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Artist Exchange

Baltimore-Rotterdam Sister City Committee (BRSCC) is organizing an artist residency program for artists in Baltimore, Maryland and Rotterdam, The Netherlands. This project is an outgrowth of our Reflection student postcard exchange that took place in 2006 and 2007.

Current Program

The Baltimore Rotterdam Sister City Artist Exchange Program currently features Steve Bradley from Baltimore and will involve a Rotterdam artist in the future.

The artists in the program focus on public art projects that actively invite communities to examine their unique histories and sense of place.

An extensive educational outreach program accompanies each residency in an effort to allow the artist and their project to dialogue directly with students as well as the general public. We are currently exploring a collaboration between Steve Bradley’s work and a Harbor Arts curriculum in Baltimore city schools (for more information, see Reflection.)

The Baltimore-Rotterdam Sister City Comittee (BRSCC) has received several grants for this arts initiative and is soliciting funds from other sources. BRSCC committee member Symmes Gardner is spearheading this project. We are partnering with Irene Hofmann, Executive Director of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, to bring this project to fruition.

Surface Current: Radio Heijplaat

Baltimore artist Steve Bradley is the driving force behind URBANtells, a collective of media artists whose work focuses on the intricacies between the architecture, cityscape and the human and cultural geography found within any city. One of their projects is URBANtraces; it collects stories from the residents in Baltimore’s Station North district and redistributes the recordings back onto the streets through various means. It creates a sense of place by offering up the sounds and the voices of the residents back into the urban environment. Now, Steve is doing a similar project with Rotterdam.

The Radio Heijplaat project gives voice to the rich history of the Rotterdam Seaport through various communities, beginning with Heijplaat neighborhood that was displaced in the 1980’s by the laying off of over 1300 shipyard workers, tracing how the seaport has had an impact to the people through their stories of the place. Juxtaposed and mixed underneath the voices from Rotterdam, there will be sounds from the streets and under the water of the seaport presenting the voices onto a “sonic canvas” or ground from which the voices emanate from.

The project is seeded with stories from Baltimore City’s residents in the Station North district. Over time the Baltimore stories will be mixed with stories from the Heijplaat and Rotterdam Seaport. In Baltimore, Steve will broadcast both the Baltimore and Rotterdam voices together as though they are having a conversation about their mutual places - a project with a working title of “Radio Cargo,” being planned for 2011.

 

Building Cultural Bridges

With our art exchange programs, we are addressing issues that relate to globalization, cultural development of community, multiculturalism, and social change through community and contemporary art. Our efforts include educational programs, artist residencies, and commissioned artwork, aiming to foster dialogue between the people of these two unique yet complementary cities, and at the same time strengthen institutional partnerships.

Supporting Institutions

Many institutions have a connection with the Artist Exchange.
They include:

Maryland

Netherlands

 

Activities associated with the Artist Exchange have been partially funded by the Maryland State Arts Council, the Baltimore Office of Promotion and The Arts, Inc., Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Culture, former mayor Sheila Dixon, and the Center for Art and Visual Culture at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

 

ARTIST PROFILE
Steve Bradley

Steve Bradley received his MFA from Florida State University and is currently an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He is a trans-media artist performing in the United States and internationally, and founded art@radio based at the UMBC campus.

Websites:

TIMELINE OF ACTIVITIES