Growing up in Chicago, Nicole Clark was steeped in the visual arts. But by adulthood, she had given up her creative pursuits, except for some occasional writing.

“It was a desert of creativity for many years,” says Clark, who moved to Baltimore in 2010 for better job opportunities. But after a divorce at the age of 30, Clark returned to her creative life. “It came out of necessity for my mental health,” she says. “I was not aware that I was in a season of depression.”

One day, Clark found some abandoned wood panels and took them home to use as a canvas for her paint. “I did not have a community in Baltimore at the time,” she says. “I needed artwork for the apartment I moved to after my divorce. I was like, ‘I’ll make art for my walls.’ Initially, in the absence of having a community, it was feeding my soul,” she says.

Some 11 years later, it’s taken on an even deeper meaning.

“It took me years to understand the creative process and the healing that can bring,” explains Clark. “My work is a lot like writing an essay: You write to answer a question, but sometimes you don’t know what the question is. My paintings are a means for me to understand what’s going on beneath the surface. Once I finish a piece and step back, it’s a reflection of a question that was ruminating. As my creative processes have crystallized, I began to realize my art was like my writing—it was a portal to understand what was happening at a subconscious level.”

Below, Clark gives us a deeper look at the process behind two of her works.

King of Sorrow

“King of Sorrow originated when I was doing research on Norse mythology and I found this symbol for the Valkyrie. I decided that the female warrior was going to be the ethos of the piece. I didn’t have a studio at the time, so I was painting in the basement of my apartment building.

“It was winter and it was dark. I can look back now and see that I was going through a very, very dark depression. I was struggling with suicidal ideation and really lost my sense of identity. I was trying to will this female empowerment, this Valkyrie, but the composition of the piece wasn’t working.

“As part of my process, I would turn the canvases around. One night I flipped the canvas and stared it for a while. As I stared at it, I saw this profile, this silhouette of a closed eye and a tear coming down. At that time my neighbor and I would have porch sits and she’d play guitar and she played Sade’s ‘King of Sorrow’—I’d never heard the song before. I started crying quietly.

“Later that week, I had that song on repeat while I was finishing the piece. That was the song that informed putting the crown on the image—I was trying to will a sense of hope in my own life and I was playing with genders, as well—a woman can be a King of Sorrow. I was trying to add this sense of majesty and honor to the darkness with the crown.

“Painting it was a means to give form to this otherwise murky time. It is probably one of the most powerful pieces I’ve ever done and gave some meaning and purpose to that dark time.”

I Took Apart the Sky for You

“My brother who dabbles in music had just written these lyrics, ‘I took apart the sky for you and left it there for you to see,’ which became the name of the piece. He was the one I called and who continued to check on me and offered me an affirming experience of reaching out and encouraged me to get help in a really powerful way.

“He was the one who really helped me in the moment. He was not afraid to ask the hard questions—and when he asked me how I was, he was willing to hear an answer of ‘not that great.’

“He went to hell and back to help me understand joy again. For me, ‘I Took Apart the Sky for You’ means showing unconditional love and the lengths that I felt my brother would go to help me.”

Eileen Koenigsberg sits on a recliner in her living room in what would otherwise be a typical suburban home in Towson were it not for the gigantic abstract paintings surrounding her, taking up entire walls.

Over the past five decades and through several moves and life changes, Koenigsberg, 75, has lived with these large-scale paintings by her father, the late Peter Scholleck. In every room, his oil paintings, some of which are nearly sculptural in their thickness, hang on walls, making this house part home, part museum. Her Towson house is a showcase that ranges across spectrum of styles—abstract, figurative, still lifes, landscapes, even religious.

The paintings have a particular poignancy because Scholleck survived Nazi Germany in 1939, when he was just a teenager. Before he left, he witnessed untold horrors. And for Koenigsberg, it was more about the connection to her father who died at only 45.

“When I went through the home, it was like an installation of this artist’s life and work—a site-specific installation,” says George Ciscle, whom Koenigsberg had hired to help organize the body of work. “Of the 157 pieces, all except 20 or 30 of them were in storage. I was just completely overwhelmed by the environment. Back then, her children were still living at home, so even the two girls had [his work] in their bedrooms. And she didn’t [formally] curate herself; these were just works she chose to live with. That was interesting to me, to see that personal relationship to the work she and her children had.”

