BmoreArt

Soon after descending the steps from either Lexington or Eutaw Streets, turning the corner, and approaching the escalator, it’s impossible not to glance down, and even before seeing the platform itself or whether a train is coming or going, to encounter a series of colorful tilework patterns mounted on the eight large horizontal beams connected to the two outer subway tracks. The patterns on the beams, which are installed at regular intervals about ten feet below the tops of the escalators at each end of the station and fifteen feet above the platform, seem both to fix and to move the gaze simultaneously. The squareness of the repeated tiles in and of itself is restive, while the artist’s arrangement of the tiles in various shapes—meandering and labyrinth-like, pointed and arrow-like—solicit anything but stand-still viewing. In fact, every time I stand at the top of one of the escalators, looking down, the overly imaginative part of my brain wants to follow the pull of the labyrinthine and pointy shapes and push off, embarking on a magical flight above the beams, doing a few loopity loops along the way, enroute to the other escalator and back again, peering down and taking in all eight mural-like stretches of tile in sequence (actually sixteen, since each side of each beam bears a different geometric tile design). Pshaw, immersive art experiences! I want an anti-gravity experience of “Geometro” as an aerial-view flipbook!

Back to earth—more specifically, back to the top of the escalator, where, having already looked down at the colorful beams, the first natural impulse is to look down even more specifically at the moving staircase to gauge which step to choose that’ll allow adequate space in front and behind your landing foot for safety’s sake. The second impulse is to raise your eyes. In doing so, within seconds, looking directly at the beams, one beam slowly disappears behind the one in front of it until you get a straight-on view of the closest for a nanosecond before the tops of the other beams come back into view. In his 2015 Baltimore Sun piece about “Geometro,” critic Michael Anthony Farley (now Contributing Editor of BmoreArt) rightly described this physical descent and visual phenomenon as the moment when “the beams overlap and almost form a singular composition.” And earlier, in 1983, John Dorsey had observed in the Baltimore Sun Magazine how the mosaic’s “parts move together and then apart as you walk past or ride up and down the escalator, creating new combinations of pattern and color.” Third, stepping off the escalator, the urge is to look up and, if your train hasn’t arrived, look all the way up, to contemplate each beam in turn, front and back, maybe even while walking the platform from one end to the other. 

Farley also nailed a lovely moniker for Alexander’s contribution to public art along the Metro line, calling it “Baltimore’s little ‘Alhambra under Eutaw Street.’” Alexander told me in much-appreciated interviews as I was writing this column that she indeed drew on the panoply of tile patterns that historic monuments, like the 13th-century Alhambra, have to offer, as well as examples of tilework she’d seen while traveling in North and West Africa in the 1970s. And to today’s viewer, other sources pop up. For Farley, the work “calls to mind everything from Babylonian temples, Navajo weaving, Mexico City’s idiosyncratic mid-century modernism (the backdrop for the first ‘Total Recall’ Film), and the saccharine animated GIF art popularized in the mid ‘00s.” 

Another point of agreement between Farley’s observations and Alexander’s intent for “Geometro” has to do with what he called “the kinetic energy of the [M]etro” and the way that energy “animates the panels,” an energy that insists the “artwork … be experienced in motion.” Alexander agrees, but she might have done a very different piece originally. After receiving the commission for “Geometro” in 1981 from the Maryland Transportation Administration (MTA) through Baltimore’s Percent for Art Program, she visited the site where the Metro would be built. The walls and beams were in place, but otherwise, the site was a giant hole in the earth. At the time, she was considering creating a work for one of the walls, the location that the MTA assumed she’d use. For a subsequent visit, she invited Norman Carlberg (see “The Public Art Chronicles Vol III” in BmoreArt on Carlberg’s work), her colleague at Maryland Institute College of Art, where they both taught. A lightbulb came on for Alexander when Carlberg remarked: “This space is so dynamic, too bad you’re not using the beams.” The word “dynamic” was the spark. She then knew the work needed to be patterns of tilework along the horizontal beams, the kind of patterns informed by many of the sources mentioned above. The MTA was amenable. “There’s something about the brain and the way it works,” she shared with me in conversation, that makes it entirely logical that “human mark-making” would take the form of vibrant, active designs. Alexander’s chosen designs—which she drew and colored in detail on gridded paper before starting to work with professional tile setters from Philadelphia (the “old school” kind who had studied how to assess blueprints and art-architectural interactions)—seem both to imply and to direct movement. And movement is part and parcel of being alive. “People are integral to the piece,” she continued, “it would be totally different if people weren’t moving.” And so they are: To and from the station, down the escalator, along the platform, and onto the subway, where they merge with its “kinetic energy.” 

