BmoreArt

If you know where to look, you can observe the span of their career throughout Baltimore, from early street art festivals like Open Walls Baltimore, curated by Gaia in 2012 and 2014, to Union Craft Brewery’s courtyard, to the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation building where BmoreArt’s offices are located. Some of their pieces have been around long enough that they are beginning to fade as newer murals by other artists continue to fill the surrounding surfaces, becoming a tapestry woven into the very weft of Baltimore’s urban fabric.

At Kaiser Permanente health facilities in Timonium, a giant mural greets you on the approach from both the parking garage and the light rail, the sidewalk interrupted with pops of color in squares and circles like a modernist hopscotch game. Sitting on a bench, facing the corner of the building where the mural is anchored, intense aquamarines and pinkish reds radiate out in all directions, dominating your visual field.

The colors and curves interrupt the angular, modernist benches that dot the sitting area in what would otherwise be a monochromatic gray field. From the walls, the undulating curves of warm and cool spill onto the ground like rays of sunshine, conspicuously devoid of yellows and oranges, but in every other color of the rainbow, a playground for your eyes. At times the lines follow those that already exist in the concrete, drawing attention to a manhole cover by surrounding it in ever-widening circles of various blue hues.

“We are very influenced by the architectural elements of a space. When our designs respond to a window or a corner it is clear that the painting was made for that environment and could not exist anywhere else. We want it to feel cohesive and not like it was dropped on top,” says Katey, who describes their site-specific designs like a puzzle, with precise mathematical calculations to maximize balance and composition based on measurements of each location.

Conceptualized by hand, and often using paper and pencil, the artists’ designs are based on measurements of the location and finalized using an aesthetic language with its own set of unspoken rules that they’ve honed over the years. Since they don’t use projections once they’re at the site to complete the painting, the math has to be exact; even a six-inch difference can have a huge effect on the final execution of the design.

Some of their most successful murals are designs created onsite. “Being in the space before we start to paint is super inspiring. We get to see how people will experience the work and this informs our approach more than anything else,” Katey says, explaining that the staircase painted in Boone, North Carolina in 2020 is still one of their favorite creations. “The world had slowed because of COVID, and we didn’t have a follow up project, so we extended our stay by a couple of weeks. The extra time enabled us to experiment with color in a way that we hadn’t before. We started mixing colors for the first time and began working with gradients.”

Their murals went from palettes of ten to fifteen colors to palettes of thirty to forty colors, which was a significant evolution because it brought more depth to the work, reigniting their excitement about color.

Jessie and Katey have been setting new goals for themselves and taking advantage of the opportunity when it comes along throughout their career. When they first decided to pursue muralling full-time, the duo would still take on odd jobs like working at farmer’s markets, babysitting, and even painting the ceiling of a gas station across the street from the H&H building where they lived, which had to be completed overnight.

Community projects like the PNC Transformative Art Prize, working with the Franklin Square community and CivicWorks on Sunflower Village in 2012, were integral to getting them started, but it was landing a package design commission from Starbucks in 2018 that finally allowed them to be full time artists. Since then, they’ve worked with Meow Wolf, Facebook, Figma, and most recently, Haagen-Dazs and in San Francisco, the OpenArt Biennial in Sweden, Miami’s Wynwood Walls, and in Hollywood, CA, and each project offers a new learning experience for the artists like their recent mural at The Works in Atlanta, which was their first time incorporating neon lights.

“Our website or Instagram shows the final project, but you don’t see the two years and hundreds of emails in between,” Jessie offers, acknowledging how much unique labor goes into every project. The two are currently working on a new mural in downtown Baltimore, on the Convention Center, creating a giant, color filled greeting to make a bold first impression.

The duo has never had a clear division of tasks and will respond to emails based on who is available at that moment, not exactly finishing each other’s sentences, but checking in with each other to confirm the dates and details of their shared career. They attribute part of their success to their partnership, saying, “There is so much to consider and manage when painting a mural. We’re constantly problem-solving and making decisions on the fly. I don’t think either one of us would be able to do this without the other.”

Their next big goal is to start using more permanent and sustainable materials. “We hope to get involved in projects at an earlier stage of development so that we can influence the architecture of the environment and not just the surface application,” Katey says.

“We would love to design seating and sculptures that pop out of our floor murals. We’re at the point where we’re excited to think in new and different ways about what it means to share public space,” Jessie adds. “Often, people think abstract art is unapproachable and not for them, but abstract art can be interpreted in any way the viewer chooses. We think it’s important to create transformative public work that asks the viewer to participate in the conversation rather than feeding them a narrative. We want our work to be really fun and celebratory.”