Link: A Critical Journal on the Arts, Issue Four: Displacement - Softcover

Link

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1892813033 ISBN 13: 9781892813039

Publisher: Link Arts, Incorporated, 2000

Synopsis

The Baltimore-based arts magazine Link published ten book-length journals to great critical acclaim between 1996 and 2006. In Issue Four: Displacement, Ruth Turner takes a conceptual tour of African-American history in Baltimore, The Presence of Absence. Marc Molino writes a history of the almost. Laura Schleussner on Baltimore artists living in Berlin. Chezia Thompson-Cager on African-American artists living in Maryland. fiction and poetry by Karl Woelz, Usha Akella, and Rafael Alvarez. And movie star Mink Stole reminisces about The Morg.

About this title

Review:

Happily for those interested in the arts in Baltimore, Link's critical pretensions are fleeting and even charming in a way, more a matter of exuberance than arrogance. The substance of the journal's articles is suitably inspired by the cheerful and dreary particularities that make Baltimore what it is, and not more than it is. Ruth Turner catalogs 14 mostly forgotten places in the city's African-American history, including slave jails and cargo ships in Fells Point; A. Jack Thomas' Aeolian Conservatory, once known as the Black Peabody; and the luncheon counters of the Read Drug Store, desegregated five years before the more widely remembered 1950 sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C. Marc Molino surveys several Baltimore municipal projects that were planned but never completed, including a 500-ton statue of Christopher Columbus and a faux-Venetian canal at the lower end of Jones Falls. Mink Stole reminisces about the now defunct Morgan Millard Restaurant Gallery and junior lifesaving classes at the Roland Park Pool. Kathy O'Dell writes a panegyric on pastries at the City Bakery. Various artists receive sympathetic considerations, including three Baltimore emigrants living in Berlin, four Maryland artists working in African-American traditions, and seven artists featured in a recent gallery show on the theme of humor and violence. Short-story writers Rafael Alvarez and Karl Woelz portray characters who are in love in (if not with) Baltimore. And Alan Rutberg extols Sun Ra's music, little heard here or elsewhere. Thankfully, all this attentive devotion to the arts in Baltimore chastened my uninformed prejudices about Link. Gertrude Stein quipped, 'Once upon a time Baltimore was necessary.' Who knows? Maybe it still is. --Baltimore Citypaper, May 10, 2000

Link is an unusual journal in that it straddles the boundary between an academic journal and a popular magazine. The latest issue [Link Four: Displacement] deals with the various ways Baltimoreans have been separated from their city geographically, emotionally, and historically. In the provocative lead-off essay, 'the Presence of Absence,' Ruth Turner lists various sites in Baltimore that were historically important to African-Americans but were destroyed, as if that history could be erased. --Towson Times, April 12, 2000

About this edition

• Publisher: Link Arts, Incorporated
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1892813033
• ISBN 13: 9781892813039
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 180
• Editor: Elizabeth Donovan, J. R. Fritsch, Rawley Grau, Megan Hamilton, Marc Molino, Kathy O'Dell, Joanna Raczynska, Alan Rutberg