The Baltimore Love Project Author: Rafael Alvarez Photographer: Sean Scheidt
Contents 1 Introduction
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A Wall as Lovely
5
The Sketch: Launched and Lost
107
Not a Blue Crab
9
Who Cares?
111
Art and Commerce
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A Wall is Worth a Thousand Words
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Brother’s Keeper
21
Believe vs. Love
119
You Don’t Know Me
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Off the Bicycled Path
125
The Birth of Cool
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The Only City I Know
127
Love it or Leave it
31
A Golden Age
133
Use What You Got
39
Learn Your Letters
141
Thou mayest … not
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Suspicious Minds
145
The Holy or the Broken?
47
Baltimore Love Project Locations
149
Epilogue: Blues for Baltimore
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The Spaces Between the Letters
154
Mural Sponsors
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Love: as High as a Kite
156 Acknowledgements
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Growing Up
157 Contributors/Design
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Love and Tolerance
69
Bright Lights/Dark City
73
Talk is Cheap
77
Eyes to See
81 Unfathomable 83
A Letter From Michael’s Father
87
Love Lost/Work Needed
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Love in All its Guises
Introduction
Love, Leini, and Commerce
“Love’s in need of love today…” — Stevie Wonder
The ghost walls of Baltimore advertise nonexistent products for businesses that no longer exist. Paint on brick. Blistered, faint and indelible, like a memory of the house you grew up in, ghost walls echo in silence from one end of town to the other. Coal, soap, ice, rags and the spirits of rye. What are you selling? LOVE, says the mural artist Michael Owen. LOVE, affirms Scott Burkholder, the logistics man. LOVE, declare 20 walls in the proud and beleaguered city of Baltimore, upon which Owen has painted the word since 2009. Al fresco advertising was more permanent before the Second World War: paint on brick, the side of a corner store was a craftsman’s canvas. Marketing was more tactile before billboards and plastic tarp made a cheaper way to hawk one’s wares. Throughout Baltimore, advertising painted almost 100 years ago on the fronts and backs and sides of buildings endures. Like Epstein’s department store in Highlandtown—“put it on layaway, Hon”—green-tinted bottles of Coca-Cola three stories high
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Baltimore, Maryland
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and “FAULTLESS” nightshirts. What’s a nightshirt?
And the tales and rumors about Leini so moved Minás Konsolas that he painted her face 20-feet high on the back of the church where his mother once kneeled and prayed.
The cat’s pajamas no doubt. The bare back of a shapely woman is the symbol of a good night’s sleep on a Sealy mattress, visible from the northbound lanes of the Jones Falls Expressway near Chase Street. On Mulberry, just above Mercy Hospital, a silhouette in the style of a cameo promotes the defunct Baltimore School of Beauty Culture on the side of a stately townhouse. Signs advertising companies that paint signs. Reminders of what used to be (and now and again, still is) if only a person took a moment from their 21st century bustle to have a look.
Such stories: shipped from Greece to Baltimore at the age of nine in exchange for 14 sewing machines; married off (lamb on the spit) to a drunken brute while still a teenager because the man she wanted was not Greek; meeting her American lover in secret across the arc of the 20th century for ritual meals never cooked the same way twice. Not many people know who she is, the woman with the thin neck and Hellenic earrings and dark eyes that have seen too much; the one who looks like she is about to speak but has thought better of it. The Leini mural neither promotes nor explains the books that introduce her to the world.
Few look. Canned oysters, rope for sailing ships, and at one time, along Boston Street when Canton was a village of Polish factory workers, a sign for licorice on the J.S. Young candy factory. The sweet works are now condos, the white-on-black licorice lettering painted over in the same style but pushing a different product. And in Greektown, on the rear wall of St. Nicholas Orthodox Church, the face of a woman who in a long and troubled life canned those oysters; tasted the licorice. Leini Leftafkis, the stoic and beautiful, a lonely Greek masmid staring into the passing seasons of East Baltimore. A beloved character in my ficciones, Leini exists in the pages of storybooks and on a brick wall between a coin laundry and liquor store in the 500 block of Oldham Street. She is a woman of quiet strength, the kind you see every day at the laundromat, a grieving mother on a short leash who paid dearly for the kind of love she’d only known from books.
