Below please find examples of work from my current community art project, A View from the Inside Out

To visit my visual/performance art galleries, please use the navigation menu above

A View from the Inside Out

empathy and community through connection and skill sharing

The ABCs of A View include: Advocating for healthier labor policies and practices, Building stronger communities through participatory decision making on collaborative art projects, Connecting artists and Baltimore residents for one-on-one mentor sessions. I pursue this work out of concern for the current divisive environment and increasing anti-intellectualism. The costs of this systemic imbalance include anxiety, violence, eating disorders, and loneliness. Fatalities from alcohol, drugs, and suicide in the USA in 2017 were the highest they’ve been since 1999.

This gallery offers an overview. The galleries below contain more information about a selection of the project’s pilot components and achievements to-date.

Mural Panel (camera obscura installations)

This graphic mural is the window display in camera obscura installations. There is a small opening in the pupil which allows the outside world to project into the installation. The link is to a 2 minute edit of one installation.

The trilogy of components are mutually reinforcing, inviting others to collectively shape the programming.

The Road Home

The Road Home was a participatory performance/installation on the abandoned campus of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. The experience included magic tricks, an opera singer, and discussions on the shortcomings of GDP-driven econometrics. The content was shaped by conversations with soon-to-be fired campus security guards and homeless citizens.

Dice and Blindfolds

Dice and Blindfolds is a participatory game where players share roles in achieving the task of stacking dice while blindfolded. Dexterity is less helpful than strong listening skills. It is sometimes a warm-up or wrap-up component to broader community activities (performance, installation, exhibition). Participatory Performance (90 minutes) Washington DC 2019

In the Future...

A homeless neighbor writing with light in the air during a camera obscura installation Baltimore 2019

Yoga in the dark

Practitioners in a 60 minute yoga class with pin-lights clipped to their wrists and ankles, part of a camera obscura installation Washington DC 2019

Commentary on the ethics of funding in the arts, case study: This Place Has A Voice Washington DC 2012-14

The Measured Step

This interactive timeline starts with the stories and experiences of security guards, homeless citizens, and academic practices at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, permanently closed down summer 2017. The timeline travels back to the origin of the school (1600s) and developments that affected education, job, and housing security in Santa Fe. The timeline is in-progress, part of my Fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute 2017.

Artist Booster Grants 2020

After reviewing @200 submissions, A View is humbled to award an Artist Booster Grant to each of the two amazing artists cited below. We wish them continued success in their explorations, and look forward to future opportunities to support amazing work in the arts.

Caroline Xia (left):

Caroline has always known the importance of diversity and community as a child of Chinese immigrants and being born and raised in Queens, New York, a borough known for their diverse immigrant population. Her work centers around narratives about women of color and immigrants. She frequently collaborates with musicians and other creatives around Baltimore city. Her work has been featured in galleries such as FLIP Gallery, a photography solo show at Asana Roots Gallery, and publications such as Sukeban Magazine, and Slanted Magazine. Caroline Xia: https://carolinexia.com

Abdu Ali (right):

Abdu Ali is an American avant-garde electronic musician, writer, cultural worker, and multidisciplinary artist who primarily works in sound, dialogue, literary text, and social practice. Their work is a yielding poetic uprise that often interrogates ideas of identity as well as narrates and promotes liberation from oppressive ideologies and systems. Abdu Ali: https://www.abduali.com/new-page-2

A View continues the mentor-mentee program, in part thanks to support from the Warnock Foundation and the Grit Foundation Emergency Recovery Fund. If you would like to be a (paid) mentor artist, please provide us with the following (brief) information: https://forms.gle/5Rx8KKhz8jDe2jTS7

A View - some of the experiences:

A Parlor Game in the Library

Saturday, November 10, 2018 4pm - 6pm Gormley Gallery Notre Dame of Maryland University

A participatory game where participants perform simple safe tasks as they navigate the room, with a twist on perception. The experience is a look at the value of work, empathy, volunteerism, and edible statistics.

Exhibition: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Workers: The Cowboy, the wrestler, The Dictator

October 27 - November 30 2018 Gormley Gallery Notre Dame of Maryland University

This exhibition, organized around three series -- the cowboy, the wrestler, and the dictator -- combines my own photography with curated images and materials that explore some of the historical and current cultural and socio-economic relationships between photography and the themes of cowboy as bandit or hero, masculinity, border security; labor in the entertainment industry and definitions of “work;” dictators, propaganda, and fake news.

Cowboy

Wrestler

Dictator

Equal Justice Residency

The Santa Fe Art Institute July 2018

As a participant in the Equal Justice Residency program at the Santa Fe Art Institute 2018, I spent the nights wandering the abandoned campus of the Santa Fe University of Art and Design (SFUAD). My nocturnal conversations were with graveyard shift security guards and homeless residents trying to navigate the recently vacated 65 acres of classrooms, studios, and dormitories. The conversations shaped the art I made, using fragmented, dismembered, disguised or distorted human body parts, mostly hands, to make installations, photograms, collaborative poems, installations and a performance piece. They also shaped my on-going research into the economics of SFUAD, contract labor (security guards) and homeless residents in Santa Fe.

Art & Labor

Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts Creative Baltimore Fund Grant 2018

The pilot phase of this project connected Baltimore residents with artists to explore stories of labor and life through one-on-one time together and the production of artworks over conversation on work and being neighbors. Participating residents were selected from groups that face systemic challenges to securing gainful employment, including but not limited to single parents, homeless, youth or elderly, returning citizens, and refugees. Artists included myself and additional contributors, primarily residents at Artists’ Housing Inc.

Labor and Art

A barter network between artists and tradespeople, funded in part by a Crusade for Art Grant 2016

New Economy Maryland Fellowship 2016

The Institute for Policy Studies

New Economy Maryland seeks to help build an economy that better serves all people and protects our planet. We celebrate this moment of opportunity to advance a bold, creative vision of a New Economy that is both rooted in place and committed to peace.

More and more people across the political spectrum are coming to see that the old economy has failed us. There is much to be told about how the New Economy is taking shape in communities all over. Luckily it is not just a story about what should happen someday, but about the inspiring work already underway. We strive to raise up the good work in our community and learn from powerful examples around the globe. (description from The Institute for Policy Studies)

This year-long Fellowship introduced me to people and practices that explore economic models that reflect humane values instead of neoliberal profit-driven criteria. Barter, local currency, gift economy, worker owned, B corporations, are a few of the many alternative models shaped by the values of equitable, accessible, and sustainable practices for individuals and communities. A link to articles on the subject written by Fellows in 2016, including my piece, “A Soiled Picture of Art and Labor, “ (Inequality.org) is here.