Baltimore Community FellowshipsApplication Guidelines | Fellows | Fellows Profiles
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Baltimore, Maryland
2007
Ashley Milburn is an artist who specializes in vernacular arts—or objects that come from our culture.
Milburn is using his fellowship to pursue a community arts project called "Envisioning the ‘Highway to Nowhere.'" To Milburn, the stretch of Route 40 between Martin Luther King, Jr., Blvd., and the West Baltimore MARC station has become a metaphor for the cultural disenfranchisement of black urban communities. Before its completion in 1979, the highway displaced 5,000 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 but that never happened. Instead, it simply dead-ends after about a mile and quite literally goes nowhere.
Mid-way through his exploration of the highway as "an agent of community change, interaction and engagement," Milburn says now that the multi-mile swath of concrete has changed his life. "I've cried. I had no answer to anything. All I knew was that I was emotionally being transformed," said Milburn, 63. "I got personally engaged in what I was doing."
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. He sees the possibility for public art - perhaps a powerful mural - along a 3.5-mile wall and in 52 acres of open space in the highway corridor. He wants to go beyond art to organize the West Baltimore communities to imagine the highway as a cultural asset. "Perhaps this could become something that will help reunite the community," he says.
No work has been done on the highway yet, but Milburn has started 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.
He's also in talks with the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts to brainstorm about the mural he envisions stretching across the highway walls and has entered into a partnership with Alternate ROOTS, an Atlanta-based art community activist group, to dream up such things as having professional artists stage impromptu morning performances at the highway's entrance.
"We want to start implanting in people that this space is going to be re-dedicated as a cultural venue," Milburn said.
