Plot

Baltimore is an homage to writer, director, producer, and actor Melvin Van Peebles (1932-2021), whose 1971 film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song ushered in the "blaxploitation" era, a genre of low-budget films created for African American audiences during the 1970s. Artist Isaac Julien appropriates the look and feel of blaxploitation films, using Baltimore's streets and museums as locations. He created this piece while filming Baadasssss Cinema (2002), a documentary on blaxploitation. Baltimore features the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and The Contemporary museum, which serve as symbolic markers of American history and art history. Van Peebles stars with his signature hat and cigar alongside the stylish Vanessa Myrie, who-in a nod to Afrofuturism-plays a cyborg with superpowers. They move in parallel journeys through the museums as well as through time and space until Van Peebles encounters his likeness standing between wax versions of civil rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Evading a single interpretation, Baltimore is-in Julien's words-"ironic and funky, nostalgic and futuristic, rough and fine." Isaac Julien (b. 1960, London) is a British installation artist, filmmaker, and distinguished professor of the arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This exhibition is curated by Vice President of Curatorial Affairs Doris Berger and Assistant Curator J. Raúl Guzmán. Thank you to Isaac Julien and his studio members in London and at the University of California Santa Cruz as well as Mark Nash.—jem600