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But, not unlike the ad jockeys who believe a three-story high bottle of beer will tempt your thirst, it is my hope that a glimpse of Leini will engage those who catch her looking back at them. I see a kid about six or seven years old (white, black, Greek, Hispanic, or Middle Eastern—the Americans of my neighborhood) holding his mother’s hand as they walk to the bus stop. The kid looks around as kids do, neck a-swivel as the grown-ups focus on tasks at hand. A corner is turned and the youngster is startled by the huge face of a woman painted in black and beige and blue on the side of a wall. “Mama—que es que?” Fused with the specter that dwarfs him—enduring, brooding, knowing—the answer might stay with the child for the rest of his life. It could be silence or “I don’t know.” Around here, it might be “shut up” or worse. Yet a certain kind of guardian, someone like my father, who enjoys a tall tale in the shade of a tree,
might make up a story, adding colors to the myth each time they pass by. There will be holes in the story. I want to believe the little kid has enough make-believe in his bones to fill in the missing parts with narrative of his own. Filling in the missing parts with a silhouette, black paint on tan stucco, four hands bent into the shape of four letters, is one of the objectives of Michael Owen and Scott Burkholder’s Baltimore Love Project. It is also the purpose of this book about the venture.
Their vision: “The Baltimore Love Project expresses love by connecting people and communities across Baltimore City through lovethemed murals…” As Baltimoreans of a certain age and zip code might say: “Who gives a shit?” How different is this campaign from the constant bombardment of vulgar commerce? How more or less compelling are these carbon-copy murals than the scores of other public art going back at least to the Works Project Administration projects of the Great Depression? Read on.
Owen and Burkholder have stenciled an identical design of the word LOVE—two times ten across the landscape—in spots where you would typically find ads for cigarettes, malt liquor, and the lottery.
A hundred years from now, if human beings have understood love well enough to still be around to talk about it, some of Baltimore’s LOVE murals may survive as ghost walls: the image faint but visible.
They have presented what is arguably the most powerful word in all the languages on Earth in places where it is most needed and sometimes unwelcome.
— Rafael Alvarez Macon Street / Baltimore
“Leini Leftafkis,” by Minás Konsolas
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A Golden Age Pedestrian in Southwest Baltimore:
“What is it?” Scott Burkholder:
“We’re putting the word LOVE on the wall …”
The second decade of the 21st century in Baltimore was a golden age for murals. Crabtown awash in paint on brick and stone and stucco. From the word LOVE repeated 20 times on walls throughout the city—an attempt, said Owen, “to erase geographic lines” in a stubbornly segregated city—to the constellation of the Great Lion on Barclay Street, to the robot looming above Mulberry Street on the approach to the Basilica of the Assumption. “There’s been an explosion of murals in Baltimore,” said Randall “Randi” Vega, cultural affairs director for the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts (BOPA), a non-profit organization contracted by the city to handle municipal arts programs.
via the Works Projects Administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Beginning in 1935, a time of 20 percent unemployment, the Maryland Federal Art Project (headquartered in Baltimore) put artists to work painting murals and frescoes in public buildings. Two of the surviving murals were painted on linen by Robert McGill Mackall (1889-1982) and are displayed in the lobby of the city’s Ashburton Water Treatment Plant near Druid Hill Park. “Art is important even if the only people who see it is your family,” said Vega, a native Philadelphian and fiber artist who sews quilts, makes dolls, and works with fabric in all its forms. “It’s missing from our curriculum and it’s missing from [the agenda] of our policy makers.”
Since the 1970s Beautiful Walls project during the Schaefer Administration, some 250 murals—community-approved, commissioned artwork, separate from walls garnished with graffiti—have gone up through the municipal Baltimore Mural Program.
