S3/Agitational Design Workshop

This project was a concept created by The Contemporary Museum in Baltimore and Maryland Institute College of Art, modeled after Rural Studio in Alabama. In the 2005 Spring semester, Michael Rakowitz turned his Agitational Design Workshop class in an eighteen month collaboration with The Men's Center non-profit organization in East Baltimore.

Rakowitz posed himself more as a project manager, and we (the students) spent most of our "class" meetings at the Men's Center. When we first went into East Baltimore, we started questioning who we were within the context of the class, as students, artists, and as outsiders to the East Baltimore community. I had already faced many of these questions in my previous work, but found myself revisiting them within the context of a city I barely knew. Issues of race, class, and colonization where particularly daunting when trying to realize producing some sort of artwork. We faced assumptions by everyone involved in the collaboration with the Men's Center from the beginning: What were we expected to accomplish by the creators of this collaboration, and from the Men's Center; What the Men's Center assumed about us, as artists, and as mostly white students; and what we assumed about them as members of a low-income, marginalized, mostly African American community.

Pragmatically there were structural issues that needed to be addressed in the actual building, and I think many students felt that while personally dealing with the contextual issues of making art in East Baltimore, they could tackle some simple clean-up and organizational things around the building. Other students felt conflicted with this direction because they wanted to retain their identity as artists and not establish themselves as service providers. I think this was the first real disagreement between class members and started the process of breaking into groups to work on different projects.

I spent a lot of time in the first two months of the class thinking, processing, and listening, as I think most of us did. I helped out a couple different groups working on cleaning up the building, constructing a basketball goal from trash we found in the alleys, and feeling out a space where I could exist within the community. After moving to Baltimore from Memphis, I started to miss things about home, the things you take for granted when they are around but realize what they mean when they are gone. East Baltimore reminds me a lot of the neighborhood my mother and stepfather live in, but with much more concrete. My mother is a gardener, and in the spring and summer our yard is like a secret garden. She has created a sort of oasis that transports her away from the poverty, drugs, trash, and crime of her environment. I was already really interested in guerrilla gardening, as a different sort of graffiti, and decided that because we had been told the soil was poisoned with lead, and there was an abundance of abandoned space outside the Men's Center, I would work on creating portable container gardens. They would be vegetable gardens because I was not interested in beautifying East Baltimore, like my mother's garden, but really into "Food Justice", which is a movement whose mission is to put control of resources and basic needs back into the hands of people through growing produce. While I was brainstorming the ideas for this project in class, one of my classmates told me that the Black-eyed Susan, Maryland's state floral emblem, was illegal to pick. I thought, how ridiculous, there are laws to protect a flower, but a huge lack of effective laws to protect citizens from innumerable problems: poor living conditions, no access to good education, healthcare, living wages, etc. I see this symbolic connection between the Black-Eyed Susans, and the incompetence of our democracy. So began the Madeira Project, and Urban Armor.