With a gift of twenty-four sculptures, Chestertown is about to enter an extraordinary phase of its ever-ascending appreciation and showcasing of the arts—with an installation of twenty-four sculptures to be placed throughout the town.

For the last two years, members of the Public Art Committee, Kent Cultural Alliance, and the A & E District have been in discussions with Hanna and Peter Woicke of St. Michaels about the couple’s offer to donate their world-class sculptures to Chestertown,

Ben Tilghman, Chair of the Public Arts Committee presented the full proposal to the Town Council during their Monday, July 19 meeting. The Council will review the proposal and make their decision in one of the next two Council meetings.

“After carefully reviewing the collection and discussing possible locations for the works in accordance with the Accession Policy approved by the Town Council, the Public Art Committee (PAC) proposes that we accept the gift of the full collection over the course of the next three years. A three-year timetable will allow the town to manage the complexities of installation without having to store the works in the meantime,” Tilghman said.

If officially accepted by the Council, the first set of sculptures will be delivered to the town sometime this fall. Locations for several of the pieces have already been suggested.

“I love how quickly the Woickes understood what a viable setting Chestertown would be for their artworks. They could see the community’s active appreciation of the arts and the array of possible settings,” former Economic Development and Marketing Coordinator Kay MacIntosh said.

The Woickes’ fondness for Chestertown began some years ago with visits to the MassoniArt Gallery and an appreciation for the Kohl Gallery at Washington College. When they decided to donate their sculpture collection to a community—and keep the collection intact—the couple saw Chestertown as the perfect location and a town that appreciated such a unique opportunity with open arms.

Two weeks ago, The Spy interviewed the couple at their St. Michael’s residence to discuss the sculpture collection, how it came to be, and their affection for the community. 

Since 1993, as an executive at World Bank and its requisite worldwide travels, the Woickes always made time to visit international galleries and public art landscapes large and small. Along the way, they couldn’t resist wanting to bring one or two back to the US. One thing led to another, as they say. Now their lawn is a panorama of sculptures.

“We’ve never disagreed on any art we’ve acquired,” Peter says and is quick to point out that Hanna has a more extensive background in the arts, having studied hart history at University in Saarbrücken, Germany. She was also one of three curators at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, one of the foremost regional museums of contemporary art in the country.

But Hanna and Peter didn’t just collect art. They became life-long friends with many of the artists, and in some cases, invited them back to their guest cottage in St. Michaels to create a commissioned piece for them.

Director of Kent Cultural Alliance John Schratwieser told the Spy that the collection is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a small rural community. “The artists are diverse in every sense, and the long-term benefits for the people of Chestertown and Kent county are many. Having a public art trail for students to learn from, seniors to interact with, and visitors and residents alike to enjoy, is just a win for all.”

This game-changing gift of public art to the community has roots in a 2016 art initiative by Alex Castro, former Director of the Sandbox and Art Lecturer at Washington College, and the Broad Reach sculpture in Wilmer Park. When contacted to tell him the news about the Woicke’s gift, Castro, now retired, was ecstatic. This is the kind of thing he hoped would come to pass. “This opens the doorway to having visiting artists create on-site.”

That’s a sentiment John Schratwieser plans to realize when the Kent Cultural Alliance building is completed and art residencies can begin.

In the meantime, for three years, sculptures of all kinds, shapes, and materials will arrive for all to experience. 

Schratwieser says that the collection is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a small rural community with long-term benefits for the town and county.

“The pieces are expressive and engaging, the artists are diverse in every sense, and the long-term benefits for the people of Chestertown and Kent County are many. Having a public art trail for students to learn from, seniors to interact with, and visitors and residents alike to enjoy, is just a win for all. Peter and Hanna have been generous of heart and spirit throughout the process,” Schratwieser says.

This video depicts only a handful of the sculptures that will appear in Chestertown over the next three years. The Spy will offer images of more of them in the weeks to come.

This video is approximately eight minutes in length.

 

For three weeks, Washington College student mentors and Kent High School students have been meeting at Minary’s Dream Alliance to pluck sound bites out of Kent County’s recorded history and shape them into contemporary collages of music and spoken words wrapped in a hip-hop beat.

Sponsored by Washington College’s Chesapeake Heartland Institute, the “Hip Hop Time Capsule” is an innovative learning program developed to explore the rich traditions of Kent County’s African American music, culture, and history.

The three-week program immerses students in workshops learning how to research Chesapeake Heartland Institute’s oral histories archives in search of the perfect spoken phrase or gospel lyric. The collected sound bites, “samples,”  are selected by the students and handed over to WC sound engineers to be “cleaned” and ready to overlay with others. Original student lyrics are sometimes added or snippets from the oral history archives.

To add to the sound lab experience, professional musicians and writers hold workshops to discuss their creative process. Poet and playwright Robert Earl Jones, recording artist Kentavius Jones (appearing in this video), and Karen Sommerville were a few who discussed history through the lens of art.

Faithlyn Hunter, a Junior at Washington College and classical violinist, was surprised at how the experience affected her.

Originally not a fan of hip-hop, Hunter began to appreciate the history of Kent County through the discovery of its archives. “I found inspiration in the stories of growing up in Kent County and taking those experiences and sound and making something new. It made me grow as an artist and violinist,” she says.

With one week left in the program, students hope to have a substantial catalog of original sounds to present at the end of the month.

The Spy interviewed Starr Center’s Asst. Director for Programs and Experiential Learning Kacey Stewart and Kentavius Jones about the summer program.

