Kathy O'Dell
Kathy O'Dell is Associate Professor of Visual Arts Emerita, UMBC; on the team implementing the Catonsville Arts District Public Art Vision; and former Chair of the Maryland Public Art Commission. An art historian and critic, she is author of the book Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s and a founding editor of Link: A Critical Journal on the Arts in Baltimore and the World, published 1996-2005.
Stories by Kathy O'Dell
Creative production is good for us. Those of us engaged in the arts have intuitively known this fact for ages, but the scientific studies and resulting evidence synthesized in the book Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us drive the point home with hardcore data.
This month, Kathy O'Dell takes readers on a ride through, above, below, and behind Pat Alexander's beloved "Geometro" mosaic in the Lexington Market Metro station. Plus, the sad stories of two Alexander works that Baltimoreans can no longer enjoy.
Here, before us at the school, are stripped-down, geometricized versions of four individual caterpillars, poised at different moments in their movements—stretching upward toward the sky, looking ahead, or reaching toward the ground, as if scouting for fallen leaves on the brick foundation...
It takes a minute to wrench myself out of the cosmic nerve center of this 40-foot wide, 20-foot-tall mural, which Santos created in 2011, and move on to clues and cues that will help piece together the narratives that figurative murals promise to offer up... So, who are these women?