The piece that Alexander credits with attracting the attention of the selection panelists for the MTA project bore similar patterns but was painted on canvas and hung in 1981 on the wall and over the entrance to a lecture hall at the University of Maryland Medical Center. A quick look at a photograph of the “half-pediment,” as Alexander refers to it, makes it look like actual tile, appearing behind a grid of cylindrical shapes resembling pipes. But it was a painting, almost a trompe l’oeil painting, comprising three separate but connected canvases. Titled “Hippocratic Grid,” it’s easy to surmise that medical students would be populating the hall for classes that would ultimately lead to their taking the Hippocratic Oath. The choice of shape and placement of the tripartite canvas—a long, almost triangular shape, with the smaller tip at the end where people would congregate before entering the lecture hall and the longer, expanded end just past the door to the hall—suggests a directional and conceptual cue: Move along from your place of minimal current knowledge into the hall where that knowledge will be expanded, just as the triangle expands from its smaller to longer end.

“Hippocratic Grid” was Alexander’s first public art commission, acquired through the Baltimore Mural Program, which began in 1975, during the robust years of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), a federal program lasting from 1974 to 1981 that provided jobs for visual and performing artists across the country, modeled after the famous Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s. According to arts administrator, writer, and social activist Arlene Goldbard, “There is scarcely a U.S. community artist who was around in the mid-1970s who did not either hold a CETA job or work directly with someone who did.” Pat Alexander is one of those CETA-employed artists, as was artist Kevin Labadie, whom she met on the job and later married.

Sadly, “Hippocratic Grid” was taken off the wall during a renovation of the building a few years ago and was never remounted. After many attempts on Alexander’s part to locate the piece, with assistance from a helpful staff member, the story ends like way too many stories of public art pieces in Baltimore (and most everywhere) end: The piece has disappeared. Such is the case, though with more public intervention and controversy at the time of threatened disappearance (or, more officially, “deaccession”), with her wondrous work titled “Oasis,” 1989. A field of tilework from an aquatic blue-green and summery yellow-pink palette was installed on the steps leading into and along the bottom of the Druid Hill Park Swimming Pool, well known as the pool that wasn’t desegregated until 1956, as was the nearby Druid Hill Park Pool #2, which had been for Black residents. The latter was closed in 1957 and didn’t reopen until 1999 following Joyce Scott’s phenomenal remaking of it into “Memorial Pool” (see my column next month for a detailed look at this public artwork).

Some of you readers may have been lucky enough to have been able to look down at Alexander’s patterned stretch of tiles that formed “Oasis” and to witness its ever-changing shimmer of shapes, the shimmer caused by your own movements and those of other swimmers, or merely by the wind. And in this case, pushing off from the top step would have been safe, unlike my overly imaginative flight across the Lexington Market Metro stop’s “Geometro” beams. At the pool, to push off and float above the tiled “oasis” would offer a delightfully cloudy view of the tilework (if chancing chlorine-itchy eyes) or a crystal-clear view (if wearing goggles). 