But, because of BOPA, it’s not missing from Monroe Street, and Druid Hill Avenue, and Lafayette Street, and 2009 Annapolis Road in Westport, where a pair of huge kites float in clouds painted on a wall brimming in blue; wall after wall of birds and gardens and golden orbs of light.
The first government-sponsored murals went up in Baltimore during the Great Depression
The images are almost universally uplifting—an African-American interpretation of Da Vinci’s
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A Section of ECB's Mural in Station North
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“Creation of Adam” on Druid Hill Avenue; or a large painting of a stand of trees in a neighborhood with few real ones. Vega said her phone rings often with requests for murals. To BOPA add Gaia, the young (born 1988) and celebrated street artist who landed in Baltimore from Brooklyn, New York by way of MICA. To Baltimore, Gaia has added a huge hand holding a dove at the corner of North Avenue and Charles Street. An iconographer specializing in paper images affixed to buildings with wheat-paste, Gaia’s work includes a Fremont Avenue immortaliza-
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Gaia's Mural for Open Walls Baltimore
tion of “Four Generations of Arabbers” (the Baltimore term for horse and wagon peddlers) in the Sandtown neighborhood. In 2012, Gaia was the curator for an invitation-only mural project in the city’s Station North arts district called Open Walls Baltimore. Two years later, it started work on new walls. The original project included works by 23 artists from around the corner and the four corners: Argentina (where the lion painter JAZ began as a graffiti writer in Buenos Aires), South Africa, Ukraine, and the state of Washington.
The project was funded with $20,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts and a PNC Bank grant of $63,000. PNC also contributed to BOPA, resulting in a mural of hands cradling a sunflower at 216 North Carey St. in West Baltimore. PNC’s grant also funded several murals and painted screens in tribute to Billie Holiday, centering on the block of Durham Street in Upper Fells Point where Holiday spent time as a child. “I’d seen the documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop and learned how street art was being deployed in cities around the world as a means to revitalize neighborhoods,” said Will Backstrom,
a community development officer for PNC in Baltimore. Street art is a way to “bring artists and visitors to places suffering from disinvestment. “We viewed these activities as neighborhood revitalization [with] art being used as a means to achieve our goals.” Backstrom—who said PNC passed on a funding request from the Love Project—noted: “I’m not certain the LOVE murals are bringing the impact being offered by their creators. The neighborhoods in which they’re installed seem to like them. That counts for a lot.”
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Baltimore Love Project Mural Locations 1. Mt. Washington
6920 Holabird Ave
Pg. 13
Pg. 85
2. Carroll Park
12. Brooklyn
Gwynn Falls Trail Head, 1210 Washington Blvd.
Benjamin Franklin High School, 1201 Cambria St.
Pg. 23
Pg. 91
3. Highlandtown
13. Cross Keys
3429 Eastern Ave.
Western High School, 4600 Falls Rd.
Pg. 27
Pg. 97
4. Hollins Market
14. Fallstaff
1138 Hollins St.
Northwestern High School, 6900 Park Heights Ave.
Pg. 37
Pg. 101
5. Lauraville
15. Glenham Belair
4251 Harford Rd.
5724 Belair Rd.
Pg. 43
Pg. 117
6. Waverly
16. Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park
Rite Aid, 3133 Greenmount Ave.
4001 Clifton Ave.
Pg. 49
Pg. 123
7. Broadway East
17. Irvington
2313 North Ave.
4019 Frederick Ave.
Pg. 53
Pg. 131
8. Downtown
18. Forest Park
Planned Parenthood, 330 N Howard St.
Liberty Elementary School, 3901 Maine Ave.
Pg. 63
Pg. 135
9. Hampden
19. Armistead Gardens
911 W 36th St.
Armistead Gardens School, 5001 E. Eager Street
Pg. 71
Pg.139
10. Bolton Hill
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11. Dundalk
Mt. Washington Arboretum, Kelly Ave.
