Baltimore Community FellowshipsApplication Guidelines | Fellows & Grantees | Fellows Profiles
 |
Baltimore, Maryland
2007
Ashley Milburn started his fellowship with the title “Envisioning the ‘Highway to Nowhere,’” about the multi-mile stretch of Route 40 between Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard and the West Baltimore MARC station that dead-ends in the middle of the city.
Now that his fellowship is over, Milburn is now, at least unofficially, calling it the “Highway to Somewhere.”
And there is a movement in the community to actually give the highway a name.
Where he once saw the highway as a metaphor for the cultural disenfranchisement of black urban communities, Milburn says he now sees the possibilities for it to be “an agent of community change, interaction and engagement.”
“I continually point to the Highway and the growing amount of unused spaces as a resource for community redevelopment and empowerment,” he says.
Milburn used his fellowship to pursue a community arts and cultural organizing project along the infamous stretch of highway. Before its completion in 1979, the highway displaced thousands of residents and more than 700 homes, schools, hospitals and small businesses, disrupting life in the black community. The original plan called for the highway to connect with Interstate 70. Instead, it simply cuts off after about a mile and quite literally goes nowhere.
Milburn says the more he dug into the little-known highway story, the more he saw an opportunity to use art as a way to heal. “In my work as a community artist, it seems that the thing that hurts us will cure us,” says Milburn, who has a master’s degree in the community arts program at Maryland Institute College of Art.
Today, Milburn has formed an organization called The Culture Works Project, with the mission of developing cultural assets in West Baltimore, such as galleries and performance spaces, and even perhaps the use of the Highway to Nowhere as a performance venue.
Perhaps his fellowship’s most tangible accomplishment: Culture Works already has sparked the attention of the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts, which has agreed to develop murals along three miles of highway retaining walls. “This will be the longest mural on the continent, making Baltimore a tourist destination,” Milburn says.
Milburn plans to continue the work he started during his fellowship, organizing the West Baltimore communities to imagine the highway as a cultural asset over the long term. He envisions a “15-year process of emerging artists in the community partnering with master muralists to think about art and the community and what should be on the walls.”
Through it all, Milburn has learned about political frustrations involved in any project, especially one as potentially high-profile as this one. Milburn has been dismayed that West Baltimore community arts groups or Culture Works haven’t been included in mural-planning meetings.
But that won’t stop him from continuing on with the project in some way – particularly when it comes to helping community groups assure their own sustainability and use culture as a community-building asset.
Milburn says the community is beginning to take ownership of the culture project which gives him hope for its future.
“Perhaps this could become something that will help reunite the community,” he says.
