in a for­tu­itous year. Two other orga­ni­za­tions have already very pub­licly addressed ways to improve the city–Amplify Bal­ti­more and Cre­ate­Bal­ti­more–and opens about a year after the City From Below, which brought a vari­ety of national urban thinkers here. It’s all part of a grow­ing grass­roots civic (re)imagining that has always per­co­lated through the city’s arts work­ers and com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions, but has steadily gained momen­tum over the past decade as they’ve come into con­tact with one another and cre­ated dynamic pock­ets of activ­ity that exist at the inter­sec­tion of visual art prac­tice, local activism, and grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion. These projects aspire to directly con­front per­sis­tent urban issues: pop­u­la­tion dis­place­ment as a result of devel­op­ment, neigh­bor­hoods and hous­ing struc­tures often­times erected decades before eco­log­i­cal con­cerns entered the dis­course, eco­nom­i­cally depressed pop­u­la­tions, and  the social stres­sors that sup­port under­ground shadow economies and the so-called “cul­ture of vio­lence” that has become the blan­ket term for urban ills.

The Bal­ti­more: Open City site has already aggre­gated some entic­ing con­tent, such as teas­ing some poten­tial projects, includ­ing “Social Stoops” (pic­tured above), which pro­poses reclaim­ing mate­r­ial from Baltimore’s mar­ble grave­yard to recre­ate the iconic sit­ting place of the Bal­ti­more row­house in our pub­lic parks.

How hope­ful ideas, orga­ni­za­tional energy, and gen­uine ide­al­ism are turned into prag­matic action can be a conun­drum when deal­ing with the inter­sec­tion of art and activism, but go ahead and expect some­thing dif­fer­ent from EDS. Its process has pro­duced some inno­v­a­tive exhi­bi­tions over the past decade, from At Freedom’s Door: Chal­leng­ing Slav­ery in Mary­land to Fol­lies, Predica­ments, and Other Conun­drums: The Works of Laure Dro­goul.

You can fol­low the exhi­bi­tion on Twit­ter and Face­book.

Tags: city life, Damon rich, Exhibition Development Seminar, MICA, urban renew, urbanism