20. Belvedere
Eutaw - Marshburn Elementary School, 1624 Eutaw Pl.
5857 York Rd.
Pg. 79
Pg. 143
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17 11
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Love: As High as a Kite “…and when you feel afraid, love one another When you’ve lost your way, love one another …” —Todd Rundgren, songwriter and musician
In Baltimore, said a young DJ who lives in the shadow of the giant black and yellow LOVE mural of the 2300 block of East North Avenue, “there are lots of visions … everywhere.” Brandon Wilkins, a 2005 graduate of Patterson High School, heads out the door to a business meeting early on an August morning in 2013. The immediate visions with which Wilkins comes into daily contact—the gothic entrance to Baltimore Cemetery nearby at North Avenue and Rose Street, the methadone clinic a few blocks east, and a vacant lot across the street—are leavened by the black-onyellow LOVE mural two doors from his home. Wilkins, whose day job is driving for a Dundalk company that auctions automobiles, often travels miles from the apartment he rents for $350 a month to find more pleasing vistas. “Federal Hill is one of my favorite places to just sit and get my mind together,” said Wilkins, who also has a fondness for the bustle of the East Monument Street shopping district around the Northeast Market. “I like sitting by the boats in Canton and Fells Point too.” Of the LOVE mural at his doorstep (from which the ID plaque has been ripped off), Wilkins said: “Sometimes it’s the small stuff in life we neglect.” But there’s nothing small about LOVE looming above 2313 East
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Previous: Wall 7, East North Avenue, Near Baltimore Cemetery
Wall 7: Residents of East North Avenue and Gay Streets
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North Ave., one of the project’s more prominent sites because it is on the route of the BoltBus between Baltimore and New York. Directly across the street is a short block of eight row houses, half of them boarded up. “You can’t look at that wall without knowing that this is the word LOVE in a desperate place,” said Owen. Wall number seven, on a building erected in 1906, is the only one of the 20 with color, though not by design. Owen said he was duped into painting a large swath of the used auto warehouse and repair shop yellow because the owner insisted he was going to do the same on the rest. Until the project agreed to put LOVE on a field of yellow, the building’s owners—listed in city tax records as Patrick T. Min and Hyung Hwi Min—would not give approval. Burkholder worked directly with Patrick Min to come to this compromise and used a community-funded Kickstarter campaign that netted $5,000. In the first week of August 2013, ABC television shot a Baltimore episode of “Secret Millionaire,” in which a wealthy person pretends to be poor or working class while getting by as best they can in a depressed area. The undercover businessperson in the Baltimore episode was Anne F. Beiler (born 1949), who founded Auntie Anne’s pretzels in 1987. Now franchised, the stores—well known for hot dogs wrapped in pretzel dough—can be found in malls, train stations, and airports nationwide. The conceit of the show is that after a week of living side-by-side with people struggling to make ends meet, the millionaire steps forward and gives away $100,000 to the local people and charities they deem most deserving. While deciding which of the Baltimore non-prof-
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its she is going to help, Beiler is shown looking up at the North Avenue LOVE mural, sort of nodding in agreement and moving on. Beiler did not donate to the Love Project. A block away at North Duncan Street, Lewis Sharpe’s neighborhood “Miracle Garden” includes a green apple tree bearing fruit in front of a brick wall. On that wall is a mural by Pontella Mason of African-American heroes. The garden is one of the programs funded by Beiler. Lewis Sharpe started the Miracle Garden a year after Anne Beiler began selling pretzels to the public. He has since run the urban farm out of his own pocket. From Sharpe, Beiler was tipped off to the Moveable Feast charity, to which she donated $35,000. From Beiler, Sharpe received $5,000 and a new tiller to turn fertile ground, blocked on all sides by asphalt, brick, and concrete. And from ABC, the Love Project got a nationwide audience estimated at five million viewers. A month after the episode aired, Burkholder said he was still trying to figure out a way “to leverage” the exposure. The black-on-yellow North Avenue wall was finished in June of 2011, and by late 2013 the rest of the building’s façade was still as Owen first found it—the way he wishes the background to the LOVE mural had remained—white. “That one was a beast, the biggest of all the walls,” said Owen, “maybe 35 feet at its highest,” which is the tip of the index finger that makes the trunk of the L. It took a lot of labor and a lot of paint, “and the whole time I was cursing the owner for making us paint it yellow,” said Owen. Said the less vitriolic Burkholder: “I have not tried to convince [Patrick Min] to paint the rest
