Just south of North Avenue, two murals face each other in a flash of primary color on Harford Road.

On the west corner, a three-story painting depicts a man reading a book, its pages inscribed with the words of an African proverb: “However far the stream flows, it never forgets it origin.” On the east, there is a block-long scene of city life: children riding bicycles, sitting on stoops, eating ice cream cones.

Despite their size and splendor, these artworks can be easy to miss amidst the zoom of traffic at this busy crossroads and the lurking shadow of the Eastern District Courthouse, especially since some of their yellows and blues have faded in the sun. But not for Deyane Moses who vividly remembers the first time she saw them.

“They were larger than life,” says the 38-year-old artist and archivist, who was visiting the area on a field trip to the nearby National Great Blacks in Wax Museum from her native Northern Virginia in the 1990s. “I remember stretching my neck way up, like, ‘Wow!’ I had never seen a mural that big before, much less of a Black person.”

Little did she know then that, decades later, the muralist would become a pivotal part of her own artistic practice.

In February, Moses launches the annual Tom Miller Week in honor of the late artist, beloved not only for his magical murals, sprinkled from Oliver to Cherry Hill, but also his playful and poignant screenprints and painted furniture. Inspired by masters like Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, his distinctive Afro-Deco style speaks to the Black experience, at times through satirical societal critique or somber personal reflection, at others through an all-out celebration of only-in-Baltimore joy.

Born in 1945, Tom Miller grew up in Sandtown-Winchester—a “whimsical” child, his mother once told The Baltimore Sun. He attended Carver Vocational-Technical High School with dreams of becoming an illustrator, and, upon graduation, got a scholarship to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), becoming one of the first Black students to enroll after its desegregation.

This is how Moses rediscovered him, as a student there herself. She’d started her career in the Army as a broadcast journalist, along the way finding a passion for sharing Black stories, which she later brought to art school. At MICA, studying photography and curatorial practice, her thesis would result in the Maryland Institute Black Archives, an ongoing project dedicated to preserving the history of the school’s Black artists.

“That’s how I stumbled upon Tom Miller,” she says. “I realized then that I had met him—or his work, that is—all those years ago.”

Delving into the past, she learned about Miller’s life and legacy, from becoming one of the first local Black artists to have a solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1995, to the declaration of Tom Miller Day by Mayor Kurt Schmoke, ultimately taking place only once, that same year.

“I thought, ‘Let’s revive that,’” says Moses, who launched a limited celebration with an online reading by Schmoke during the early pandemic days in 2020, followed by a commemorative mural painting with local artist Ernest Shaw and musician Rufus Roundtree, Miller’s nephew, in 2021. “It just kept growing and growing from there.”

Now, with an outpouring of interest and support, Tom Miller Day has evolved into an entire Tom Miller Week. Community programming occurs at venues including the Reginald F. Lewis Museum and Maryland Center for History & Culture, and the Eubie Blake Cultural Center.

In the future, Moses hopes to launch a traveling retrospective, restore his murals throughout the city, and even create an art scholarship for students at Carver—helping his story live on in Baltimore, and beyond. (In 2000, Miller passed away due to complications from AIDS, at age 54.)

“I just want more and more people to see his work,” says Moses, who now teaches at MICA and works as director of programs and partnerships at Afro Charities, where she is preserving the century-old AFRO American newspaper archives. Last year, she also led a multi-institution initiative to recognize another local art legend, Elizabeth Talford Scott. “To preserve this history, to preserve these legacies, is vitally important,” says Moses. “Like they always say, if you don’t know where you’ve been, you don’t know where you’re going.”

Besides, for Moses, Miller’s work epitomizes the best of this Baltimore—its monuments, its waterfront, its rowhouses, its people. Two of his screenprints now hang in her living room, depicting Baltimoreans of all ages shopping with arabbers and savoring a summer crab feast.

“These are the good times in Baltimore,” she says. “Everyone here can relate.”

When she was a photography student at MICA, Deyane Moses couldn’t help but notice that there weren’t many Black students on campus. For her first curatorial thesis project in 2018, the now-36-year-old artist created the Maryland Institute Black Archives (MIBA), using photographs, archival research, and oral histories to shine a light on the oft-overlooked history of Black students at the prestigious art school. The project received critical acclaim, and in the years since, it has expanded to the city at large. Through her umbrella Blackives, she now provides archival and research services to help Black communities in Baltimore preserve their past and future.

The idea of collection plays a huge role in your work life. When and how did you take interest?
Collecting started happening in high school. I got into scrapbooking during my senior year. That was when they had disposable cameras. I took pictures. I saved my shirts. I saved every ticket. I saved everything. I wish I had saved things from when I was younger. For me, the fascination with collecting things is being able to see other people’s stories being told from what they’ve collected.

How did MIBA get started?
I knew Baltimore was predominantly Black, but at MICA, I was the only Black person in most of my classes, and I had one Black instructor. I started wondering, “Why does this place look like this?” In MICA’s history book, there was only one page about segregation. In my opinion, it was very whitewashed. So I decided to start researching and the rest kind of unfolded from there. I located the first four Black students who attended MICA—as well as some people who tried to attend, but couldn’t between the periods of 1894 and 1954, when schools were segregated—and I started looking into who attended afterwards. MIBA started off with MICA, and it continues, in a way, with MICA, but it’s started to expand beyond that to talk about Baltimore—specifically Black artists who have lived and worked here, and who have made an impact in the art world.

