BALTIMORE’S BLACK ARTS DISTRICT: A CREATIVE ARCHIVE
Ages 16-29
Winter 2020, Johns Hopkins Homewood
What is an archive? Who creates it and for whom? How do we creatively archive the living history of urban space? In this workshop, student fellows will explore the subjectivity and power of archival collections, asking critical questions about memory, place, and people’s everyday life. Working with the instructors, themselves historians and artists, fellows will take as their subject a specific intersection on Pennsylvania Avenue, Baltimore’s black arts and entertainment district. They’ll visit and engage with the location in person, and they'll take a deep dive into its history, examining scraps and shards in city archives and speculating about the traces of the past found in saved texts and photographs, including the black and white street portraits of the Baltimore photographer John Clark Mayden (sample work). They’ll consider and redefine archival materials, interpreting the past in relation to their own lives by producing original photographs, images, and creative writing; assembling their own archives; and recording oral history interviews. Their final product will be a gorgeous collaborative art “zine” (a do-it-yourself publication, similar to a magazine) of fellow images and writing that creatively archives the history of Pennsylvania Avenue. Fellows will learn archival research; oral history as well as “speculative history” writing; documentary photography; how to create digital negatives and photograms; and the basics of zine-making. Their work will appear in the zine, on the program website, and at a public exhibition. Limited to 12 student fellows.
Jonna McKone is a filmmaker, storyteller, journalist, and interdisciplinary researcher. Her films, photographs, and audio works have been broadcast on public radio and screened and exhibited at galleries and museums, most recently at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.
Joey Plaster is a curator and historian living in Baltimore City. He teaches public humanities, performance studies, and oral history in the Program in Museums and Society at Johns Hopkins University.
Malkah Bell is a graduate of Morgan State University's SWAN (Screenwriting & Animation) program, receiving her BFA in Television and Media Writing. Since childhood she has had a love for writing and uses film as a her canvas to tell moving stories.
