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.”

Once a dumping ground for garbage, the vacant lot on Homestead Street in East Baltimore is now a beautiful sculpture park.

Dubbed The Coldstream Homestead Montebello Sculpture Park, the new installment had its grand opening on June 3 as a part of the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts (BOPA) and the Baltimore Office Baltimore Office of Sustainability’s Sustainability’s Growing Green Initiative’s Lots Alive grant program that supports the creation of temporary public art projects on vacant lots. 

“We ask artists to look for lots and work with community leaders to see which ones they would like to see activated,” said Growing Green Initiative coordinator Jenny Guillaume, who added that funding comes from the Department of Housing and Community Development’s blight fund, used for post-demolition greening of abandoned lots. 

This year, Baltimore-based artist, Lisa Dillin was awarded $10,000 in grant funding from the program to repurpose a lot of her choice. Dillin selected the Coldstream Homestead Montebello (CHM) area from an “adopt-a-lot” list provided by the city, in which residents are able to lease city-owned lots for one year—sometimes for community gardens or simply to maintain them.

“This community wanted art,” Dillin said. “So we’ve been working really closely with them to be sure that everything is what they envisioned.”

Instead of just creating the art alone, Dillin decided to develop a fellowship program that allows eight artists to display their work for six months in the park. Wanting to include local artists, she passed out flyers in the neighborhood. 

“I was really hoping to find non-traditional artists that didn’t go to MICA—ones that live in the neighborhood,” she said. “I imagine there are makers who just can’t stop, or even hobbyist painters that could imagine themselves trying sculpture.”

Before the artwork could be installed, the lot had to cleared of all trash and debris and a volunteering landscaping crew worked for nearly three months.

“There were at least 100 bags of trash that we collected,” she said. “The plants and weeds were up to your knees—you could see nothing except vines and grass.”

Since then, trees and flowers have been planted and eight pieces of artwork have been installed. The sculptures range from an iceberg made of Styrofoam to a blue man in tighty-whities to a bird’s nest that could fit a pterodactyl. Each piece of work is meant to reflect current events in not just the community, but also the world.

For example, fellow Alice Gadzinski’s piece Recess—a wall of 72 1×1-inch colored panels arranged to resemble the test pattern on classic television—represents a break in “regularly scheduled programming.” Gadzinski, who is currently undergoing cancer treatment, wants this piece to encourage people to take pause and take a look at what the world has become. It also doubles as a backdrop for a performance space that can be used for public events. 

Currently, the CHM Sculpture Park is free and open to the public seven days a week with events and sculpture workshops taking place until October 1.

Other artists include D.C.-based Lorenzo Cardim, who came up with the idea of “stitching” the park with metal. 

“I was thinking about mending, and connecting the community,” he said.

Baltimore artist Leanna Wetmore, an environmental activist and master gardener, applied because she wanted to help beautify the neighborhood and show her fellow residents the possibilities of what the vacant space could be.

Her piece, Home, is a large nest made of metal and leftover debris from the park that she repurposed to create a representation of what the neighborhood has meant to her for the last decade.

“It made me feel at home,” she said. “My nest is this neighborhood.”