of the building yellow. He did some work cleaning up in front of the mural, removing weeds, stuff like that.” That background—sunflower yellow, good morning yellow, rain slicker yellow—did exactly what Owen and Burkholder feared it would: persuaded people to look and connect for reasons different from the egalitarian philosophy behind the project. “It stands out from the rest,” said Owen, “people like it just because it has color. I didn’t want people separating the pieces from one another.” “People believe in color,” said Randi Vega, who said she would have encouraged the project to use a palette of backgrounds on the walls. “It would catch the eye and still deliver their fabulous message.” But the project was rolling by the time number seven was going up and Owen wanted to keep moving—wall to wall, neighborhood to neighborhood—the way the BoltBus rolls by, the way Eric Means, 50, walks beneath the massive hands every day.
“Things have gone down around here but at least [the mural] is a reminder to share things, to try to be nice,” said Means as folks walked by saying good morning to one another, some on their cellphones or headed to the Turning Point clinic a block away, none of them looking up at the wall. “I hope it brings people together.” Means is a well-known character in the area and is soon talking to friends Lena Thomas, 50, and Sam Williams, 60, who, like Means, are both lifetime Baltimoreans. While Thomas talks of her “pet peeve”—the city’s thousands of vacant, abandoned buildings, the ones Ott and the Wall Hunters have taken on—Williams says the LOVE mural is a step in the right direction.
“We need more of it,” said Williams. “Stop the killing and love one another.”
Wall 7: Rafael Alvarez with a Neighbor of North Avenue LOVE Mural
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Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, 49th Mayor of Baltimore and a 1988 Graduate of Western High School Previous: Wall 13, Western High School, Falls Road and Cold Spring Lane
Love it or Leave it “Just the fact that the image can be made at anytime by two people holding up their hands is powerful …” —Amber Collins
Collins, who lived in Michigan until her family moved to Indiana when she was 10, earned a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin. Devoted to urban alternatives to getting around by automobile, she met Burkholder through Bikemore, a Baltimore advocacy group promoting cycling and the rights and safety of cyclists. Collins and Burkholder—through the Transit Choices organization—are involved in creating a comprehensive public transit plan for a city that has not had a highly dependable way to get around without a car since the streetcar system was abandoned in the early 1960s. She is of the belief that if society better cares for all of its members—from transportation to nutrition—then those members (particularly on the lower economic rungs) will be better stewards of their immediate and larger environments. She pays the bills working as an executive assistant at a for-profit consulting firm in the downtown neighborhood of Mount Vernon. Her employer, Campaign Consultation, uses entrepreneurship for social change. The company helps business people on issues from community development to corporate citizenship. In early 2014, the first calendar year since the final LOVE mural went up in Baltimore, Collins was helping to launch the Living Legacy Initiative for Entrepreneurs. It was also about this time that a post by a Baltimorean named
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Amber Collins
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Tracey Halvorsen went viral. It was titled “Baltimore City, You’re Breaking My Heart.” In the wake of the home-invasion stabbing murder of Highlandtown tavern worker Kimberly Leto, Halvorsen’s post offered a laundry list of reasons why living in Baltimore was not only unappealing, but no longer made sense.
viewed more than 350,000 times. It immediately launched the most rigorous public debate in Baltimore since the comparatively inane 2010/2011 controversy over who owns the rights to the word “Hon,” while prompting community and governmental meetings. None of which took place as the word LOVE methodically appeared on 20 walls throughout the city in an illogical effort, however insignificant, to temper the very things that Halvorsen and many others have become sick of.