Ciscle, a well-respected arts educator and curator based in Baltimore, says he gets asked “all the time” to look at family collections of artworks. He never agrees to work with clients until he’s seen the work, and usually, he passes. He says he’s never seen anything quite like Koenigsberg’s collection.

“I was like, wait a minute. This work has never been seen outside the home?” Ciscle recalls. “Here I was invited into this world—and it was a very private experience and very special—and my first impression was this work needs to be seen. It needs to be shared and shown.”

Koenigsberg remembers a recurring scene of her early childhood vividly. She would jump into the front seat of her dad’s convertible, along with their dog, Tango, and head to the Mar-Sue Gallery art supply store in Pikesville. On the way home they would ride down the streets with huge canvases poking out of the back of the car.

At their home in Mount Washington, Koenigsberg would help her father stretch smaller canvases in his basement studio—a space large enough to create his sculptural paintings, which grew in size in the 1960s. 

If he needed more space, her father would move his work to the carport and paint out there. He’d stay up late into the night making art. From 1946 to 1967, he was painting.

“He had this creative restlessness,” Koenigsberg recalls. “He was compelled to paint. Our childhood home was decorated with his work from wall to wall.” Regardless of his various day jobs (including factory manager, tavern owner, and land title examiner), it was his artwork that brought him the most joy. “I think work was secondary. The art was his passion.” But despite that, he rarely showed his art publicly.  

Scholleck was born in Germany in 1923, just three months after his father died. His mother remarried three years later, and his stepfather, Wilhelm Nussbaum, raised Scholleck as his own son in Munich.

By 1938, Scholleck was attending an Episcopal boarding school when he was suddenly told he could no longer continue his education there because he was Jewish. That same year, he witnessed the violent destruction of Kristallnacht by the Nazi regime, and his stepfather was taken to a concentration camp.

In 1939, shortly after his badly beaten stepfather was released from the camp, his family fled to the U.S. His stepfather died just 20 months after they arrived in America, likely due to injuries sustained in the camp, Koenigsberg says.

It’s hard to imagine his childhood did not influence his work, but Scholleck rarely talked about it.

“I’ve wondered how that childhood informed all this [artwork],” Koenigsberg says. “He was so grateful to be in this country. In 1943, he enlisted in the Army. He was not confused about where he’d been and where he was. I can’t separate that from the tension in the work.”

Koenigsberg also notes her father was not particularly religious, but he was an intellectual with “an enormous laugh” who would invite friends over on Sunday mornings for “these very cerebral conversations,” she says. Christ’s crucifixion, a simulacrum of “The Last Supper,” rabbis, and priests show up in his paintings, though nothing directly relating to Germany, she added.

Scholleck died at 45 with little to no recognition for his work, other than showing a few pieces in regional shows, and his wife followed six years later. So, Koenigsberg, an only child, was just 25 when she inherited the collection, which comprises of both large-scale and small works. In the 50 years that followed, she has cared for the work through six homes, displaying different pieces on the walls with each move.

She has managed to find homes that could accommodate storing the work (mostly ones with large, finished basements) and only needed to rent a climate-controlled commercial storage unit once in the past five decades. When she went that route, she visited the unit every two weeks to replace moisture-absorbing material left in buckets to control the humidity.

“I became a bit of a student on how to maintain the art,” she says. “It drives where you live—and how you live.”

Keeping the pieces in her home has meant keeping windows closed year-round to avoid any dust or pollen from entering the house and adding UV-blocking film to each pane. It has meant keeping the temperature and humidity at steady, specific levels. Caretaking the collection has meant hiring professionals to clean or restore pieces as needed. Koenigsberg has also gone so far as to install museum-quality lighting in her home.

While she has enjoyed living with the artwork over the years and has always wanted to honor her father by caring for his work, she also admits the collection has become a true labor of love.

“I’ve had this responsibility for this legacy,” Koenigsberg says. But she was reluctant to sell his work that was so personal and meaningful to her. It took her a while to “embrace the idea that I [need to] distribute the work.” Not just because it deserved to be seen by the public but because, “I know what it’s taken to care for it, and I am not going to pass that down to my children.”

