New and immaculate, the War Memorial on Gay Street was draped in sun­light for its 1931 opening, with Mayor Howard Jack­ son on the portico, facing City Hall, looking out over the crowd.

One year into the Great Depres­sion, though, Jackson’s outlook was far from sunny. “In some homes today, there is more suffering, more heartache than war ever brought,” he announced. “Our real obligation to those who died [in World War I] is to find a solution to the economic problems of the present.”

His present, of course, is now the past. Today’s banks have real money inside. The stock market is soaring. Employment is at a record high. But other problems reminiscent of the Depression linger, as problems do. There are still hobos under bridges. Still soup lines. Still factories closing. And old and forgotten, the marble War Memorial has lingered, too, darkening in city soot, weather­ ing, growing weary.

Now it sits draped in a blanket of fog and blackness on a cold March midnight. On the front portico, where a mayor once spoke of better­ment, a homeless Vietnam vet named Bill sleeps with his head pressed against a tall golden door. From here, the War Memorial seems heartbreaking: soiled and silent in the shadows of downtown. Even the front courtyard appears disheveled, muddled in low mist, that patch of land where “The Star­Spangled Banner” was first per­formed in 1814. And across the courtyard, City Hall tolls its bell: one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, four. Nothing changes, save the scatter of rubbish whirling in rich, black breeze.

But come 5:30, light nips at the horizon. A short woman sips coffee at the corner and shivers, hawking newspapers for 25 cents. Police offi­cers hasten toward headquarters. Batches of businesspeople bustle by, ignoring the old memorial, and Bill awakens on the portico, fumbles with a handful of cigarette butts, and lights one.

At 7:30, Civic Works employees perform calisthenics in the front plaza, and at 8:05, a car pulls to the curb. A candidate for U.S. citi­zenship emerges, ready to be sworn in as part of a monthly cer­emony. She is old, feeble, with light-brown skin and long gray hair, with two tall sons in turbans helping her from the sedan to a wheelchair. And she is smiling up at the War Memorial, a smile of hope and excitement. Long ago, just after this monu­ment was built, this old woman would not have been allowed to take her citizenship oath here. State veter­ans had forbid use of the building “for other than veterans.” But that idea didn’t last—this is American, after all—and the policy was overturned on Constitutional grounds.

Eventually, the building became a museum, and was rededicated to also honor veterans of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. The Disabled America Veterans, the American Legeion, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars took office space over the years, and in 1997, Cynthia D. Coates became the building’s first non-veteran, its first female, and its first African-American executive director.

Today, the first day of spring, Coates is in her office downstairs as 351 citizens-to-be assemble in the auditorium above. She listens as Lloyd Marcus sings “Celebrate America” and Howard German croons “America the Beautiful.” She hears 351 voices—legal alien voices—take the oath of U.S. citizenship and she hears congratulations booming from the stage, cries of “Welcome to America!”

Then she hears 351 voices—citizen voices, now—whooping on the portico, on the stairs, on Gay Street and beyond. And Cynthia Coates sits in her chair smiling at the joyous sound of her old and maybe not entirely forgotten building. A building still of patriotism, still of pride, and now, again, of hope.

Incoming generations are often left to clean up—or at the very least make sense of—whatever messes were left behind by the generations that came before, though it’s not always done by way of art. 

The effects of the Hiroshima bombing can never be completely erased, no matter how much time passes or what measures are taken, but two Baltimore artists with a unique context to the event through their own family histories have come together to make manifest a reconciliation of sorts.

In what one might call fate, Kei Ito and Andrew Paul Keiper met as potential roommates while students at MICA, only to learn during an initial conversation that they had something powerful in common. Ito’s grandfather witnessed the atomic-bomb explosion at Hiroshima, which killed his entire family and left its radioactive imprint on his own body. 

Keiper’s grandfather was an engineer who worked for the top-secret Manhattan Project that developed the A-bomb. As artists (who did become housemates), Ito and Keiper knew they needed to collaborate on a project together to explore this inheritance and bridge together two personal histories that are so extremely at odds with one another. The result is Afterimage Requiem, a large-scale installation on view at the Baltimore War Memorial through January 31. (As an aside, theirs is the first art exhibit to ever be shown in the building.)

Even without knowing the story behind the Afterimage Requiem, the piece is distinctly chilling. More than 100 life-sized photograms of Ito’s body (made by lying directly on light-sensitive photographic paper) lay flat on the floor, weighted down by smooth stones, in long rows. Spaces between each image allow you to walk through the installation, looking earthward to view the work. One dramatic light beams down in the otherwise dark space—a blinding presence that connotes the bomb itself. 

Ambient industrial and natural sounds manufactured by Keiper are projected from four tall speakers, one in each corner of the room. As you walk through the piece, the human figures lying in various positions underneath you might not immediately evoke Hiroshima, but they surely suggest a war or mass shooting or mass burial—i.e., the remains of some disaster.

It’s a profound statement on the aftermath of a tragedy, but it’s not meant to be seen purely as a reflection of a historical event. The purpose of art is to “use these personal, historical events to talk about contemporary issues,” Ito says in an artist talk on opening night. “This nuclear crisis . . . we think it’s a past history. It’s not.”

Just days before the show opened, in fact, the false missile alert in Hawaii made headlines. And President Trump’s continual threats of nuclear war on North Korea have caused an undercurrent of anxiety.

Ito was just 9 when his grandfather died, so he never got the chance to ask about Hiroshima, which he regrets now. But he remembers his grandfather describing the bomb as being like “a hundred suns lighting the sky,” and that image stayed with Ito. In his photograms, he uses his body as the camera, and as he sees it, his grandfather’s body acted as a camera, too, recording the light of the A-bomb and passing it on through his altered DNA, ultimately to Ito.

