If you went to Artscape last fall, you may have seen, somewhere along the Charles Street corridor, Saba Hamidi’s vibrant vinyl-wrapped electrical boxes featuring colorful squiggles, swirls, and smiles, among other playful shapes and symbols. Or maybe you’ve seen her lightly shaded mural inside Mount Vernon’s Mera Kitchen Collective, combining the delicate outline of a tree with polygon patterns inspired by the textiles and artifacts of the countries whose cuisine the restaurant serves.
Or perhaps her “Growth is evolution is progress” mural at Lexington Market is the one that caught your eye; those words arranged over a sprouting sapling and large rainbow-colored leaves in a mimetic circle so that you can begin the sentence anywhere.
Hamidi, founder of the visual storytelling studio MadeBySaba, painted this mural with the fellow co-founders of Brush Mural Fest, a mural festival that seeks to open doors for up-and-coming muralists in Baltimore. Brush Mural Fest will officially become an annual tradition—that is, return for a second year—in September.
But before then, by mid-July, if all goes as planned, there should be another one of Hamidi’s creations to behold. It will be one of the longest artworks in the city: a 500-foot mural along both walls of the Maryland Avenue bridge between Lanvale and Oliver Streets midtown.
The mural is a key element of the Midtown Community Benefits District’s Falls Gateway Master Plan, which aims to reimagine (and even realign) the Jones Falls Trail through art, public space improvements, and other upgrades to the nearby alleys, streets, and underpasses. The location is notorious for graffiti, but Hamidi and her team—she is hiring at least four other muralists to assist her—will figure out how to deal with any issues that arise.
Spanning the Jones Falls Expressway, the Maryland Avenue Bridge was built in the mid-1890s by the Pennsylvania Steel Company to carry electric street railroad cars. Right now, Hamidi sees the vehicular bridge as a blank canvas. Soon, it should be, at the very least, an Instagrammable moment. “There’s no real reason, if you’re a pedestrian, to look up from your phone and look at your surroundings,” she says. “I want to create a beautiful, exciting, colorful, playful space that draws people in, together.”