Around 2001, Koenigsberg began the slow process of letting go.

At that time, she hired Ciscle, who recommended a professional photographer to shoot each piece and then taught Koenigsberg how to document them by creating a digital archive. Koenigsberg made a spreadsheet that details any and all information she has on each piece—title, history, whether or not it was exhibited, if it had won any awards—and numbered each of them, including some smaller works like a sketch he drew on the back of an envelope.

Together they eventually created a website, designed by a graphic designer, to highlight the work and ultimately found a gallery in Baltimore where it could be shown publicly. Over those twenty-some years, she and Ciscle also became friends.

“I think of him as my champion,” Koenigsberg says. “There have been a lot of stops and starts with the work—because of life—but it was the friendship that stuck.”

For the first time in September 2024, Koenigsberg showed 12 pieces publicly at Arting Gallery in Baltimore—a vignette of his work, chosen by Ciscle, to give the public a first taste. “The Unknown Paintings of Peter Scholleck” was on view for a month in the space, complete with weekly art talks and salons hosted by Koenigsberg and Ciscle.

“We could have rented a space,” Ciscle says, “but I wanted it to be seen as a professional exhibition.” In an unusual move for a commercial gallery, none of the works were for sale.

“My first impression of Peter’s work was..they were hidden treasure,” says Arting Gallery director Xiaoming Liu. He adds that Arting, which has been open for two years, “is truly experimental. We don’t select the artworks by money and fame…we judge by the artist and his or her works—to some extent, by the sixth sense.”

“The process of letting go of these paintings is almost like grief. It’s not linear. It’s slow, and it’s only sometimes by choice,” Koenigsberg says. “But I want them to have a life beyond this.”

Art Space is a recurring element in the UpFront section of our print publication that spotlights a local artist or project making an impact in the city at large. Here’s what’s going on this month:

“My paintings are a labor of love for Baltimore,” says longtime Baltimorean and retired artist Richard Friedman, whose creative flame, sparked early on by an artistic mother, took him to the Maryland Institute College of Art, which he graduated from in 1973 before becoming a technical illustrator.

Friedman’s intricate oil paintings, which flaunt the city’s street musicians, restaurants, rowhomes, arabbers, and time-honored landmarks like The Club Charles dive bar in Station North, reinforce a decades-deep admiration. Find them on his Instagram account, @richshelfri1951.

The first portrait Kimberly Sheridan painted was a close-up of James Smith III, smiling in a barber chair, and holding, symbolically, a small lamb and lion cub in his lap. On his third birthday, in 1997, at a barbershop near Sheridan’s Pigtown home, James had been shot in the head and killed as he waited with his mother to get his hair cut.

That painting, made six years ago, was a reaction, Sheridan explains—“after Congress couldn’t even pass a gun bill with background checks,” following the massacre of 20 Sandy Hook kindergarten and first-grade students. “I had become enraged. The next morning, I stood outside the Plaza Art store on Cathedral before they opened to buy supplies.”

A 58-year-old self-taught artist with impaired sight but genuine vision, Sheridan had never forgotten James. Nor had she forgotten local church custodian Ron Waggener, her best friend, killed around the corner from her home in 2004. Waggener became her second portrait a few days later. “It’s healing to paint,” she says. “It’s my way of advocating for stricter gun control laws. It’s the way I reach out to others who are grieving.”

Taking her cue from Yoko Ono, who tweeted after Sandy Hook that more than one million people in the U.S. had been killed by guns since her husband’s death, Sheridan pledged to paint a million victims of gun violence—starting with those in close proximity. “I wondered, who were these million people?” she says. “Especially the forgotten people. The ignored. What if we brought them into the light?” Today, 176 of her works fill a second-floor front room of her modest rowhouse. Colorful, joyous, and imaginative, they are informed by whatever pictures and biographical details Sheridan can cobble together. They are, overwhelmingly, portraits of people cut down before their lives had fully formed. “For some, I have to draw from mug shots,” Sheridan says. “But I paint everyone with the same sympathy. Picturing them at their best. When they were their true selves.”

