BmoreArt

My two favorite public artworks might just be considered verboten by the standards of Trump’s America yet somehow skirted the censors forty years ago: Romare Bearden’s Baltimore Uproar mosaic, unveiled in a metro station for the largely-demolished Upton neighborhood in 1982, and Scott Burton’s gesamtkunstwerk Pearlstone Park, inaugurated in 1985.

Most readers have probably passed through Pearlstone Park—a tidy, oddly-shaped, narrow slice of public space—on their way to the Symphony, MICA, or the light rail. It’s likely that they never considered it’s an artwork—let alone one that’s probably about anonymous gay sex by an artist just now experiencing overdue art historical attention.

Comprising a colonnade of lamp posts and chunky concrete benches arranged in a crescent that reflects the curved facade of the Meyerhoff Symphony and hugs the steep hillside leading down to the MICA Station Building’s parking lot, Pearlstone Park looks innocent enough. It’s a seemingly inoffensive bit of transitional postmodern landscape architecture that physically and aesthetically forms a satisfying link between the brutalist concert hall and the Romanesque former train station across Preston Street.

Indeed, it was Joseph Meyerhoff’s grandson, Richard Pearlstone, who commissioned the park shortly after the symphony named for his grandfather opened in 1982 to resolve the irregular block sandwiched between the hillside, train tracks, institutional buildings, and awkward intersections. But Burton was no ordinary landscape designer. The conceptual artist (and art critic) had cut his teeth in Provincetown and New York’s queer scenes in the preceding, promiscuous decade through performances informed by sexual encounters and functional sculptures that could be described as kinky furniture. Pearlstone Park represented his first major site-specific public piece at this scale.

Walking its path or sitting on its benches, I have long held the suspicion that Burton had choreographed sightlines and seating to evoke the sensations familiar to many gay men in sparsely-populated semi-public spaces—say, someone deliberately sitting across from you in a mostly-empty subway car late at night, gym locker room, or sauna—eye contact that lingers just a bit too long, the sensation of being watched, of being cruised.

I reached out to David J. Getsy, author of Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (2022), and Art History professor at University of Virginia for a second opinion. “Oh totally,” Getsy confirmed, “Burton wasn’t just practicing cruising, he also studied it, reading books on body language and proximity and nonverbal communication… he was thinking deeply about how bodily cues affect established power relations and inform communication.”

“There are sculptures of chairs that function as the thing that they represent, but they have a kind of duplicity or dissemblance in them, depending on how you’re looking at it,” he explains. “Nobody really needs to be told how to use a chair or a bench or a table—or even something that looks vaguely like a chair or bench—they just use it… But it definitely puts people into positions.”

Getsy points out, for example, that the single seats on the cross-shaped benches originally faced a row of bushes, so that anyone visiting the park alone was gazing into the site where anonymous sex was most likely to take place. Sadly, those bushes were removed in a 2008 renovation of the park, altering Burton’s original vision. But Pearlstone remains one of the most important and best-preserved examples of the artist’s early landscape work.

Tragically, when Burton was dying of AIDS-related complications in 1989, he entrusted his estate to MoMA, who didn’t quite know what to do with his hard-to-classify (and market) legacy. About half of Burton’s site-specific installations in New York have either already been dismantled or face demolition now that new owners, officials, or architects have inherited built environments they didn’t know (or care) were artworks, and bulky marble postmodernism has fallen out of fashion for atriums, plazas, and lobbies.

Conversely, Romare Bearden (1911-1988) was already a celebrated household name by the time he triumphantly returned to Baltimore for his MTA commission (the artist had a brief stint in the 1930s as a cartoonist for the Afro American Newspaper, whose former Charles Street building now houses BmoreArt’s offices and exhibition space). For better or worse, America’s chronically underfunded subways are probably the sites least likely to suffer overzealous renovations.

Baltimore’s sole Metro line was originally envisioned as one of six, looping around and radiating out from Downtown. But when America’s “Great Society” ambitions derailed as the nation’s politics switched rightward throughout the 1970s and 80s, we inherited just the one 15.4 mi spoke, which opened in 1983. The upside: the city’s subterranean stations–some ambitiously-scaled as transfer points to lines that were never built–are veritable time capsules of late modernist architecture. They’ve been spared the wrecking ball that befell so much brutalism above-ground, where the iconoclastic whims of the post-Reagan ruling class villainized the style as an embarrassing reminder of unfulfilled utopian promises.

The city’s stunted subway arguably contains some of the finest examples north of the Río Grande of what the rest of the continent’s art historians refer to as Integración Plástica—the incorporation of sculptures, mosaics, stained glass, or other decorative arts into otherwise functionalist infrastructure. And in one of our most-overlooked underground Cathedrals of Concrete—Upton–Avenue Market station, just one stop north of the State Center station near Pearlston Park—we are blessed with the Sistine Chapel ceiling of modern African American art: Romare Bearden’s exquisite Baltimore Uproar.

The Paris-educated Bearden was one of the few Black American visual artists of the 20th century to find canonical success during his lifetime—sampling European, Mexican, African, and Asian influences in his paintings, and later, famously, innovative collages. Lesser known are Bearden’s roughly 20 surviving public artworks from the last two decades of his life, when he combined his longstanding interest in Latin America’s vibrant mural culture, his signature proto-punk cut-up style, and day job as a social worker.

But Baltimore Uproar dwarfs the precious few Bearden murals still adorning the lobbies of modest healthcare or education buildings. The mosaic depicts Baltimore’s scandal-prone icon Billie Holiday and cadre of segregation-defying jazz musicians in decadent Venetian glass and ceramic tile. Holiday shimmers over the under-1000 daily passengers who still use the oft-forgotten station, mere blocks from the site of the legendary Royal Theater (demolished for “urban renewal” in 1971, along with much of the neighborhood) where she famously performed.

The 14’x46’ mosaic was made in sections in Italy, then shipped to the site in a marvel of art-handling logistics. Italian-American relatives of the artisans who fabricated the piece overseas were even on hand to oversee its installation and finishes. I know the Right Wing loves to kvetch about public spending on transit and art, but even by “fiscally conservative” metrics this investment was a good one. This complicated, enormous chef-d’œuvre from an art star—crafted from artisanal, imported materials—cost taxpayers just $114,000 in 1982. In 2021, one of Bearden’s paper collages on cheap cardboard (a mere fraction of the size, and not nearly as handsome) sold at auction for over $1 million.

Today, as Trump’s administration threatens to purge institutional budgets and narratives around Black history from the nation’s cultural patrimony, our Bearden feels like a secret treasure we need to cherish, deep in our concrete Culture War survival bunker. Thankfully, I don’t think many Republicans know how to use public transportation. And I suspect most fascists wouldn’t admit that they “get” the sly public sex references in Burton’s work. Politics aside, these two artworks are timeless examples of what keeps Baltimore so compellingly resilient: our strange, overlooked “leftover” spaces and the ability for artists to imbue them with magic.