Dresher x CADVC: "Save Our Block: Public Art/Humanities & Activist Print Culture in Baltimore"

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 16:09:34 -0400

Save Our Block: Public Art/Humanities & Activist Print Culture in Baltimore

This discussion will focus on the collaborative and collective work discussed in the article "Save Our Block: Public Humanities, Zines, and the Connecting the Classroom" in The Routledge Companion to Publicly Engaged Humanities Scholarship (Routledge, 2024)

For more on the zines, see this doc and check out https://baltimoretraces.umbc.edu/.

Markele Cullins is an interdisciplinary artist from Baltimore, MD currently based in Los Angeles, CA. They received their BFA from the University of Maryland Baltimore County and are currently an New Genres MFA candidate at UCLA. They explore and ask questions about the human condition through play, experimentation, and embodied research. Grounded in the Black radical imagination, their practice creates spaces for catharsis and contemplation. Cullins was a founding member of Oak Hill Center for Education and Culture, and co-founded 4C Gallery, an online gallery for artists of color. They also collaborate with communities and students as a designer to create zines preserving Baltimore public history.

Nicole King is a professor in the Department of American Studies and co-director of the Orser Center for Public Humanities at UMBC in Baltimore, MD. Her research focuses on issues of place, power, and the tensions between historic preservation and economic development. She is an editor of the book Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City (Rutgers University Press, 2019 - which features a photo by Cullins on the cover) and co-founder of the Baltimore Traces: Communities in Transition public humanities project. She is currently working on The Ungentrifiable City, a book project focusing on a history of holdouts–the residents and small business owners who challenge extractive development on Baltimore's westside from the 1970s to today.

This event is open for full participation by all individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or any other protected category under applicable federal law, state law, and the University's nondiscrimination policy.