Declaring, “I’m growing to absolutely hate it here,” while arguing that, “This is why people leave,” Halvorsen revealed nothing new, but rolled all of the city’s flagrant shortcomings—crime, “Anger is an easy emotion for people to catch onto,” reasoned Collins. “Love is simple and drugs, violence, poverty, and high taxes—into deceptively easy.” one long and emotional indictment. Mostly it was about crime, and in five days it was
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“One Day at a Time,” Weisman-Kaplan House, Maryland Avenue, by Michael Owen
What is the relationship between the power of love and the quest for social justice?
Justice: Black. Black/Black. No dimension. Details gone.
“Love is a critical part of justice, but our project is much more on the soft side of the effort, not the hard work of changing systematic problems of oppression that justice seeks to right,” said Burkholder.
Race, age, and gender erased.
“We are not directly alleviating poverty, racism, gender discrimination, crime, or improving education. But we are certainly encouraging people to think about these … we hope action will come but the work of art is not doing these things directly.” Asked the same question, Owen answered lyrically.
Whose hands are these? Any religious upbringing? How much time inside? Got a mom and a dad? Two moms and no dad? From here? From/From here? These hands represent us all. All of us on the same playing field.
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EPILOGUE
BLUES FOR BALTIMORE
“Your love is better than ice cream … everyone here knows how to fight …” —Sarah McLachlan
How’s that for a trick bag? Love and ice cream and violence. In Baltimore—in the last week of April, 2015 and beyond—that unlikely mash-up was the very thing in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray. When the 25-year-old West Baltimore man died of a broken spine after being arrested by Baltimore City Police, peaceful protests and ugly rioting bloomed across Baltimore like black-eyed Susans. “I didn’t march with the other people, I did what I could,” said Michael Owen, who in the hours after the riots found himself explaining the word “corrupt” to his 9-year-old son, Harper. [Owen’s answer, after a moment’s reflection: “Using the power that you have in the wrong way.”] “My son and I went downtown that weekend and we painted LOVE together on boarded-up windows, small versions of the symbol over and over, like wallpaper,” said Owen. “Harper didn’t connect what he’d seen on TV to reality until we painted the boards on a friend’s store in Mount Vernon that had been hit. “I told him [the violence] was the result of agi149
tation over things that need to be resolved. At the end of the day, he was overwhelmed. It’s a lot to take in.” Then, the cooling consequence of ice-cream. Or, as Faheem Younus defines it, as though he’d been sitting in on mural meetings with Michael Owen and Scott Burkholder: Love. “This is our city and we wondered what we could do as a community to help, the worst of it was less than four miles from our mosque— we could not just do nothing,” said Younus, a physician who serves as president of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Northwest Baltimore. During Ahmadiyya’s post-riot huddle, many ideas were tossed around about how to respond, much of it the same well-intentioned blah-blah-blah in search of an answer. “One of our African-American members spoke up with a lot of conviction—it was almost like he was telling us to, ‘Cut the crap,’” said Younus. “He said, ‘this city needs love … these kids just need love.’”
The Road to Damascus on the Patapsco
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Black Lives Matter: How Is It That This Needs to Be Pointed Out?
Design The book was conceptualized by Michael Owen and Scott Burkholder with photographs by Sean Scheidt. William (Billy) Mitchell designed the book using a grid system that is flexible enough for diverse content styling but rigid enough for a strong sense of unity and form. Helvetica’s predecessor, Univers, is used as the heading typeface. Meta Serif is used in heading quotes and body quotes, which gives distinction but retains unity with the classic-modern body font, New Baskerville. Putting the power of the LOVE image in readers’ hands is a top priority; that’s why we included a die-cut stencil with every book.
Designed with: Adobe Creative Cloud Fonts: Univers, New Baskerville, Meta Serif Printed by: Four Colour Print Group Printed in: China Copyright 2015 Baltimore Love Project ISBN: 978-0-9966620-0-0 baltimoreloveproject.com 158