Anchoring the 2017 Artscape Charles Street Trail July 21-23, Dancing Forest was a kinetic environment of inflatable trees emblazoned with trail markers identifying Baltimore’s many classic places, features, and customs. Participants were encouraged to walk among and explore the the animated trees as they undulated in the sky. Up close, one found an array of urban trail symbols, such as benches, snowballs, bikers, and buildings. Internal LED illumination of the sculptures allowed nighttime exploration. Combining spectacular movement with urban wayfinding symbols, Dancing Forest created an exciting, playful environment inspiring participants to continue exploring Baltimore’s many intriguing places.

Dancing Forest
July 21-23, 2017
Artscape
Charles Street Bridge, Baltimore, MD
Submersion printed nylon, blowers, felt, LED lights, grass, website
20’ x 45’ x 200’
Project partners: Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts, Station North Tool Library

New Public Sites walking tours explore the history, design and uses of overlooked public spaces. From championing pedestrian accessibility around Druid Hill Park, to exploring the robust and emerging civic spaces and public art of Arlington County, New Public Sites tours show that place is truly what we made of it. Through New Public Sites walking tours we poetically re-experienced everyday public spaces while learning from community leaders and civil servants how to affect change at the block level. Recent tours include the Arlington County Wandering series, Rosslyn Public Art, Mondawmin Crossings, Druid Hill Reservoir Interchange, and Bromo District.

New Public Sites consist of everyday public spaces existing in one or more of three states: rendered mute by their physical and discursive emptiness, ambiguous due to contextual contradictions of urban design, and/or invisible from a lack of formal architectural framing and practical readability. Through tours, maps and videos, Public Artist Graham Coreil-Allen cultivates pedestrian agency, interprets aspects of the everyday and investigates the negotiable nature of the built environment. New Public Sites invites you to practice “radical pedestrianism” – traveling by foot through infinite sites of freedom while testing the limits of and redefining public space.

The Monumental City is played by giants among many – the business person, the bird, the worker and you. Hopscotch Crosswalk Colossus is an intersection of four oversized hopscotch-court-crosswalks, each featuring a quintessential Baltimore path-print. Featuring the shoe, the bird track, the boot and the footprint, the project is a monument to the people who populate the Bromo Tower Arts & Entertainment District and make Baltimore The Greatest City in America.

North Side: The Shoe
The Towering Businessperson skips east approaching downtown skyscrapers.

East Side: The Bird Track
The Superbird Champion hops south heading to Camden Yards and The Raven’s Walk.

South Side: The Boot
Wobbling west The Worker passes through a former garment district built by labor.

West Side: The Footprint
The Hippie Artist bounces north with abandon towards lofty digs in the Bromo Tower Arts & Entertainment District.

Hopscotch Crosswalk Colossus
December 4, 2013
Eutaw and Lombard Streets
Baltimore, MD

Permanent crosswalks installation

Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts

Produced with the Baltimore Museum of Art, Visioning Home Mapping and FutureSite Baltimore were interactive mapping installations and activity in which participants wrote on and placed laser cut cardboard signs within immersive tape map to illustrate and discuss their neighborhood assets, challenges, and new ideas.

BMA Visioning Home Mapping Workshop
September 23, 2017
Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218
gaff tape, laser cut cardboard, spray paint, play doh, markers
24' x 24' x 12”
Project partner: Baltimore Museum of Art

Visioning Home was a day-long workshop at the Baltimore Museum of Art that invited participants to challenge the entrenched narratives about Baltimore neighborhoods and envision possible futures. As part of the Imagining Home exhibit series, forty residents from across the city gathered for this meaningful day to learn about civically engaged art, find inspiration in the museum’s collection, and take part in a series of facilitated conversations and artmaking activities designed to spark creative thinking about changes and opportunities in Baltimore. El Paso artist and city councilperson Peter Svarzbein presented on how his fictitious advertising campaign to revive a defunct trolley raised $97 million in funding to re-establish strong cultural and economic bonds between El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico communities. Group discussions were captured throughout the day by visualizations drawn onto the studio's walls by graphic recorder Lucinda Levine. The day of engagement culminated in an interactive mapping installation and activity created and led by public artist Graham Coreil-Allen. Participants used laser cut cardboard signs to write and illustrate their neighborhood assets, challenges, and new ideas. They placed these signs on corresponding locations within an immersive, 22’ x 24’ floor map made of brightly colored tape. Residents highlighted and sensitively discussed a range of issues such as the school-to-prison pipeline, food deserts, and industrial pollution; and proposed new ideas such as job-creating urban farms, universal tuition, and completing Baltimore’s mass transit rail network.

