These are a few of my pieces from the exhibition Liberty Injustice at Connect Collect Gallery in Baltimore.

Quote from BMOREART :

Kim Rice and Paul Rucker are both prolific makers of labor-intensive, clever, immersive works of art that captivate and inform. Both repurpose unusual and historic materials with an ability to harvest the hidden stories that animate these objects and challenge common assumptions about our collective history as Americans. Beyond this, both artists are fearlessly, passionately socially engaged and their work is informed by the history of injustice in America. Research is primary to their process and historical documents, events, and statistical data is interpreted in surprising ways through new translations of familiar forms and materiality, which are surprisingly inviting–at least at first glance.

Seen together for the first time in Liberty and Injustice, their artworks offer an expansive conversation about race and gender, America’s evolving legal system, intersectionality, violence, coordinated systems of exclusion, and the ethics behind collective political thought. This conversation is complex and sensitive, uncomfortable at times, challenging and wholly necessary.

How do we talk about liberty and injustice honestly, intertwined with aspects of race and gender in America? What language can we use? What actions can we take to have transformative rather than symbolic change? And how do we effectively critique and educate one another with respect and authenticity? With genuine care and reverence, Rice and Rucker offer us an American conversation that addresses a subject that cannot be simplified.

[RE]Birth of a Nation and The Greatest City in America are a love letter to Baltimore.

For [RE]Birth of a Nation I hand cut and wove the Chapter Healing the Black Butterfly of Lawrence Brown’s book The Black Butterfly into the Baltimore redlining map. In the chapter Brown proposes a way to disperse funds into Baltimore to create true equity in the city.

For The Greatest City in America I bought books by Baltimore authors at Baltimore based bookstores and cut, folded, built, and painted 1,300 flowers.

Baltimore was the birthplace of redlining. The federal government looked at Baltimore’s segregation policies and then replicated it throughout the country with the Home Owners Loan Corporation. I love this city. I see the tenacity and creativity of the people here and believe If Baltimore was once a model of oppression it can become a model of equity. There are incredible change-makers and creatives in this city who are already doing the work. To the rest of us, it is a call for philanthropy and support.

The books and authors:

• The Black Butterfly by Lawrence T. Brown
• The Cook Up by D. Watkins
• Black Boy Smile by D. Watkins
• The Beast Side by D. Watkins
• We Speak for Ourselves by D. Watkins
• Raw Wounds by Kondwani Fidel
• Hummingbirds in the Trenches by Kondwani Fidel
• The Anti-Racist by Kondwani Fidel
• I Got a Monster by Baynard Woods & Brandon Soderberg
• Inheritance by Baynard Woods
• The Master Plan by Chris Wilson
• Baltimore Revisited by King, Drabinksi, Davis
• Not in My Neighborhood by Antero Pietila
• The Ghost of John Hopkins by Antero Pietila
• If You Love Baltimore it will Love you Back by Ron Cassie
• 5 Days by Wes Moore & Erica L. Green
• The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore
• We Were Eight Years in Power by TaNehisi Coates
• The Water Dance by TaNehisi Coates
• Between the World and Me by TaNehisi Coates
• The Beautiful Struggle by Ta Nehisi Coates
• Baltimore Civil Rights Leader by Victorine Q. Adams & Ida Jones
• Baltimore Monuments by Thomas Cotter
• The Line Between US by Lawrence Lanahan
• All the Pieces Matter by Jonathan Abrams
• We Own This City by Justin Fenton
• The Glass Eye by Jeannie Vanasco
• Kings of B’More by R. Eric Thomas
• Things We Didn’t Talk About When I was a Girl by Jeannie Vanasco
• Miss Chloe by A. J. Verdelle
• Lost Restaurants of Baltimore by Suzanne Loudermilk & Kitwaskom Pollard
• Loner Forensics by Thea Brown
• The Portero Complex by Amy L. Bernstein
• Baltimore A Political History by Matthew Crenson

Using roofing paper and New Orleans HOLC (Redlining) maps, I hand cut and wove 7 to 14 panels creating the image of the Mississippi as it curves around New Orleans. The panels are two-sided and can be installed several ways. This piece connects the cartography of New Orleans to redlining and the repercussions of that during Katrina.