Baker Artist Portfolios

Pete Ross is a banjo maker, researcher, and musician who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Since 1991, he has been trying to undo the cultural injustice of the banjo's relegation to the periphery of American culture. Through his instrument building, writing, and speaking, he has re-centered this African American instrument as an origin point of American popular culture. Although his wooden-rim banjos revisit the instrument's history of mass production, corner-cutting, bottom-line-motivated, cultural jetsam, he builds them with the care deserving of an object central to our culture and with a complex heritage. Pete's intention is to imbue these banjos with the care, craftsmanship, and aesthetics worthy of these long-neglected voices in our musical heritage. 

When Pete began building instruments, the earliest banjos from the 17th through early 19th century were literally missing from historic collections here and abroad. By recreating them and placing them in the hands of contemporary musicians and museum collections, his hope has always been to redefine our understand of American popular and folk culture, as well as the complexity of racial interactional within these spheres. 

In the last thirty-five years, his instruments have been shown in and acquired by museums across the world; been in the hands of both amateur and award-winning musicians; and used both as props for and in the soundtracks of television and film. Most recently, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has commissioned an instrument for an upcoming permanent display in the musical instrument wing; musician and scholar Jake Blount has featured one of Pete's banjos on his album "symbiont" (Smithsonian Folkways, 2024); and one of Pete's banjos was commission for Amazon TV production's of The Underground Railroad, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead's award-winning novel. ​

His banjos have also been exhibited in the Museum of Musical Instruments, Brussels, Belgium; Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix, Arizona; Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia; George Washington Historical Birthplace National Park, Colonial Beach, Virginia; Blue Ridge Institute, Ferrum, Virginia; Appomattox State Courthouse National Park, Appomattox, Virginia; Mercer Museum, Pennsylvania; Hines History Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; National Museum of African American Music, Nashville, Tennessee (forthcoming); Lefferts Historic House, Brooklyn, New York; and the Crooked Trail Road, Galax, Virginia. Photographs of his instruments have appeared in Picturing the Banjo by Leo G. Mazow; Banjo: America’s African Instrument by Laurent du Bois; Banjo: An Illustrated History by Bob Carlin; and Building New Banjos for an Old-Time World by Richard Jones-Bamman. 

Pete holds a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City, where his senior thesis focused on reconstructions of the New World banjo and on the banjo’s place in the broader American culture. Shortly after graduating from SVA in 1994, a large part of this thesis work was exhibited at CBs Gallery, The Bowery.

In 1994, Scott Didlake, a master early-banjo builder living in Jackson, Mississippi, offered Pete an apprenticeship to study with him. After Scott's death, Pete returned to his home state of Maryland, where he has continued the research needed to authentically recreate the banjo in its earliest New World form. 

In 2010, Pete received a Maryland State Arts Council Apprenticeship award to study techniques of late 19th-century banjo construction with master luthier, Kevin Enoch. Pete's instruments are inspired by the 1890s-1910s "classic-era" banjos but made for the contemporary Old-Time music setting. They feature intricate mother-of-pearl inlays, engravings, hardwood necks, ebony fingerboards. 

In 2014, Pete s co-curated “Making Music: The Banjo in Baltimore and Beyond” with Greg Adams and Robert Winans. The exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Industry explored the mid- to -late nineteenth century Baltimore banjo maker William E. Boucher, Jr. and the transformation of the banjo to a commercial product. He has an essay about the Haiti Banza discovery and early banjos in Banjo Roots and Branches (University of Illinois, 2018). Ross has lectured on banjo history and taught banjo construction and performance at the Baltimore Civil War Museum; Augusta Heritage Workshops; The National Folk Festival; The Black Banjo Gathering; and elsewhere.