The Dreaming of a Community

The creative team behind Community Bridge attempts to interpret the dreams of Frederick, past and present

by Richard Daub

When artist William Cochran was first approached about creating a mural for the east wall of the Francis Scott Key building (formerly the Francis Scott Key Hotel), he saw the same thing that most residents did: an unsightly space of brick that had been painted some indistinguishable tone between Malibu peach and tangerine dream to cover the huge scar left behind from the demolition of the building next door decades earlier.
     "I drove by and looked at it, and I really wasn't interested," William recalls. "I did not see the value of doing something there initially."
     Deep in the recesses of his creative subconscious, however, a seed had been planted, one that over the next several months would germinate and sprout into the vision of his most ambitious project yet.
     That project is now known as The Dreaming, one that William and his wife Teresa, who works closely with him on all of his projects, hope will invigorate a block at the heart of downtown Frederick's cultural scene that is home to the Weinberg Center for the Arts, the Maryland Ensemble Theater, and The Cultural Arts Center of Frederick County.
     "I think a five-story artwork right there on that block in such a prominent location visible from Market Street will be an incredible asset," says architect Jim Mills, head of The Dreaming leadership team and project director of Shared Vision, a nonprofit organization founded in 1993 to promote community building through participatory public artworks. "It'll act as an anchor for that side of town—it'll give that side of town an arts destination aside from the theaters."
     Shared Vision is most well-known for producing Community Bridge, a project that helped breathe new life into the Carroll Creek Project. It has since become a model for arts-based community development studied in schools from kindergarten up through the university level and is often used as an example of team-building by organizations small and large. Despite the success of Community Bridge, however, William and Teresa believe that The Dreaming will bring this model to a whole new level.
     "The process of public engagement has been much more sophisticated and much more personal," William says of The Dreaming in comparison to Community Bridge. "We gathered people together for meetings called 'Dreaming Conversations' and we asked them to discuss publicly things that they don't even allow themselves to think about privately, and then we used that material to shape the design of the work."
     The artwork itself will consist of a five-story installation on the eastern facade of the Francis Scott Key building and a viewing plaza below. The main components will be a three-story mural of a weaving, a veil of sculpted glass that will appear to be floating in front of the mural, and text contributed by the community etched into the building wall and plaza floor. The diversity of these components are meant to highlight Frederick's former reputation as "The Crossroads of Culture" through the combination of ancient crafts such as weaving, glassmaking, calligraphy, and architecture, to create a unique perception for each individual who experiences it.
     "Frederick's cultural heritage grows out of craft largely," William says. "William Henry Rinehart was the first truly great American sculptor—he grew up a Frederick County farmboy and began his training by working as a stonecutter. He began in the craft field and developed into a fine artist. A lot of Fredrick's cultural history is tied up with its roots in craft, so using etched stone and glass and weaving and calligraphy and architecture as the components of this work is partly a way to celebrate and illuminate Frederick's cultural identity and to express its pride of place."
     The glass veil will prominently recall Frederick's stature as one of the leading glass-blowing centers in the world during the latter half of the 1700s. It will also highlight several other aspects of the area's cultural history throughout the centuries with five sculpted copper pieces that will line the right side of the glass: a Native American artifact from around 1450 excavated in Frederick County; a Civil War bullet that was carved into a chess piece; the City Opera House built in 1873, which at the time was the largest stage in Maryland and hosted many leading stars of the day for nearly half a century; a glass sugar bowl that represents Frederick's glass-blowing heritage; and the banjar, ancestor to the banjo, which Maryland is believed to have been one of the earliest homes of and is the instrument that most forms of American popular music such as blues, jazz, country, rock & roll, and hip-hop, trace their roots to. The glass will also be etched with sheet music and Francis Scott Key's first line of "The Star Spangled Banner," as well as the image of a clock face that is believed to have been crafted in Frederick in 1760.
     While many elements of the artwork will be derived from Frederick's past, most of the thoughts and ideas behind the project have been solicited from its current residents. This was done mainly through eighty 'Dreaming Conversations' held throughout the county and suggestions made via e-mail and The Dreaming website. At first the idea of sifting through the thoughts and dreams of hundreds and hundreds of individuals may seem daunting, but after a while themes start to emerge, and the heart of this project has been to find the common threads that weave all these dreams together.
     "One of the more interesting patterns," William says, "is the notion that people are not really in touch with their dreams. They don't look for them. They haven't been taught to dream, they haven't been encouraged, so most people can't, for example, tell you what the dreams of their parents were even though they grew up with them. They oftentimes discover that they have dreams that they were not aware of just because no one ever asked them, and they never asked themselves."
     "Some people are very reality-based," Teresa says. "When you ask them, 'If anything were possible, what would you create?', they say something that they really could create. And then you have a whole other set of folks who say something that is completely fanciful. One woman, before she gave her idea, said, 'Don't give me a magic wand if you don't want me to use it!' Some people say things that just completely couldn't happen but are wish-based in a whole different way. Some people say things that are private dreams for the betterment of themselves. But most people have said things that are for the betterment of society, which was interesting."
