How universities impact a community’s creative ecosystem
Baltimore artists explore ways academia and art support one another — and how universities help propel art’s influence in society.
While academia is seen as foundational to innovations in science or tech, it also plays a role in facilitating art that sparks dialogue and discovery. Celebrating Johns Hopkins University’s yearslong devotion to the Baltimore art community, the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery’s latest exhibition, Strong, Bright, Useful & True: Recent Acquisitions and Contemporary Art from Baltimore, featured contemporary Baltimore artists shaping the national and global arts landscape, fostering a deeper connection between the academic and community spheres.
At the close of Strong, Bright, Useful & True at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center, four artists who helped produce the exhibition discussed the role universities play in supporting their artistic communities to advance common understanding and what it means to be an artist right now.
On how art can be useful, as implied by the exhibition title, Strong, Bright, Useful & True
“Art…doesn’t have to be visual art hanging on a gallery wall. It might be a book, it might be your clothing, it might be a meal, it might be a film. There are so many different ways to encounter creativity in our lives, but the art is the reason that we keep going.
I don’t think that anything is more useful or utilitarian than giving someone a reason for being. So the arts are not extra. The arts are not decoration. The arts are a direct connection to our souls, and it’s essential that we preserve that.”
– Cara Ober, founder and editor-in-chief of Bmore Art
“I really feel like [art] helps give completely different perspectives that most people would not see. It’s kind of refreshing to be able to have that experience—and good for everyone to have that type of experience—and not think that everything has to be so straightforward, monotonous, or viewed in a very specific way.”
– Baltimore artist Phaan Howng
On how research and discovery show up in the creative process
“That’s what really fuels the creativity. I feel like research really is what makes that work more valuable because it’s like a microchip embedded into the work.”
– Baltimore artist Phaan Howng
“I also think the role of a historian and the role of an artist, there’s a lot of overlap there. There are also distinctions. I like the latitude that artists have to create connection points between these different things, but we don’t have to footnote it.”
– Baltimore artist René Treviño
“If you have an idea, you need to do research — that’s fundamental. For me, it’s about how do we use the research, what are we doing with it, and who is it useful to?”
– Cara Ober, founder and editor-in-chief of Bmore Art
“Oral history — having conversations directly with people who were witnesses to events that maybe are now historical … that’s something that has really kind of come to the fore for me as a research practice that is well-suited to addressing gaps and erasures in history. To have conversations that are very relational, to record and document them, and to use institutional resources to be able to create a historical record through that direct kind of conversation.”
– Cecilia Wichmann, curator and department head of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art
On the role of university art collections in the creative ecosystem
“I think the generational perspective of a university and the interdisciplinary piece of it is really exciting and important. That you have a kind of mix of thinkers and stakeholders and people who are not necessarily imagining their own path to intersect with an art world.”
– Cecilia Wichmann, curator and department head of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art
On the value of Johns Hopkins art acquisitions
“All of the work that you see [in this exhibition] will be disbursed into different areas on [the Johns Hopkins] campus in Baltimore, in different buildings with different disciplines. So the idea that you might have a student or a faculty member think a little bit differently about their work because of their exposure to these works of art is really inspiring to me.”
– Caitlin Berry, director of the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center
“[With student-engaged collecting initiatives], there’s a piece of the puzzle that’s very much about creating this representation of your campus community, your student body, thinking about…how this artwork is going to speak across history and over time [and] why this can be meaningful to you.
To see Johns Hopkins getting involved in this way and prioritizing Baltimore is just absolutely immense, because it means that all of those faculty, staff, students — undergraduate and graduate — create this new relationship with artists in this city that actually is going to transmit across multiple generations in time.”
– Cecilia Wichmann, curator and department head of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art
On the relationship between Baltimore and D.C. art communities
“The more you look, the histories are really very intertwined. If we think cross-generationally again, there is so much that binds artistic communities and creative lineages between the two cities.
I hope Baltimore can offer an embrace to artists who are struggling in the economic precarity of D.C. and vice versa. That this kind of reciprocity and opportunity can be honed through really deep personal relationships that we can make a point of growing.”
– Cecilia Wichmann, curator and department head of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art