Subjects include a father and son, cousins killed months apart, a pair of girlfriends, a police officer, a young man killed by police, former Councilman Kenneth Harris, and Charmaine Wilson, a 37-year-old mother of eight, who was targeted in 2017 after reporting to police that her son was being bullied. There’s also Raquan Campbell, a 15-year-old football player and honor roll student, affectionately nicknamed Ra-Ra because of his ebullient personality, who was shot 10 times in 2010. “I met with Raquan’s mother a week before Christmas this year at the Cherry Hill Shopping Center,” Sheridan recalls. “She does an annual coat drive there. She saw me coming, holding the painting, and started to cry.”

To date, Sheridan has exhibited at a Pigtown church, the former Liam’s Pub in Station North, and a small business in Canton. She doesn’t sell her work, instead offering her paintings to each victim’s family for free. She has coordinated more than a dozen such “homecomings” as she calls them, with more on the way. In terms of painting a million portraits of victims of gun violence, she says the only thing required is more artists, “There’s one in St. Louis and another in Miami doing something similar I know of,” she says. “It’s a start.”

Meanwhile, she keeps a running list of everyone killed in Baltimore. “More than 5,000 this century,” she says, shaking her head. “We are all witnesses to a slow-motion genocide of black males in this city.” Recently, Sheridan formed a nonprofit to partner with other anti-violence and family survivor organizations.

“It’s a never-ending treadmill of pain and anger leading to murder,” she continues. “We keep making little kids orphans when we kill their father, their mother, their brother and sister, and then they end up shooting someone else’s father, mother, brother, and sister.

“Why aren’t we seeing the whole picture? That’s the question I ask myself when I paint.”

An exhibition of Kimberly Sheridan’s portraits will be on display May 11 at Union Mill in connection with Ceasefire Weekend.

Three years ago, artist Jerrell Gibbs was developing a series of acrylic paintings that revised characters from Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts. Gibbs mimicked Schultz’s playful illustrative style, but created nuanced narratives that centered around the life and experiences of Franklin, a silent African-American characterization. His paintings reminded us that—while Franklin’s inclusion was well-meaning—his silence, lack of character development, and nonexistent independent story arc were telling reflections about a culture that normalized banal representations of black identity.

As Gibbs now studies in the rigorous Leroy E. Hoffberger School of Painting M.F.A. program at MICA, the scenes he chooses to visualize reflect broad humanizing narratives about mundane instances in black life: smiling children watching television or swimming, young women posing for prom pictures, mothers and young sons sharing intimate conversations on a couch. In these works, Gibbs engages a mature style that meanders between intricately rendered realist figurations and free-form gestural strokes reminiscent of works by artists like Alice Neal, Henry Taylor or John Sonsini.

Some of his newest paintings are currently on view at Ida B’s Table through January 31, 2019, as part of the restaurant’s monthly rotating exhibit, Necessary Tomorrows. We got a chance to visit Gibbs in his studio to view his latest series of oil work on canvas and discuss how his work has evolved over the years.

What inspired this body of work and the evolution in your work?

School and me challenging myself to be a student of all the things I want to master. I want to do this for the rest of my life. If I continue down this path, I want to evolve and dive into the practice of painting and learn what it is to be a really significant artist. I want to continue to grow, master my craft, and be a student of the game first. I’m taking the time to research a lot of the things I have learned in school and figure out ways to get better. Even if it’s not something that is easily recognizable, I know overtime that it is something that will start to manifest.

In many of your portraits, you use very gestural style that leaves sections blank or less realized than others. Why does this aesthetic recur in this new series?

Me not knowing the individual [in the paintings] forced me to not want to get too involved with every minute detail. I don’t think that was necessarily important. The person wasn’t important. It was the environment, the space, and the reaction—everything that was given besides the actual person. The emotion of the imagery, that was what was important. I’m working on not being bogged down by detail.

For “Studying God’s Word,” in particular, it’s unfinished but so is youth. The whole idea of growing up and continuing to learn and taking what you know and applying it to what and who you are at that moment in your life and continuing to shed other things, layers, adding subtraction. That whole notion of youth, growing, maturing is like a play with that whole dialogue. Also just showing the layers of people. We are all a work in progress and so is this painting.

