sample pages from zine produced during our seven-week workshop

Baltimore Youth Film Arts: Black Arts District

What is an archive? Who creates it and for whom? How do we creatively archive the living history of urban space? In this workshop, co-taught with Joey Plaster, for Johns Hopkins’ Baltimore Youth Film Arts, student fellows explored the subjectivity and power of archival collections, asking critical questions about memory, place, and people’s everyday lives. Fellows took as their subject a specific intersection on Pennsylvania Avenue, Baltimore’s black arts and entertainment district, engaging with the location, its history, examining scraps and shards in city archives and speculating about the traces of the past found in saved texts and photographs, including the black and white street portraits of the Baltimore photographer John Clark Mayden. The entire zine from the class can be viewed here.