The sounds emitted in the space are split into four channels: two of industrial noises, meant to conjure up the processes used to build the A-bomb, and two of natural sounds, symbolizing the bomb’s effect on the natural world. The artists collected field recordings from such sites as Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the bombs were developed. In essence, Keiper’s portion of the installation represents his family’s contribution that led to the event, while Ito’s work represents the event’s aftermath as experienced by his family.

Though daunting, Ito made 108 photograms of his body, a recurring number in his work that is not without reason. At the end of each year, per tradition in Japan, each Buddhist temple sounds its bells 108 times to symbolize the cleansing of the 108 evil desires we have as humans, to face the new year with a clean slate. “You can hear it everywhere,” Ito says of the bells. In continuing that thought, he adds that through his work, he tries to find hope. “I think that’s my ultimate goal.”

Ring Tone

February 8, 2014
Joppa Farm Road, Joppa 

“There’s nine matches, and only three have been approved for weapons,” Dan McDevitt reminds the motley crew of tough guys, heels, cheap-shot artists, Samoans, and “Black Wall Street” thugs—some doing push-ups, others pulling on Lycra singlets and elbow pads—backstage at the sprawling Joppa Market Place. The venue normally hosts an Amish flea market, but tonight is the site of Maryland Championship Wrestling’s (MCW) 16th Anniversary Show.

Meanwhile, 64-year-old WWE Hall of Famer Jerry “The King” Lawler, best known for putting comedian Andy Kaufman in a neck brace in the 1980s, poses for photos with row after row of fans. Later, just before intermission, Lawler, still built like a keg of beer, enters the ring to battle “The Pinnacle” Shawn Patrick. 

Despite his age and a 2012 heart attack, which occurred announcing a show, Lawler trades body slam after body slam with Patrick, an Ocean City hotel manager by day, before finishing him off with his signature pile driver.

“Phat Blues” Kelly Bell, a 290-pound MCW wrestler, retiring because of vertebrae issues, notes that being a good wrestling heel isn’t easy. “I always started with a bad joke, but you walk a line,” says Bell, who fronts the popular Kelly Bell Band in another life. “Years ago, I grabbed the mic and asked a good ol’ boy crowd what Pink Floyd and Dale Earnhardt had in common. The punch line? ‘The last hit for both of them was ‘The Wall.’

“Too soon [after Earnhardt’s death]. My tag-team partner and I needed a state police escort out of the building.”

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Carnal Knowledge

February 14, 2014
North Avenue

Billed as a “nerd date,” an eclectic mix of straight and gay couples, gray-haired and young alike—as well as curious singles—pack Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse for a Valentine’s Day science lecture from Harvard professor Sarah Richardson, author of Sex Itself: The Search for Male & Female in the Human Genome. Not a traditional Valentine’s date perhaps, but romantic nonetheless. “I studied biology as an undergrad, and my boyfriend is a neuroscientist at NIH,” says Will Abshier, 22. “This is a shared interest for us.”

Naturally, there’s a photo of Bill Clinton in the presentation. Not, however, because of the former president’s infamous hormones; rather to highlight that researchers now believe there are greater genetic differences between men and women—Bill and Hillary, for example—than previously understood. According to biologist David Page, whose TED Talk Richardson uses in her lecture, men and women are about as similar, in terms of the percentage difference of their human genomes, as they are to chimpanzees.

Richardson stresses that gender descriptions as more complex than “binary” “X” and “Y” labels—and that scientific “facts” remain influenced by culture and politics. She jokes that the mapping of the human genome did not include the discovery of the “Jane Austen appreciation locus” or “channel-flipping trait”.
During the Q & A, one man asks about the human male Y chromosome, which diverged 300 million years ago in mammals, but is getting smaller. “It’s an interesting subject, especially when you consider it alongside the expanding role of women and the ways some men are reacting to that,” Richardson tells another male questioner. “But yes,” she adds with a wry smile. “There’s shrinkage.”

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Monumental City

February 22, 2014
North Gay Street

Inside the marbled War Memorial Building, about 200 people, including current Maryland National Guard soldiers and a dozen and a half surviving members of the Maryland 231st Transportation Truck Battalion are celebrating that historic, all-black unit’s 135th anniversary. Later, there will be a wreath laying at the Negro Heroes of the Unites States statue at City Hall.

Also on hand, a descendant of “Buffalo Soldier” 1st Sgt. Augustus Wiley, who served in the 9th Calvary Regiment after being born into slavery in Reisterstown.

Dubbed the “Monumental City Guards” when the unit received recognition as an all-black independent militia in 1879, the truck battalion was called to active duty during the Spanish-American War, both World Wars, and the Korean War. “The 231st Battalion was the first U.S. National Guard unit to land in Pusan—Dec. 31, 1950,” retired Sgt. 1st Class Louis S. Diggs, the keynote speaker, tells the audience.

A member of the 231st, Diggs recalls waking up in Korea after integration came to his unit’s camp literally overnight—when troop losses and the arrival of new soldiers put black and white soldiers in the same barracks for the first time—albeit two years after President Truman’s order abolishing racial discrimination in the Armed Forces.

After Korea, Diggs spent years in Japan and Germany, not realizing how little things had changed at home. “I’ll never forget visiting my mother in Sandtown before leaving for Philadelphia where I was stationed next,” Diggs recalls. “She made me a big bag lunch for the drive—didn’t have to look inside—whatever she’d cooked, I knew would be good. But after a ways, I open it and with my food, I pull out an empty jug.

“I thought, ‘What’s this?’ And then it hit me—she knew, even if I’d forgotten—there wouldn’t be a bathroom on Pulaski Highway or Route 40 that I could use.”