     "When you look at this closely," William says, "it'll be thousands of words of text, and that text comes from the community itself. This work is ultimately about the imagination and the power of that, and it's about emphasizing that that is within everyone, not just artists. Everyone has access to this tremendous power, which also gives them the choice, the opportunity, to change their lives and to change the world by the exercise of that faculty. Our society does not place enough importance on unlocking the power of that in people. The arts are a key to unlock whole worlds for people that they didn't know existed, and those worlds are internal to them, they're not external. One of the kids in one of our 'Dreaming Conversations' was talking about a peak experience he had in his life—which was one of the questions we asked—and he was talking about an extraordinary experience he had as a performer when he got in touch with parts of him he just didn't know were there. He said, 'You don't know who you are until you unlock yourself.' Art is one of the keys for doing that."
     Part of the appeal of Community Bridge is that it is accessible enough on the surface to be enjoyed by just about anyone, yet at the same time it is sophisticated enough to impress even the most seasoned of art aficionados. The Dreaming is expected to do the same.
     "It's not art that you already have to have an art education to be able to find something," Teresa says.
     "You can just look at it as a painted bridge and walk on," William says. "It's very non-coercive in that way. It doesn't hit you over the head. But the more you dig into it, the more you discover."
     "If you keep digging, you'll discover yourself," Teresa adds.
     "You have to come back for repeated visits, and this helps build foot traffic downtown. It helps encourage repeated visits, it's part of the revitalization intent of the work. It is not about simply creating art—it is about basically creating a new model for community building, and doing it here in Frederick first."
     At the moment there is hardly any visible evidence that the project site on West Patrick Street will eventually be transformed into a five-story work of art, but The Dreaming has already had an impact on the local community by encouraging people to interact with each other in a positive way through the 'Dreaming Conversations.' After the artwork is completed, the hope is that it will continue to bring people together from all walks of life.
     "I think it's just going to add so much to the artistic value of what Frederick has to offer already," says Bev Shelton, retiree of the Frederick County Builders Association and current candidate for a seat on Frederick's Board of Aldermen. "It will be a gathering place for the community and for visitors—it's gonna be wonderful."
     "There are so many things that are detrimental to community," William says, "the rise of the mobile society, the incredible fragmenting power of mass culture, of partisan politics, the increasing friction that you see—and the studies show that art is one of the real silver bullets, one of the most powerful aspects that bring people together because they connect people across all sorts of divides of economics and race and gender. You begin to look beyond these superficial differences. In Community Bridge, how easily paint can fool the eye is a metaphor for how easily we're fooled by these superficial differences like attitude and language and physical size and age and gender and race, and these lock us into stereotypes of who we can connect with, who we think we should connect with. These are illusory. This is a prison that's made of simple ignorance—we don't realize that these bars are illusions. Art is one of the keys that can unlock that, and once you walk out, you realize you were never trapped to begin with."
     "It's the unified voice of the community," Teresa says, "but they're individual voices. You connect, connect, connect, connect with so many more people in the hour that you listen to their stories than you do in your whole day that you realize that a connection is possible, and that it doesn't matter as much as you think it matters who's on the other side. That person can look different, can act different, can talk different, can eat different—can be really different, and the boundaries that we place between us and who we think we can connect with turn out to be very artificial."
     Like most public projects, The Dreaming has had its share of opposition. One concern stated by local artist Marilyn Henry is that, while she is not necessarily opposed to The Dreaming, the city needs to establish some type of arts council that will create a step-by-step process to evaluate proposed public art. A task force has been set up by the city to consider a formal evaluation process, but so far such a system has not been established.
     "I do think that as we get more public art in the city," Marilyn says, "we really have to know how to jury it and what to accept and have a set of guidelines."
     Another concern is, of course, money. While the city has not approved any funding for The Dreaming, Frederick County contributed $50,000 to the project at the onset. The remaining funds have come from local businesses, corporate sponsorship, and individuals throughout the community.
     "I believe that the one project, the Bridge, was fantastic," says local artist Ed Ramsburg. "The rest of this is overkill. My main objection is to the public money. This is going on a privately owned building, and I think it's between the person who owns the building and the person doing the project, as long as it gets the approval from the historic district commission."
     Still, many cities across the country see arts-based participatory projects as a way to help build community and revitalize downtown neighborhoods that have fallen victim to neglect due to the ongoing trend of residents moving from urban areas to the suburbs.
     "I think downtown art programs have tremendous benefits," says Jim Mills. "They just enliven the downtowns and add a lot of interest to some potentially uninteresting areas, or maybe areas that haven't received as much focus in terms of funding for other improvements."
     "Downtowns are the center of communities," William says. "They're the focal point. If you want to revitalize downtowns, you have to be able to bring jobs down there, you have to bring culture, you have to bring activity during the day and at night, you have to have people want to live there rather than fleeing the high-crime areas. Cultural development is critical. People who become involved in the arts because they run head-on into a public artwork get fascinated and start finding value in the whole notion of art, and then they go to the theater or they read a book or they do something that they might not have done otherwise. Building ties of understanding across divisions—it can do so many things at the same time."
     "And when people become involved in the arts, all sorts of other things happen," Teresa says. "Falling rates of truancy, falling rates of poverty, other ways that people are engaged in civil activity rise, and it doesn't matter if those exact people are involved in the artistic participation or not. If there's enough of a percentage of the whole community, it rises for everybody."

Published in Frederick Magazine, September 2005