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 features Steve Bradley from Baltimore and Arnold Schalks from Rotterdam. Both artists have created public art projects in the United States and Europe 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.
The Baltimore-Rotterdam Sister City Comittee (BRSCC) has received several grants for this 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 in 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 will be seeded with stories from Baltimore City’s residents. Over time the Baltimore stories will be replaced by stories from the Heijplaat and Rotterdam Seaport. After Steve returns to Baltimore, he will broadcast both the Baltimore and Rotterdam voices together as though they are having a conversation about their mutual places.
Rotterdam artist Arnold Schalks is coming to Baltimore at a later date. His residency may include a project with the Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum. He has done a lot of community art projects in Surinam (a former Dutch colony in South America) and that experience will form part of his artistic dialog with Baltimore.
Building Cultural Bridges
With our art exchange programs, we are addrsessing 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
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Netherlands |
Activities associated with the Artist Exchange have been partially funded by the Maryland State Arts Council, Mayor Sheila Dixon, the Baltimore Office of Promotion and The Arts, Inc., Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Culture, 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:
- urbantells.net/rotterdam
Information about the residency - urbantells.net/earsea
Blog about Steve’s adventures in Rotterdam - userpages.umbc.edu/~sbradley
Steve’s faculty page at UMBC
Bradley had several micro-exhibitions this summer at Rotterdam’s Foundation B.a.d.
ARTIST PROFILE
Arnold Schalks
My work is strongly rooted in language. With my art work I dissect contexts in order to reconstruct the connection between customs, notions, words, materials, objects and, after all, between people. My mainly site specific works contain elements derived from the locations’ environs, culture and dialect. My ideas develop into installations, performances or interventions, often presented in public space.
Website: arnoldschalks.nl
Photo of one of Arnold Schalks’ collaborative art projects