By Isabella Mooney
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
Reed Bmore watched from outside the window of his old studio in Baltimore’s Station North when a city worker in a bucket crane fiddled with the first wire sculpture he ever installed—two kids holding a flower. He smiled to himself; it wasn’t easy to take down.
His sculptures, all illegal street art, soon became some of the most iconic fixtures in the city.
Baltimore is full of street art, from the gigantic murals sponsored by the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts, to the endless illegal graffiti lining abandoned buildings throughout the city. While someare fighting to get these works removed, many residents consider street art essential to Baltimore’s rich artistic culture.
Two Baltimore residents are known well for their contributions to this culture, both illegally and legally. They are Gaia and Reed Bmore.
“I love street art,” Bmore said, “because I love doing illegal sh** with my friends.”
Bmore is responsible for the wire sculptures that can often be found hanging above streetlights. More than 200 are still hanging, he said, though he’s hung many more city workers have removed.
“I jump and throw them,” Bmore said. He creates a mechanism using a carabiner that snaps into place when he tosses the sculptures at the correct angle. There is no taking them down once they are up unless you climb up and unclip them from the wire.
Bmore does this for more than just fun. Doing things illegally is also a good way to get exposure.
“F*** galleries,” he said. “I never wanted to work in galleries.”
Gallery work can sometimes be more costly than doing street art, since some galleries require artists to fund an event or pay commissions on sold work—all of which renders these spaces inaccessible to people with low or irregular incomes.
“Street art is better for reaching the masses,” he said.
Gaia also avoids galleries. But while Bmore does his art for fun, Gaia treats his art as activism, or “a kind of surrealist approach to history,” he said.
One of the projects he’s proudest of is a mural that features a Black panther and a Korean tiger. The mural sits on the side of Ms. Grace’s corner store, which was torched during the Freddie Gray uprising.
“Through the composition, I want to tell some sort of narrative that isn’t often told,” he said. “I want to promote narratives that aren’t mainstream.”
While most of his large-scale murals are now funded by BOPA, he began by exhibiting his work illegally and has been arrested for in New York City and New Jersey. The risk is is worth it, though. He said he feels the social dialogue around his street art is essential to the community it’s installed in.
“I want my work to be as relevant as possible,” he said.
In the conversation surrounding street art, some art teachers say they feel torn. On the one hand, it’s illegal and defaces public and private property. But on the other, these works express ideas often shut out of the mainstream, and what better way to call attention than on the side of a building?
“For me, the issue is: are they good work?’” said Anastasia Arnold, director of the Community Art Center and adjunct of art education and museum studies at Towson University.
Arnold studied studio arts at Baltimore’s Maryland Institute College of Art, so she is no stranger to the city’s street art culture. And she has conflicting feelings about it.
“I think artwork as activism is really powerful,” she said. But, as a teacher, she doesn’t want to encourage people to do artwork illegally.
One of the things that she particularly doesn’t like to encourage is graffiti. Street art, such as murals or sculptures, usually have more significance behind them. They are also more aesthetically pleasing. But tagging private property veers too close simple vandalism.
However, she said that street art is meaningful to the culture of the communities, and it’s often more accessible than works in museums and galleries. Works like that, she said, are essential to Baltimore.
“Art, from my standpoint, is the language of culture,” she said.