That all ended in 2020, after the Department of Parks and Recreation asked the Baltimore Public Art Commission (BPAC) in 2017 to deaccession Alexander’s wondrous piece. Why? Apparently, some of the tiles had begun to crack, causing injuries to swimmers’ feet. Debate ensued in the form of letter-writing and public discussion. The chair of BPAC at the time, Elford Jackson, “was quoted as saying to the artist: “Judging by the letters I received, your fans didn’t want to have it [“Oasis”] removed.” Articles in both the Baltimore Brew and Baltimore Fishbowl that covered the controversy, mentioned that over time, the tiles had lost grout, shifted, cracked in the sun, and the breakage had been exacerbated by skateboarders sneaking in after the summer season had ended to use the pool as a skateboard park. What I find strange about these accounts is that nobody seemed to question what would seem to me to be standard practices for Parks and Rec in the off-season: regrout the tiles and cover the pool! But what makes sense to us as mere taxpayers sometimes befuddles certain city administrators, I guess (SMH). Alexander and her fans did not win. Parks and Rec eliminated the artwork during the renovation of the pool, which opened last summer on newly designed grounds. Even efforts on Alexander’s part, along with Ryan Patterson, then Public Art Program Manager at Baltimore Office of Promotion in the Arts, to include new artwork after “Oasis” was eliminated (showing there are “good” city administrators, too) were stifled. 

The last two stories are deeply sad for those of us who cherish the rich—and enriching, even if sometimes debatable—contributions that public art makes to inhabited spaces in Baltimore and the world. But these stories can serve a double purpose. One, they’re a reminder of the importance of staying attuned to opportunities to voice our opinions on public art. Two, they can make us grateful that we still have a major tilework by Pat Alexander, right here in Baltimore. And on that note, two final advisories:

One to the MTA: How about more regular maintenance and better lighting of “Geometro” (and all Metro stop artworks)? The impossible-to-color-correct images that accompany this column are proof that this request is on point (I’ll be in touch with you MTA folks, by the way).

Two to all other readers: We public transportation users are often in a hurry. Rushing to make it through the closing doors of the about-to-take-off Metro train at the Lexington Market stop, or feeling the necessity to catch up on texts and emails on our phones, it could be easy to miss a full-fledged experience of Alexander’s “Geometro.” But public transportation users are more often than not repeat users. So if you’re a frequent Metro traveler and use the Lexington Market entrance or exit, or you’re a regular shopper at the Market itself, or you’re just game for a visual adventure: For just the cost of a Metro pass ($1 seniors/people with disabilities, $1.50 students, or $2 full fare) to get through the gate, I strongly suggest riding that escalator with focused attention and intention. In other words:

Look down. Look straight ahead. Look up. 

Lookout Alert

This now-regular postscript feature, which began with my last column, couldn’t have ended up being more apt. The title was happenstance, since I’d picked the title “Lookout Alert” before starting to write about Pat Alexander’s look-in-non-traditional-directions work. But given the opening and closing lines of my column this month, the pick for this Lookout Alert seemed entirely logical—the public art surprises of Reed Bmore, whose wire sculptures hang here and there throughout Baltimore, dangling from traffic lights, from cables stretching across a street, or from the end of a strut holding a surveillance camera (that’s one of my favorite ones and is the artist’s current Facebook page cover photo)—inasmuch as all of these pieces prompt viewers to LOOK UP. 

Reed Bmore has gotten considerable attention, and I’m scattering a few links in the sentences ahead, where you can check out his work, including the Baltimore Magazine piece that dubbed him “The Banksy of Baltimore,” allowing him his anonymity, which got rubbed out when another, less-allegiant city praised a piece mounted there but also outed him (c’mon Philadelphia, really?!) Before long, the artist, seemingly unfazed by the latter, announced his birth name, Jon Struse, and the Baltimore Sun wrote about his and collaborator Nick Ireys’ work. While online reading and viewing can be fun (and prompt you to make connections between the artist’s pseudonym and one of Baltimore’s more questionable past taglines, “The City that Reads”), I encourage you to ratchet up your intentionality barometer when you’re next taking a stroll or stopping at a traffic light in Baltimore, and LOOK UP, just in case there’s one of Reed Bmore’s “little artistic winks,” as Aaron Henkin called them, right there above you, dancing in front of a blue, cloudy, or rainy backdrop, their appearance making you think of characters in children’s storybooks (hey, maybe we are The City that Reads, a concept that in one form or another is not far from Reed Bmore’s mind). You can also follow the artist on Instagram @reedbmoreart, where other wireworks, requiring other types of directional viewing, can be seen.