Kathy Scales Bryan, American studies lecturer, recently commented on a California politician’s daughter who has publicly split with her father on a controversial issue.

Briana Bilbray, the daughter of Republican Congressman Brian Bilbray, recently came out in support of medical marijuana dispensaries and extoled the drug’s therapeutic benefits for chemotherapy patients. Briana is currently in remission from melanoma.

Children of politicians often are brought up to put the public persona ahead of their private lives, Bryan said .

“The understanding within a family is that that’s where you could take care of your needs that can’t be taken care of out in public,” she said. “What being in politics does is take that private place and turn that into a kind of commodity that has to be produced on a public stage.”

The story, “Bilbray’s daughter at center of med pot debate,” appeared on the Sign On San Diego website on November 12.

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.