FutureSite Mapping Baltimore at the The Necessity of Tomorrow(s): Mark Bradford—Making a Path
Saturday, November 11, 2017, 12pm-3:30pm
Presented by the Baltimore Museum of Art at Union Baptist Church, Baltimore, MD
Partners: The Baltimore Museum of Art, Union Baptist Church

How do you make a path to power where none exists? How do you assess a community's needs and create access for a community to self-determine?

Presented by the Baltimore Museum of Art at Union Baptist Church, FutureSite Baltimore invited participants to challenge the entrenched narratives about our city and envision possible futures by sharing their neighborhood assets, concerns, and ideas. This interactive mapping activity was presented as part of the The Necessity of Tomorrow(s) lecture series featuring luminary artist Mark Bradford in conversation with BMA Director Christopher Bedford. Bradford’s talk explored how the artist grapples with “making a path,” and other key questions in his artistic practice and community-based work. Afterwards, attendees were invited to contribute to the FutureSite Baltimore map by writing on laser cut signs and creating play doh sculptures representing their inspired visions for the future of Baltimore City. Contributions to the map were collected by the museum to inform forthcoming programming.

Pop-Up crosswalks and pedestrian playscapes invite participants to retake our streets for safety and interaction.

Denver’s Five Points neighborhood is a hotbed of creativity and construction taking place among powerful sites of heritage. Led by Graham Coreil-Allen, the New Public Sites – Five Points walking tours and immersive map installation showed how regular people have helped shape the history, design and current uses of public spaces around Five Points. Taking place within and around RedLine‘s 48 Hours of Socially Engaged Art and Conversation, the New Public Sites – Five Points Denver provided a range of opportunities for learning about and activating the power of public space within a truly beautiful, challenging and inspirational neighborhood.

The New Public Sites tours were free and open to the public as part of RedLine’s 48 Hours of Socially Engaged Art and Conversation summit. The first tour took place on Wednesday, August 10 from 11am-12:30pm, and focused on sites of heritage and change around Welton Street. Stops will included Lawson Park, Cousins Plaza, speculative/construction sites, and the Five Points intersection itself. The second tour took place on Thursday, August 11 from 6-7:30pm, and investigated the positive and negative impacts of urban planning and development around the RiNo arts district. Sites will include Broadway’s triangular spaces, Sustainability Park, and The Temple.

During the tours, Coreil-Allen recited poetic terms and definitions identifying specific types of public sites and experiences unique to Five Points. Along the way, he also invited neighborhood experts, such as residents, workers and other stakeholders, to help identify, interpret, and activate their own public spaces. Guest speakers included Centro Humanitario organizers Nancy Rosas and Judith Marquez, Blair-Caldwell Librarian Terry Nelson, long-term resident and RTD Title-VI Specialist Shontel Lewis, Five Points Fermentation owner Asia Dorsey, and The Temple Director Adam Gordon. The project was also informed by a range of interviewees included Tyrone Beverly, Beverly Grant, Lyz Riley, PJ DAmico, George Perez, Hadiya Evans, Julie Rubsam, Nikki Pike, and Celia Herrera. The tours culminated with participants contributing found objects to an immersive map and photography installation at RedLine.

New Public Sites - Five Points Denver
Redline Contemporary Art Center
Denver, CO
August 10 & 11, 2016

SiteLines was a multimedia collection of online videos, experimental walking tours and an immersive art installation presented by ICA Baltimore at Current Space, featuring banners, photography, typography and cartography derived from nearby invisible public spaces.