When you were first playing with allowing underpainting to bleed through, there was something about it that didn’t feel as fully resolved as it does now. There’s something about it that feels like a homage to black memory. Is that your intention?

Absolutely. It’s a way to allow the process to be shown just so it can have a dialogue with what it is to be human, continuing to be vulnerable, being okay with the process, and figuring out a way to allow the undertone to function. To pay homage from where you come from and how you’ve allowed those things to mold and shape you into the being that you are. It’s bigger than just showing it, there is a function, a reason for how it operates within each piece. It’s not necessary for every painting, but when it necessary I know when to incorporate it.

It’s refreshing and very powerful that you focus on the innocence and humanity of black youth.

It’s something that I’ve been working with for years. Even though the body of work had changed, the contexts with which I place these people is strategic. Normalizing us being and existing. Everybody isn’t an entertainer, everybody doesn’t have to be glorified for their contribution to America in its entirety, just being you is enough. I want to acknowledge that and bring that presence to museums, galleries, and people so that they can view these experiences.

Painter and former MICA artist in residence Mequitta Ahuja is now one of the 2018 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship. Awarded to fewer than 200 people every year, the honor has been helping professionals expand on their art for nearly a century.

Ahuja’s artwork over the past 15 years has been an evolution of the typical self-portrait and this most recent recognition will help further her work to shift the self-portrait of a woman of color away from a conversation about identity and instead use it to show her expertise in painting.

What made you apply for the Guggenheim fellowship?
For a lot of artists, we apply for something and get our hearts set on it because we think it’s in our lane. Other times, we apply for some things just as exercises to kind of keep putting our work out there just to throw our hat in the ring. So, I applied to the Guggenheim more as an exercise honestly.

So, were you shocked that you were actually selected?
It was right near April Fool’s Day, on April 4, so I was like, ‘Wait, really?’ I was surprised bordering on disbelief, then once it settled in, I was just extremely proud, humbled, and excited. I think as artists we all learn how to make our work when money, support, and recognition is in short supply. But then when you finally get those things, it really is a confidence booster that makes it easier to do your work and to feel good doing it—it’s validation.

How long have you been painting?
It’s really the only thing I’ve ever pursued. My earliest memories are of wanting to be an artist. Of course, my ideas of what that means have grown and shifted over time, but it is what I studied in both undergraduate and graduate school. I’ve had a number of jobs over the years, but my main job has long been being an artist.

Can you explain why you chose self-portraiture as a focus for your art?
Working from oneself as a subject matter, we’re there as ready models. So, in some ways there’s this early convenience to it and I think the self and the expression of the self is a really basic and universal feeling.

As an adolescent, like most, I did a lot of self-portraits and as I got older, self-portraiture was not always the element of the work. Then it came back full force when I was in graduate school, initially again for convenience, I wanted to make figurative paintings. I started taking photographs of myself and working from those photographs. Then it has continued, I would say the meaning has changed. I’ve moved from thinking about self-portraiture being about my personal identity to moving to thinking about the genre of self-portraiture—it’s not just about picturing something about my identity.

In your artist statement you said you want to “turn the artist self-portrait into a discourse on picture making.” How does this reflect in your paintings?
There’s multiple layers of subject matter—some has to do with American history and some is dealing with a more domestic space. I want there to be multiple entry points for developing a relationship with the viewer and the painting. But I also don’t think I have control over that, so what a person gets from the painting is always an unknown factor in terms of how I may think about it. They may have a very different relationship with it.  

As you said, this is a reflection of your most recent work which differs from your past work. What caused that transition?
Going back to adolescence, my story is that I have a relatively unique cultural heritage—my mother is African-American, and my father is from India. I think in the conversation about race, it’s always black and white. If somebody is mixed-race, we assume they’re mixed black and white, not Indian and African-American or two non-white ethnic groups. For a long time, that was the subject of my work, having that cultural heritage.

Growing older changes the degree in which those things matter. There was always a feeling I had that I didn’t fully fit into either of my heritage groups or just fit people’s expectations of me. When you get older, you just don’t care anymore [Laughs]. You don’t need to fulfill somebody else’s expectations and, as some of those concerns just became less prevailing in my experiences in the world and my identity, other things came forward. I was able to take self-portraiture and make it about the genre itself, about art history, about painting, and about what it means to position a maker of the work within the work.

