ReCreation (in progress)

Marisa Morán Jahn

with Micah Campbell Smith and Sarah Szanton

Media: digital prints of monoprints and hand-dyed paper, archival images courtesy of the Robert Breck Chapman archive, University of Baltimore

Created as part of Jahn’s 2022 Artist as Instigator residency at the National Public Housing Museum..

In these works, archival black and white photographs feature kids and adults cartwheeling, dancing, relaxing by the seaside, and stepping in time to marching bands. Set against colorful backgrounds of hand-dyed and mono-printed paper created by artist Marisa Morán Jahn, these vignettes celebrate the extraordinary cultural efflorescence in Baltimore from the late 1960s through the 1970s led by working families and Black mothers whose extraordinary leadership contributed to a legacy of solidarity still seen today.

The first set of wallpaper will debut in Summer 2024 at Chicago’s The National Public Housing Museum and seen by museum visitors and public housing tenants living in the residential units adjacent the museum. The second set will be featured in late 2025 at Carehaus Baltimore, the U.S.’s first care-based co-housing project co-founded by Jahn, architect Rafi Segal, and developer Ernst Valery. In Carehaus, the murals’ audience includes older and disabled tenants, caregivers and their children, and neighbors whose interviews helped shape the body of artwork.

The photographs in the wallpaper surface a largely unknown moment in history characterized by citizen-led organizing in Baltimore’s Black community seeking to overcome systemic gender-based and racial discrimination. Examples include the city’s earliest associations of Black firefighters, neighborhood governance groups, extensive medical and pre-natal clinics; neighborhood-wide intergenerational street sanitation; and vibrant arts and recreation programs for youth, parents, and seniors. For Smith, who grew up in a household where family members were actively involved in desegregating Baltimore’s public schools, organizing the first Black pharmacists, and creating vocational programs for women, the playful images capture the feeling of cultural exuberance, joy, and levity experienced by many who lived through the era. As Smith points out, “These images present a dimensionality and dignity that counters many dominant portrayals of extreme racial and economic stratification of Baltimore during this time period are more commonly circulated.”

Recognizing that Baltimore’s urban density and mobilized citizens made for ideal organizing conditions, Black freedom fighters helped hone the leadership of ground-up initiatives. At the same time, President Lyndon B. Johnson sought to redress urban poverty by funding neighborhood governance councils through what was known as the Model City program. 

Johnson also sought to incorporate citizens’ participation as a public policy goal. As one example, a public housing mandate passed in 1967 required tenants to be involved in their homes’ renovation, management, policies, and services. As the majority of public housing tenants were Black women and mothers, they became enfranchised as advocates in their community. As scholar Rhonda Williams writes, “Black female tenants’ fight for tenant participation and power in Baltimore between 1967 and 1968 made them part of a vanguard of community activists in the civil rights and black power eras. Through the actions of many female tenant activists, Baltimore became one of the first cities [in the U.S.] to establish a formal citywide advisory board [for public housing]” (1). 

For Shirley Wise, the self-described Malcolm X of Baltimore’s public housing, the modernization program of public housing became “a key organizing tool” for residents. "When I became 18 years old, I had more power to speak values in the community, where the old people had broken down houses, and they had trash and people wouldn't get the trash, I would go down there and I would yell in City Hall like I lost my mind" (2). Because these advocates were largely single mothers, their leadership and achievements included a strong focus among re-creation opportunities to keep their families healthy. A lasting legacy from this era is the education programs which impacted the lives of generations afterwards.