Sitelines is a translation of New Public Sites walking tours into video web series capturing the artist and walking tour participants as they playfully explore public space while he shares the sites’ histories, design, and uses. The ongoing New Public Sites project interprets the overlooked and invisible sites within cities, investigates the negotiable nature of public space, and pushes the boundaries of pedestrian agency. Filming for the first season of SiteLines began in September 2014 with four tours: Crossing the Highway to Nowhere, Reservoir Chill, Old Town Walking Revival and Power Plant Alive! These collections of new public sites are connected by suburban style development in an urban context, including freeways and pedestrian malls. Videos from these walks will be incorporated into a larger installation of banners, photography, typography, found object sculptures and a gallery-size map at Baltimore’s Current Space, opening on April 24. During the course of the three week exhibition, Coreil-Allen will also lead three walking tours in collaboration with additional artists working in the surrounding Bromo Tower Arts & Entertainment District. All tours are free and open to the public.

New Public Sites – SiteLines
August 2014 – May 2015
Various locations
ICA Baltimore at Current Space
421 North Howard Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

Baltimore, MD

New Public Sites - The Ragged Edge of Rockville
http://grahamprojects.com/projects/the-ragged-edge-of-rockville/
Suggested starting point is VisArts:
155 Gibbs Street, Rockville, MD 20850
New Public Sites – The Ragged Edge of Rockville was originally presented September 2 – October 18, 2015 as part of Come Back to Rockville!, a two-person, participatory art project with Naoko Wowsugi, curated by Laura Roulet and sponsored by VisArts.

New Public Sites – The Ragged Edge of Rockville explores the invisible sites, contradictory features and historical spirits embedded in downtown Rockville. Radical walking tours and a VisArts gallery installation of banners, videos and maps stitch together an array of new and old buildings, urban and suburban places, and psychically-charged, poetic sites. As the historic seat of Montgomery County turned booming DC suburb, Rockville stands as an example par excellence of Sub/Urban Ambiguity: “Cities and suburbs posing as enigmas of one another.” The title of the project is inspired by a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in which the narrator reflects on how his former home in the “Middle West seems like the ragged edge of the universe now”. Tour activities include making paper rubbings and collecting Shards of Site while engaging memorials of literary tribute and contested Civil War histories. Along the way, participants will explore newly created public spaces aspiring to urban authenticity while beholding suburban voids overturning in speculative wait.

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New Public Sites - McDaniel / Westminster
http://grahamprojects.com/projects/nps-mcdanielwestminster/
November 5 – December 18, 2015
Presented in conjunction with
Alternative Cartographies
Curated by Izabel Galliera
Rice Gallery, Peterson Hall,
McDaniel College

Explore the invisible sites, commanding vistas, and meaningful connections between McDaniel College and Union Street in Westminster, Maryland through New Public Sites – McDaniel / Westminster. Developed in collaboration with students and residents, this walking tour and multimedia gallery installation investigated the overlooked yet meaningful public spaces between an idyllic hilltop and historic neighboring streets. Featuring sites such as the Epic Embankment, VistaBowl, Sidewalk Signatures, and Boys & Girls Club, New Public Sites – McDaniel / Westminster discovered how pedestrians activate intriguing moments between learning and living. Complimentary art maps were available in the gallery.
New Public Sites – McDaniel / Westminster was presented in conjunction with Alternative Cartographies: Artists Claiming Public Space, curated by Izabel Galliera in the Rice Gallery at McDaniel College. Galliera states: “This exhibition brings together six contemporary international artists, Matei Bejenaru, Graham Coreil-Allen, Jason Hoylman, Daniela Kostova, Olivia Robinson, and Miryana Todorova, who are concerned with the subversive potential of cartography. Working in diverse artistic media, including performance art, drawing, video art and installation, the artists seek to convey cartography as an instrument of empowerment.”

Maps, Prints, and sign-paintings representing invisible places. New Public Sites maps feature aerial photography, color coded graphics, Shards of Site and terms and definitions all reinterpreting the invisible sites and overlooked features of our everyday urban environments. They are an attempt to both located the invisible and get you critically lost. Each map was made freely available for radical walking tours in Baltimore City and beyond.

The New Public Sites project explores the history, design and uses of overlooked public spaces within cities and suburbs. New Public Sites consist of everyday public spaces existing in one or more of three states: rendered mute by their physical and discursive emptiness, ambiguous due to contextual contradictions of urban design, and/or invisible from a lack of formal architectural framing and practical readability. NPS walking tours, maps and videos push pedestrian agency, interpret aspects of the everyday and investigate the negotiable nature of the built environment. New Public Sites invites you to practice “radical pedestrianism” - traveling by foot through infinite sites of freedom while testing the limits of and redefining public space.