How do your travels impact your artwork?
My paintings travel more than I travel. This month I had work in Hong Kong—a place I’ve never been to. I have one right now in London—a place I have been to but not since I was a kid. A lot of times I actually don’t travel with my work or to the shows. I’m really a homebody. Most recently I did a residency in Siena, Italy which had a big impact on me. For me, it’s an unalloyed good to have the work travel all over the world because it’s a way in which I can be a global citizen from the small area of land in Baltimore.

You aren’t originally from Baltimore. What made you settle here?
I was born in Grand Rapids actually and I’ve lived a lot of places. We left Michigan before I can remember. I spent my childhood in a couple of different towns in Connecticut and then I went to Massachusetts for undergrad and Chicago for grad school. Then Houston, New York, and then Baltimore.

The Maryland Institute College of Art invited me in 2011 as an artist in residence, that’s what brought me here. I met my husband the first week I was in Baltimore, at the time he was working on his PhD at Johns Hopkins—now he’s a scientist at Hopkins.

What do you think of Baltimore’s art scene?
I was just talking with some folks about what Baltimore needs and how we can promote Baltimore and lift each other up as artists in the city. There’s a lot of energy here, there’s a lot of support in terms of the social artist scene. There’s less support when it comes to gallery infrastructure and collector groups. I think a lot of us have to go outside of Baltimore to find that kind of support. I think that there are ways to build that kind of infrastructure here.   

What’s your favorite thing to do in Baltimore?
I feel like this is boring, but I love going to the art museums. I really love the Walters, it’s one of my favorites out of anywhere. I also really love the Baltimore Museum of Art. I also recently discovered ice skating. It’s not about being good at it, half the fun is being bad at it [Laughs].

Now that you are a Guggenheim fellow, what’s next?
I’m working right now on a body of work for a fall show in Milan at a gallery called Brand New Gallery—that’s the actual name of the gallery. That’s what’s now. I will be leaving Baltimore for a month to do an artist residency this summer at the Marin Headlands in California. I’m really excited to continue with my work.

The line of cars rumbles down a long road, covered in pine needles and shaded by towering trees, before stopping at a magnificent brick mansion with walls blanketed in ivy. Here, seven passengers alight and follow a regal, blond woman inside. She hustles them through the drawing room and a library lined with wood bookcases, then outside onto a wide porch with a breathtaking view of lapping water leading to the Chesapeake Bay. “Oh wow, look at that,” one woman murmurs. Cicadas hum in the July heat and the fragrance of mint from the garden fills the air as the guests sit in wicker chairs.

The group—which includes the former chair of the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture and an expert in African-American spirituals—has come to tour Hope House, a plantation just outside Easton on the Eastern Shore. The attraction is the home’s former resident, Ruth Starr Rose, a talented, yet little-known artist whose work is the subject of a major exhibition at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum. It may seem odd for a museum dedicated to African-American culture to show work from a privileged, white woman, but Rose was always doing the unexpected. For subjects, she chose the African-American members of the Easton community—unheard of in the early 20th century.

“See that boat across the water?” Barbara Paca, the woman leading the tour, asks, pointing to a slip of land that appears over the narrow creek. “That was Ruth Starr Rose’s dock. She had her studio over there.”

Paca, a noted art historian and creative designer, curated the exhibit of Rose’s work, Ruth Starr Rose: Revelations of African American Life In Maryland and the World. It features portraits of crab pickers, sail makers, and heroic soldiers, some of whom were descendants of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, as well as bold depictions of spirituals. Rose captured those she called “her beautiful people” with an elegance and pride during an era of intense segregation and Jim Crow laws.

Her radical views could explain why she is not listed among other groundbreaking artists of her time. But Paca’s exhibit, which opened in October, aims to shed light on this unprecedented artist that history forgot.

“She gave strength to so many different people,” Paca says. “Ruth didn’t want to make the world more confused, she wanted to show universal brotherhood, to bring about a unity in races through paint.”

The exhibit coincides with the Lewis Museum’s 10th anniversary and is the first comprehensive showing of Rose’s work. “I’m overwhelmed with the similarities in tension between the time Rose lived and the atmosphere around civil rights now,” says the museum’s executive director A. Skipp Sanders. “This is an important story, and a perfect example of how art can capture history.”

