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Summer in Baltimore

Tom Miller, Steven Scott Gallery, and others

Summer in Baltimore

1993

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Summer in Baltimore

1993

Physical Qualities Color screenprint, Sheet: 624 x 816 mm. (24 9/16 x 32 1/8 in.)
Credit Line Gift of Steven Scott Gallery, Baltimore, in Honor of the Artist
Object Number 1995.2
In this vignette of urban life in Baltimore, a family passes by an enticing watermelon stand while onlookers peer out from their windows. Baltimore-born artist, furniture maker, and printmaker Tom Miller celebrated the historic vibrancy of Black underground economies formed and sustained throughout the Great Migration (1910–1970), which brought thousands of Black Americans from the rural South to the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions and beyond. In the early 1900s, Black vendors and hawkers with horse-drawn carts, known informally at the time as arabbers, established necessary economic pipelines to support themselves and their families. Summer in Baltimore brings this tradition to our current era through arranging isolated blocks of color into figural silhouettes and architectural forms echoed in the cityscape.
Baltimore Museum of Art, "A Tom Miller Retrospective: Decorated Furniture," February 22-April 16, 1995.

James Abbott, The Baltimore Museum of Art, "Tom Miller: Changing Spaces," September 15-2002 - February 16, 2003.

The Baltimore Museum of Art, rotation in Arcade (AMW1), 11 February 2009 - 28 April 2009.
"Family Fun," BMA Today, Summer 2010, p. 14, ill.

Inscribed: Recto: in graphite, below image, left: "Baltimore Museum of Art Proof"; center: "Summer in Baltimore"; right: "Tom Miller"

Artist

Tom Miller

1944–1999

born Baltimore, MD 1945; died Baltimore, MD 2000
Meet Tom Miller

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