In Reservoir Hill, a prismatic display has erupted over the asphalt and sidewalks. Last spring, Graham Coreil-Allen gathered neighbors to help paint the intersection at Whitelock Street and Brookfield Avenue with a carefully placed rainbow of literal street art, bolstered by flex posts and fresh crosswalk lines that, together, urge approaching drivers to slow their roll.

“Before it was a lot of speed-thru action going on,” says Lauren Miller, a local resident and volunteer at the Whitelock Community Farm across the street. Now, “it’s a cognitive thing. When you see brighter colors, you’re gonna look. You’re gonna stop.”

Since 2016, Coreil-Allen has run with that theory to make Baltimore City streets safer through his design-build business Graham Projects, working with neighborhoods, transportation officials, and traffic engineers on inventive art that doubles as a traffic-calming tool. The lifelong artist has built a brand on advocacy, engagement, and collaboration, becoming a sort of street-design expert along the way.

“My work is very much driven by the needs of communities,” he says. “No public art is ever going to make everyone happy, but the goal is to have an equitable process and something that builds bonds of spirit and, ultimately, trust.”

Interested in urban design since adolescence, Coreil-Allen immersed himself in making radical public art at the New College of Florida. After graduating, he moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he created work that called attention to issues such as pedestrian safety and affordable housing. He relocated to Baltimore in 2008 to earn his master’s degree at the Maryland Insitute College of Art, and his first permanent local street art project, “Hopscotch Crosswalks Colossus,” added four usable sets of painted footprints to an intersection in the Bromo Tower Arts & Entertainment District on downtown’s west side.

 

“When you see brighter colors you’re gonna look. You’re gonna stop.”

 

He’s since helped transform intersections across Baltimore. His portfolio only continues to grow, with the city—notoriously lacking in its pedestrian-friendly infrastructure—most recently announcing official partnerships with Graham Projects at busy intersections outside Druid Hill Park and Lake Montebello.

Coreil-Allen emphasizes that the spirit of his work is less about waging war on drivers than it is about humanism and empathy. He considers the roughly one-third of Baltimoreans who lack access to a car, per Census data: “Those people deserve the same level of safety and access as all the cars driving up and down the road.”

In an unexpected turn, his art also benefited from a burst of urbanist experimentation during the COVID-19 pandemic last spring through the city’s Design for Distancing program, which was created to help neighborhoods reorient public spaces for the pandemic era.

On Harford Road, Coreil-Allen worked with neighbors to reimagine three commercial blocks, filling a parking lane with benches and tables for seating, all set on a can’t-miss display of blues and yellows and protected by temporary barriers and planters. Using good old-fashioned community engagement, he crowdsources design details from residents, leads his own neighborhood association, and even co-chaired Mayor Brandon Scott’s Art and Culture Transition Committee.

How can he tell when his projects are successful? For one, there’s the before-and-after traffic behavior data gathered from his “walking audits” or collected by partners like MICA. And there’s the feedback from the actual users, like the bespectacled, elderly woman who approached him at Beaumont Avenue and York Road.

“Are you the designer?” she said, waiting for her bus near the painted, sunset-like medley of reds, yellows, and blues, featuring Adinkra symbols of birds and peace signs and more. Coreil-Allen smiled and shared his story. “I’m so glad you did this,” she said.

Tumble down the rabbit hole. Trip through an immersive installation. Stumble upon an interactive performance. At Hidden Paths: An Exhibition About Walking As Art presented by Cardinal in Bolton Hill, audiences can experience artist-led tours to experiential and visual artworks situated in communities around the gallery’s walls.

“We’re inviting people to go on these artist-led walks and learn from artists how to look at their neighborhoods,” says Alexander Jarman, Cardinal’s co-founder and curator. “Some people will be walking down streets they’ve never walked down before.”

With installments running through November 8, the exhibit features seven artists—many of whom are Baltimore-based—including Todd Shalom, Miguel Braceli, J$Fur, Malcolm Peacock, Ada Pinkston, and Graham Coreil-Allen. They offer a broad range of in-person and virtual tours designed to illuminate lesser-known facts and newly imagined encounters in the area.

The exhibition opened with an improvised tour from Shalom, founder of New York City walking-as-art festival Elastic City, which included a printed guide and talk about “tactics and strategies for how to show up and occupy a place when creating walking art.”

Throughout September, interdisciplinary artist J$Fur shared ambient soundscapes from around Baltimore, and Braceli and award-winning textile artist and MICA professor Susie Brandt hosted talks about their current projects. The last three tours in the series will be presented by conceptual artists Pinkston and Peacock, as well as visual artist Coreil-Allen.

During Peacock’s walk on Saturday, October 5 at 2 p.m., he will present “I Guess I’m Stuck With Me,” which he describes as “a work that explores themes of codependency and interdependency focusing on a range of lived experiences that took place in Baltimore between the years 2016-2019.” The interactive piece encourages audiences to come in pairs to the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Library with a fully charged cell phone (or device with internet access) and headphones.

“This work has to do with presence, physical presence and the absence of it,” Peacock says. “I want whoever experiences it to have an experience that places them in a position of reflection, but also urgency in regard to the ways they are navigating their past experiences—which are really palpable and alive in the present.”

At the conclusion of the tour, Peacock will post links to downloadable audio files so that others who could not attend can still have the opportunity to experience the work.

On October 19 at 2 p.m., trans-media artist Pinkston will present the “Post-Colonial Historical Monuments Tour Artist-Led Walk”—an interactive, ritual-based, performance on the corner of Mosher Street and West Mount Royal Avenue.

The work explores and interrogates the history of confederate monuments in Bolton Hill. During the performance, Pinkston will read excerpts from womanist scholars, including Audre Lorde and bell hooks, on a loudspeaker to facilitate dialogues about the relevance of confederate statues.

—Ada Pinkston

—Ada Pinkston

After the performance, visitors can grab a copy of Pinkston’s zine that documents participant responses to workshops conducted by the artist in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Dallas about the removal of confederate monuments.

Hidden Paths will conclude on November 8 at 7 p.m., with a 90-minute tour led by Coreil-Allen, a public artist and OSI Community Fellow. His piece titled, “Arches and Access Evening Wander,” leads audiences through Druid Hill Park. Attendees will meet the artist at the Druid Hill gates on Madison Avenue to, “explore monuments to community connectivity and a riptide of traffic priorities between the Druid Hill Park gate and the Jones Falls Expressway.”

The work is presented as part of The Access Project for Druid Hill Park (TAP Druid Hill), led by a coalition of artists, residents, city officials, and community partners to increase activation at the park.

Coreil-Allen is especially looking forward to exploring, “the challenging impacts of surrounding highways on local neighborhoods, engineering behind the ongoing reservoir construction, and efforts to better access Druid Hill through participator transportation planning and public art.”