Arlington Renaissance Garden Gates
Background:
In 2018 a project was started by Baltimore City’s 21st Century School Initiative and the Department of Planning’s INSPIRE planning program to turn a nearby vacant lot by Arlington Elementary School into a community garden. Together with the school and community associations, the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts (BOPA) put out a call to artists to develop a garden gateway entrance. A gate design by Michael Bowman of Formstone Castle LLC was selected by the community and was fabricated and installed in late 2019.
The gateway design consisted of a deep double arch, flower cutouts, and hexagon acrylic tiles casting stained glass-style light patterns on the ground. In the central gate, a silhouette of a child offers a flower as a thank you to the Sun. This piece was titled Thank You For Helping Me Grow. A grand opening was planned for April 2020 where students of Arlington Elementary would paint the hundreds of 5 sided flower cutouts from the gate to attach them to the fence, but due to Covid-19, this was postponed.
A Proposal:
In winter 2023, a conversation was started between the Arlington Community Association (ANA) president Bishop Troy Randall, and artist Michael Bowman to finally use these flower cutouts. Like flowers, this idea grew to become the Arlington Renaissance Gardens: Four separate gardens with four different themes tied together with a common artistic style. With funding and in-kind donations from several organizations, ANA has begun landscaping three new gardens along Hayward Ave: one garden already under the control of the community, the Jazz Garden, and two vacant lots up the street into the Herb and Salad Gardens. ANA and Formstone Castle have received PAAM Funding to add artistic elements to these three gardens to help beautify the neighborhood and tie the new gardens visually to the existing Arlington INSPIRE Garden.
Common elements across all gardens are metal flowers, painted by local children and neighbors, attached to the wooden fences, and a themed sculpture around 10 feet tall integrated with an 8ft tall x 16in wide plate steel sign with the name of each garden cut into it and acrylic stained glass letters. Smaller and simpler than the 15ft tall INSPIRE gate, these pieces are not gates, but mark points of entry. Sculptures incorporate the cutout elements from or similar to the INSPIRE gate with acrylic components that cast light patterns on the ground.