Steve Bradley (associate professor, Visual Arts) is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Arts in Community (MSAC AIC) matching grant for his “Portrait Stories” initiative in the Baybrook community.

In addition to this grant, “Portrait Stories” has been chosen by the Baltimore Rotterdam Sister City for its Artist Exchange program. The intended exchange will occur between the Baybrook neighborhood and Rotterdam’s Heijplaat neighborhood in the future.

The Baybrook initiatives are rooted in Professor Bradley’s 2009 residency in the Heijplaat neighborhood. His inspiration came from an educational curriculum developed by the Willem de Kooning Academie, also in Rotterdam.

Cut off from downtown Baltimore by the Patapsco River, the richly diverse communities of Brooklyn and Curtis Bay have few safe public recreational places for the youth to gather before or after school. The intergenerational “Portrait Stories” project strives to engage the youth and the elders of Brooklyn and Curtis Bay in a mutual exchange of stories. The objective is for the participants to create portraiture, in response to these stories, to share with the community.

This project is facilitated by students from UMBC and Maryland Institute College of Art for students from the Benjamin Franklin High School and elders from the Brooklyn and Curtis Bay community.

Exhibitions from “Portrait Stories” will be in several locations around Baybrook and Curtis Bay beginning May 2012.