In the spring of 2022, Baltimore artist and participatory-history specialist Lauren Muney hand-created custom silhouettes(profile portraits)of Baltimore City, Maryland, residents for long-term public installation at the Peale. These faces will encircle several rooms of the historic Peale walls, giving visitors, residents and guests the opportunity to feel the Baltimore ‘family’ all around them. The exhibition will be installed in August 2022. Some sitters also contributed stories about their lives and experiences in Baltimore.
Joby Taylor (00:04): This is Joby Taylor and I live in Baltimore in the Dorchester neighborhood, kind part of Forest Park and Liberty Heights area. And I'm a professor at UNBC as well and I love exploring the city. And I remember, this has been some years ago, I remember in reading about Frederick Douglas and kind of expanding beyond his early narrative life in Baltimore to just try to trace some of his footsteps. And it led me to the Battle Monument, the oldest monument downtown, and I remember standing there where Calvert Street splits and the courthouse and the federal courthouse are on opposite sides of the street there, and realizing that this is where Frederick Douglas gave a speech in, I think, 1870?
Joby Taylor (01:07): It was after the 15th amendment had passed that gave black men the right to vote. And I found the old archival, I think, from the Baltimore Evening Visitor or something. The news from that day that said there were as many as 30,000 people that gathered around that monument and among the other speakers, Frederick Douglas was, I think, the powerhouse that day. And he stepped up onto the little makeshift stage to speak with no microphones, right? 30,000 a sea of people and the stage kind of creaked and fell over.
Joby Taylor (01:51): And he dusted himself off and I think he went across the street to the Guilford, I think it was the Guilford House at that time, which I think had Confederate roots in its ownership and emerged from the second floor balcony and gave a great speech about the progress that had been made in those very few years that the 13th, 14th and now 15th amendment had been passed.
Joby Taylor (02:19): And I stand there today and I think of all just the grid of the city and that old monument that was placed after the Battle of Baltimore, the War of 1812, but I think even more, what I remember standing there is picturing Frederick Douglas, one of the great human beings in human history, not just the great Baltimoreans or African Americans in our own history, just a truly great individual must have been the voice that it would take to speak out across a sea of 30,000 people with no microphone.
Joby Taylor (03:03): And then the irony of going in a hotel that had a owner who was Confederate sympathizer, I believe even maybe one of Lincoln's assassination plots had been hatched in the bar of that hotel, perhaps, and for Douglas to emerge on that balcony and virtually shout this speech about the empowerment of African American people those years.
Joby Taylor (03:39): When I visited today with students and others, and try to paint that picture, I have also since realized that was complicated moment because of course women didn't get the right to vote at that time. So it represented a tension between Douglas and the Women's Suffrage Movement, which he continued to be involved in to the end of his life. So I think about that on that spot, I also think about the Catonsville Nine Trial that happened across the street and the Peace Movement demonstrations that happened there.
Joby Taylor (04:49): Thank you. This is Joby Taylor.
Asset ID: 2022.11.07
Transcription abbreviated: Contact the Peale for a complete transcript.
Photo courtesy of Joby Taylor