Though Rose received accolades during her lifetime—with shows in Europe and New York and works in collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian—critical acclaim eluded her.

“When her work is most compelling is when she was doing what she wanted to do.”

Keith Sheridan, an art dealer based in Myrtle Beach, SC, who sells Rose’s prints, said she put the male-dominated art world on edge. “She’s left out more because of her subject matter and style, which wasn’t something the art world recognized as progressive.”

To this day, Paca says, “male curators use terms like ‘saccharine’ to define her work, or ‘amateur,’ or ‘socialite.’” But she and others see Rose’s work differently. “There’s no doubt this woman is a first-class artist, and that she is every bit as good as her male counterparts. She was just shoved aside,” Paca says.

“There’s no pretense to her work,” Sheridan says. “She portrays these social issues in a format that’s heart-felt and natural.”

Though it took over 10 years to find support for the exhibit and gather Rose’s prints and paintings, their beauty and power has transfixed art patrons. And that has affirmed Paca’s belief that Rose’s story has a message that still needs to be heard.

It was 1906 and Rose was 16 when she and her family moved to Talbot County from Eau Claire, WI. The Starrs had purchased and refurbished the run-down, 17th-century plantation called Hope House, and set about constructing a lifestyle vastly different from their neighbors—one of equal dealings between blacks and whites.

William Starr had made a fortune in timber—he brought the wood for Hope House’s library bookcases from one of his mills. His family had been active abolitionists in Wisconsin, and while at Hope House, he and his wife, Ida May Hill Starr, entertained black guests as well as prestigious visitors such as President Woodrow Wilson, and brought black friends to the nearby country club. Ida May highlighted the work of African-American gardeners while writing for fashionable publications.

“These people were ahead of their time,” Paca says. “They had an integrated community here, and it made people very uncomfortable.”

Rose attended Vassar College, then enrolled in classes at the Art Students League of New York. In 1914, she married William Searls Rose, who was also from a wealthy family, and they settled outside New York City, and adopted two children. But they spent summers at Hope House, and at the adjoining farm, Pickbourne, which had been Rose’s wedding gift. Her wealth allowed her to pursue art, and the social activism she valued.

On the Eastern Shore, she raced log canoes, taught Sunday school in Copperville, and brought prestigious friends to visit, including author DuBose Heyward, best known for his novel that was adapted into the opera Porgy and Bess, and artist Prentiss Taylor, famed for his lithographs of Harlem life.

“She did everything in capital letters,” says granddaughter Brenda Rose. “She was not traditional by any means.”

Rose painted and sketched the people around her, in their homes and at work on the water, using bold colors and brushstrokes reminiscent of contemporaries Thomas Hart Benton and Georgia O’Keeffe. She illustrated the historic songs passed down through generations of slaves, depicting fiery flames and parting seas. Hers were the most comprehensive visual interpretations of spirituals in the United States, said noted Howard University professor James Amos Porter in 1956.

Critics didn’t know how to react. Rose was lauded for her technique, but cautioned to stick to paintings of boats and flowers. But she was not swayed.

“She wanted people to learn that we are all part of the color palette,” Brenda Rose says. “She wanted everyone to see that we are just people.”

Still, Rose seemed to understand that she was only one person, that it would take a movement for any real change to occur.

“Instead of a story of wonders, I can only tell you about the very insignificant struggle of one human being against a world of ignorance and hate,” she wrote in a 1930 speech. “The very little I have been able to do is only the smallest dent in the steel wall of the caste system.”

Rose demonstrated the courage of her convictions, particularly in 1933 when she had the only solo show of her life in Baltimore at the Municipal Arts Society. This was shortly after a lynching on the Eastern Shore led to the National Guard being dispatched near Hope House to control angry white mobs that protected four of the assailants. Reviewers of the show incorrectly spelled Rose’s name—but Paca believes that was on purpose, to protect her.

