News-Letter

The sense of home is a tricky subject. Many Hopkins students
have struggled with it and personally, after three years at college and
a two-bedroom apartment with my first permanent address in years, I can
finally call Baltimore home. Nancy Froehlich, a graphic design
professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art has transformed her
Baltimore home at 2219 Saint Paul St. into an art gallery and opened it
to the public. The exhibition, entitled Home, features a collection of work from local artists around the theme of home.

2219 Saint Paul St. is like any other row house. It's tucked
unassumingly between other brownstones, its only distinguishing
features the "Home" decal pressed onto the front window and the steady
stream of people that flowed in and out of it last Friday night.

"When I bought the house three years ago," Froehlich said, "I
dreamed of turning the first floor into a gallery. It took a few years
to renovate and once I was finished I realized that I was more excited
about curating than having a gallery where people come and go,
especially because I live there. So my resolution was to have a show
that was a one-night event."

Froehlich had extended an invitation to 50 artists --- friends
and students of hers --- asking them to contribute pieces addressing
the concept of home. Twenty-six artists replied and constructed the
one-night exhibit.

Froehlich's juxtaposed her home and Home to great
effect. The gallery was a standard, white-walled, well-lit place, and
yet it was also had bathrooms, stairs, and a back porch --- all the
accoutrements of a house. It was both comfortable and professional at
the same time. The first presentation of note was a collection of
photographs of houses. The accompanying text was simple and along the
lines of, "I went looking for my old house and couldn't find it."
Examining each home in each picture, I found each one familiar, a house
I'd seen driving around my old hometown. I couldn't stop looking and
wondering which houses I might have seen before, which one the artist
had lived in, and why he couldn't remember where he had once lived. I
then realized that if someone had shown me a picture of my first house
I would not have recognized it. Our perception of things changes over
time, and something that was once very large might now seem fairly
average. The idea of home is painfully subject to that same shift in
view.

Other pieces included a set of pink ceramic antlers by artist
Christine Tillman, who said of her piece, "As an artist I am interested
in man made interpretations of natural forms ... I'm interested in
bringing the outside inside, and [in] how we alter natural forms to
make them easier to digest or more sterile and friendly." The antlers,
an unnatural shade of pastel pink, appeared striking against the white
wall and as a subject seemed out of place; yet the warmth of the pink
forced the room and the viewer to accept them.

Sprinkled throughout every room on the first floor were
everything from stark portraits of East Baltimore at night, a wigwam (a
space open and inviting to all who wanted a small escape from the din
of chatter), a simulated kitchen table with hot apple pie served to all
who were willing to become part of the home installation (this was, in
my opinion, the most interesting installation not just because it
invited the attendees to eat, but it also invited them to accept the
table, room and house, as theirs for the using). The back room of the
house and the final room of the exhibit were decorated with two
`70s-style couches and a dim lamp allowing just enough light for a
projector from the same era, exhibiting a slideshow of photographs that
the artist's grandfather had taken in "times before the introduction of
words like divorce and addiction."

This was the first show that Froehlich has curated in her home,
and she hopes to hold another one in the upcoming months, with a
different theme. Her next show has much to live up to though, as the
first theme was masterfully executed, especially considering that the
pieces reflect the many artists' variegated conceptions of home. The
unique aspects of the pieces all meshed together seamlessly.

Article Tools