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Baltimore Children Get Silk-Screening Lesson from Mark Bradford, Mary Mattingly Takes Over BRIC & More

Artist Mark Bradford and BMA have launched a project with the community group Greenmount West for at-risk kids to learn silk screening skills they can use to make and sell T-shirts, baseball caps, and other items of clothing. (Kenneth K. Lam, Baltimore Sun video)

Artist Mark Bradford visited Baltimore a few days ago. While in town for the opening of his most recent exhibition, Mark Bradford: Tomorrow is Another Day at the Baltimore Museum of Art, he made sure to visit the Greenmount West Community Center. It was not his first time there either; the artist has a longstanding relationship with the center. He’s responsible for the purchase of a four-color press, a flash dryer, an exposure unit, and computers and equipment that helps provide weekly silk-screening workshops for youths ages 5 to 18. The classes began in March and have now abled the production of enough merchandise to open a pop-up store at the museum, which launched last week. The Greenmount Power Press, as the project is called, is a collaboration between Bradford, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the community center and a grassroots organization called Noisy Tenants.

Bradford, whose work centers on transforming materials scavenged from the street into wall-sized collages and installations—with a special interest in impromptu networks and underground economies—is known for launching social service programs in cities where his work is exhibited. He founded a community arts center in his native Los Angeles that works with young people in foster care, and also set up a storefront in Venice, Italy as part of the 2017 Venice Biennale where former inmates could sell products they crafted while in prison. “Centers like these create safe spaces that young people can come to and feel protected. And once they feel protected they can develop their creativity” he told The Baltimore Sun. “These types of spaces that are embedded in the community are very important. Because when you embed them in the community, when children don’t have to leave to find art, it doesn’t make it so out of reach.”


This Week in Art


The Artist Speaks

“Please take it, run with it, use it. There’s work to be done”

As part of an interview with The Guardian on her new retrospective at the Tate Modern, Jenny Holzer discussed the recurrent incorporation of technology in her work, the beauty of collaboration, and the current political climate in the United States. When asked about the use of one of her most famous Truisms, “Abuse of power comes as no surprise,” by the campaign group We Are Not Surprised—an offshoot of the #MeToo movement seeking to expose the sexual harassment and misogyny rampant in the art world, the artist said:

“I was glad people asked me if they could have it. I’m honoured. Please take it, run with it, use it. There’s work to be done.”

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