The Great Depression brought hardships, and the family eventually sold Hope House. After her husband’s death, Rose left Maryland, traveling and staying at her ranch in Montana, before settling in Alexandria, VA, where she died in 1965. She added cowboys and cherry blossoms to her repertoire, and painted Haitians and members of the Seminole tribe. But her later work didn’t seem to have the same connection as with her Easton subjects.

“When her work is most compelling,” Paca says, “is when she was doing what she wanted to do. It’s almost like she was filling in the blanks, saying, ‘We all know what George Washington looked like. Here are the people you don’t hear about.’”

This idea of a shared history, regardless of race, is something Paca believes firmly. She is dismayed when people ignore a story or key fact because it’s complicated, or makes them uncomfortable.

Though she was born in California, and now spends most of her time in New York, Paca has family ties on the Eastern Shore, and is drawn to the place and its history. Still, she wasn’t prepared when she discovered Rose’s painting of a young woman with creamy, caramel skin and a peach hair ribbon at a Chestertown art restoration studio some 10 years ago. She was further astounded when conservator Kenneth Milton told her the artist was a white woman, not an African-American. Paca left the studio with the painting—which some now call the “Black Mona Lisa”—and a desire to find out more about Rose.

Paca encountered apprehension when she began asking her relatives, who lived close to Hope House, about Rose and the Starrs. They hastily replied, “We don’t want to talk about it,” and it reminded Paca of another time she’d received a similar response. Her family is descended from William Paca, one of Maryland’s founding fathers and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The family always knew he’d had an illegitimate daughter of mixed race who’d vanished from historical records and was rarely, if ever, spoken of. “I always felt badly that we didn’t know that story,” Paca says. “And there were many people in my family who were very uncomfortable with my constant asking of that question.”

As she interviewed the descendants of Rose’s portrait subjects, many of whom still live in the towns of Copperville and Unionville, they told her how much they wanted their story told. Paca knew she would follow their wishes. The exhibit is scheduled to tour Maryland after its Lewis Museum run.

“I’m so impressed that there are paintings that show the black community as a proud and dignified community,” says Jeffrey Moaney, who grew up on the Eastern Shore and whose ancestors Rose portrayed. “It’s important that our part of the history is shared just as the white history has been.”

After the Hope House tour that July day, Paca gathers the guests back into the cars—they’re headed up the road to Wye House, the plantation where Frederick Douglass had been enslaved. A mission of the trip is to gather anecdotes for the exhibit, so Paca guides Tissier Moaney, Jeffrey Moaney’s grandmother and a descendant of Wye House slaves, to the high-ceilinged veranda where the lady of the house once sat.

A Lewis Museum staff member takes out a video recorder and asks, “How do you feel when you see Ruth Starr Rose’s portraits?” Rose had painted Moaney’s husband as a chubby-cheeked infant.

Moaney, 83, thinks for a moment, then replies, “Her portraits represented [our] honor and strength.”

After more questions, a group member asks if Moaney, a singer and pianist who has received commendation from President Barack Obama, wants to sing a spiritual.

“How about ‘Ride On King Jesus’?” another visitor asks.

“Get it started,” Paca instructs, and soon Moaney and others sing in harmony, “Ride on King Jesus, no man can a-hinder me.”

Paca watches, and thinks to herself, “Ruth would have liked to see this.”

Big Ten

The Reginald F. Lewis Museum opened 10 years ago with a mission to preserve and educate the public about Maryland’s African-American culture. Here’s a timeline of the museum’s history:

June 25, 2005: The Reginald F. Lewis Museum opens. Its first exhibit is A Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie. February 2007: The exhibit At Freedom’s Door: Challenging Slavery in Maryland debuts, the state’s first large-scale exhibition to focus on slavery and its aftereffects.
Fall 2013: Facing declining attendance and revenue, the museum drafts a plan to rebound.
December 2013: Maulana Karenga, the founder of Kwanzaa and a Maryland native, speaks at the museum’s annual Kwanzaa celebration.
May 2014: USA Today calls For Whom It Stands: The Flag and the American People one of the summer’s must-see exhibits.
July-August 2015: The free Lewis Now space opens with an exhibit by photographer Devin Allen, whose work appeared on the cover of Time following the death of Freddie Gray. Misty Copeland speaks to a crowd of 1,000 on the day that she becomes American Ballet Theatre’s first African-American principal dancer.