Recently, your work has focused on advocating for increased recognition of Tom Miller, a Baltimore muralist. What is up next?
[For my day job,] I work with Afro Charities, which is a sister organization to The AFRO that cares for and helps make accessible its archive, which has 130 years’ worth of history in it. I’m currently working on putting [their stories and gathered materials] into a database. I’m also attending Wikipedia edit-a-thons. Over the years, people of color have been working to add more of their communities into Wikipedia’s database. It’s a good starting place to get to know who people are.

What’s the most rewarding part of the work you do?
I’ve been able to fill in gaps for the people in my community. I have a lot of gaps in my own family history. If I can’t do it for myself, at least I can do it for other people until it’s my turn.

In 1891, Harry T. Pratt became the first African-American student granted admission to attend Maryland Institute College of Art. More than 100 years later, MICA still struggles to equitably reflect the demographics of Baltimore City. Blackives, an exhibition and online database curated by senior photography student Deyane Moses archives the portraits and oral histories of black MICA students and alumni.

When Moses’ review of the school’s nearly 300-page autobiography yielded only one page of information about non-white students, Moses decided to create her own archival project. Armed with her camera and a desire to erect a new monument for underrepresented populations, Moses ventured to photograph every black student she saw on campus. Those random and serendipitous encounters rendered a portfolio of beautifully earnest portraits, candid moments that document students who often feel invisible. The gesture offers a vulnerable bridge to connect with others who may feel a kindred kind of isolation. To be a person of color attending a predominately white institution of higher education can be a solitary experience.

Blackives is a living history developed to affirm black students and instigate shifts in MICA’s established diversity and inclusion policies and practices. The popularity of the exhibition triggered a lengthy response from the school’s president, Samuel Hoi. In the memo, President Hoi acknowledged the segregationist history at MICA and vowed to “strive forward to fulfill its diversity, equity, inclusion, and globalization (DEIG) goals.” As a result, the exhibition was extended through March and reinstalled in the atrium of the school’s Main Building.

Shortly before the opening of Blackives, Moses and other black MICA students staged an intervention to memorialize Robert H. Clark, one of the first African-American students denied admittance because of his race. The intervention, Take Back the Steps, successfully blocked the entrance to the building for 63 minutes, one minute for every year black students were denied enrollment to attend. At the event, Moses issued a statement that contextualized a history of omission that few in the MICA community knew about.

We spoke with Moses and Clyde Johnson, associate dean at the Center for Identity & Inclusion about the exhibition, the community’s response, and their hopes for increased diversity on campus.

Blackives is an exhibition, but it is also an online database?

Deyane Moses: Yes. Maryland Institute Black Archives is the database which houses all the articles I found online, but I’m also collecting oral histories from the students who are currently here. The articles that I found from back in the day, the ways that they described black people, our voices were lost. The Afro supplemented for some of those voices, but they were around in the 1890s. So it was important to retrieve those voices now and to also speak to alumni and faculty. That’s how the project is moving forward, by looking at the past present and moving forward into the future. Many students at MICA don’t feel like they have support and mentorship.

What has the response been from black students and alumni about their experiences at MICA?

DM: They feel like they are not supported, especially when it comes to critiques. Classes are not that diverse. A lot of times I am the only black student in my photography classes. For the first time in my senior year, there are three other senior photography students in the same class with me. We talked about that. I also went to the black student union and talked to them about the low retention rate of black students at MICA. The show has been well received and everyone wants MICA to do more for black students and to support them.

Why now is the school and President Hoi speaking up about this issue and how will it effect the school’s approach to increase the diversity of its faculty and student body?

Clyde Johnson: We have just ended a nearly three-year president’s task force on diversity, equity, inclusion, and globalization. It entailed auditors looking over policies and programs regarding students of color, our LGBTQIA communities, and every aspect of diversity. We just did that and we’ve created a hopefully powerful document that should now be in implementation phase. These are new policies, new hiring guidelines. We have heard students say that the school does not have enough faculty members of color. So we have hired trainers to learn about implicit bias in the hiring process. I think we are working in tandem with this conversation. What Deyanne’s exhibition has done is reminded us that the work we are doing is urgent. Here’s the history, let’s do the work.

I love that the exhibition looks like a living room and the wall of student portraits feel like members of your family.

DM: The majority of the portraits are of undergrad and graduates and my mentor, Colette Veasey-Cullors. They are my family. Everyone was really supportive. If they had a second, they let me take their portrait. I just asked that they focus and look at me so that, when others saw the wall, there would be a strong presence—they would know that we are here. The wallpaper is inspired by the 1890s, when the first black graduate, Harry T. Pratt, started. I wanted the feeling of home but also an awareness that you were in a museum.

You received some criticism from some students and staff about covering the statues in the Main Building with black curtains.

DM: I love this building, but I always noticed the white sculptures. Black people are not in those histories. I asked that they be covered, out of respect for black history as important by itself, outside of those histories. Some people are really upset about it.

What are your hopes for the exhibition?

DM: I would like it to be a permanent fixture somewhere in MICA and for the database to continue. I hope this is the beginning of other colleges admitting their histories so they can make change there, as well.