This video is approximately eight minutes in length. For more about Chesapeake Heartland, a collaboration between Washington College and the Smithsonian please go here. For more about Minary’s Dream go here.

 

For all its beauty, life in rural America presents a special set of challenges to meet the critical needs of its people, and some of those needs are invisible. According to a 2019 Federal Reserve study, 4 in 10 Americans can’t afford a $400 emergency, and 22% say they expect to forgo payments on some of their bills. HomeServe USA reports 31% of Americans don’t have at least $500 set aside to cover an unexpected expense.

Homelessness can be the next step for people balancing on the edge of their last paycheck.

More than 6,000 people are estimated to be homeless in rural Maryland at any given time, depending on which criteria you use to qualify it. Because it’s not as evident as a tent community in a city, it’s a hard problem to measure and address.

The “hidden homelessness,” those who do not seek needed services, do not appear in the standard statistics. While they might not be sleeping in local parks, they may be migrating from relative to relative or friends, sleeping in cars or uninhabitable structures.

Of those counted, according to a January 2020 Maryland estimate, 17,601 Maryland public school students experienced homelessness over the course of the year. Kent County reports about 20 young adults without sustainable housing.

Obstacles facing solutions to homelessness can be overwhelming—housing affordability, assuming one can qualify; transportation, mental health, and addiction issues— can all merge into insurmountable problems. Even a wage earner making one dollar over the upper-income limit can be disqualified. An arrest record, disqualified.

To explore the issues and seek solutions to homelessness on the Eastern Shore, the Spy reached out to Deborah Vornbrock, Executive Director of Martin’s House and Barn, formerly Saint Martin’s Ministries, in Ridgely.

Since 1983, Martin’s House, a non-denominational non-profit, has been essential in the Mid-Shore to serve the poor and homeless and provide essential shelter, food, and clothing for those in need. They also seek to help clients find resources to overcome barriers to self-sufficiency.

Aside from their ongoing food pantry serving 250 families per month, Martin’s House and Barn provides shelter specifically for families who have found no other pathway to affordable housing. Families with children require a private living area. Currently, four families are living at Martin’s Barn with a capacity of 12.

Vornbrock says that the young families she sees often suffer from generational poverty. If they stay with other family members in subsidized housing, they put that family’s contract with subsidized housing at risk. Martin’s House is a central part of the network of service providers available to address poverty and homelessness on the Eastern Shore and coordinates with Mid Shore Behavioral Health’s Continuum of Care.

The Spy will next be looking into Kent County’s efforts of the Local Management Board and their efforts to address transportation, affordable housing, and emergency shelter.

This video is approximately nine minutes in length. For more information about Martin’s House and Barn, go here.

 

 

 

 

One August day, some years ago, I made my intermittent pilgrimage to Arlington National Cemetery. I always manage to choose the hottest day of the season. The heat and the whining of the annual cicadas have become emblematic since my first visit as a ten-year-old walking behind the horse-drawn caisson carrying my step-grandfather to his gravesite.

Over the years, I’ve followed the horse-drawn and flag-draped caissons three times, the sound of hooves on macadam as solemn and eloquent as the bugle call, Taps.

I began to know the place by heart: from the asynchronous Greek- Revival pillars of the Amphitheatre to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and its revered precision of the Changing of the Guard, Kennedy’s Eternal Flame, and Arlington House, once Robert E. Lee and the Custis family residence. During one visit, I discovered that Custis Walk took me to the gravesites of the US Colored Troops, an adjacency of wry and poetic justice.

Only recently, I have come to learn that several sections of the cemetery I traversed had been a “Freedman’s Village” of 50 residences, with a community kitchen, school, and hospital surrounding a pond. There, freed slaves began their lives free from bondage. The village continued to exist for almost 30 years. More than 28,000 residents of Freedman’s Village are buried in Section 27 of the cemetery.

It was one of those days, walking from the Changing of the Guard toward the cemetery’s entrance, that I had an odd encounter.

Pausing to decide on my route—the cemetery is a maze of hilly paths and narrow roads—I noticed a man holding a sheet of paper and staring at me with that expression only the lost can project. I knew he was about to ask me for help as he approached. He was tall, with close-cropped silver hair and wearing a suit, the tie long gone. He held out the sheet of paper and uttered “Brown Bomber” as a question drenched in a heavy German accent.

He was holding a map, a sort of tourist guide for Arlington visitors, and he wanted to see Joe Louis’ memorial. I had no idea Joe Louis, the illustrious boxer, was interred at Arlington.

We found the famous boxer’s memorial stone in minutes. My acquaintance stood before the monument, its bas-relief of the fighter eternally posed in a boxer’s stance. I hung back
listening to the cicadas in the stifling furnace of the afternoon. He turned and nodded his head, as if to thank me.

He said he was a young boy in Prussia when he listened to the famous 2-minute fight at Yankee Stadium between Louis and Max Schmeling on the radio. Schmeling, having beaten Louis in a previous fight and heralded by the Reich’s propagandists as the Nazi’s golden boy, was decimated in the first round of the rematch and sent to the hospital for ten days with a broken vertebrae. A Black man had beaten him.

As we walked down the hill toward the entrance, he told me that he was Trappist monk in Germany and promised himself a trip to honor Joe Louis and to thank him for a small sense of triumph over adversity, homage to the man who gave so many a shred of hope in a Europe quickly being ravaged by Hitler’s quest to crush Europe. “That fight was what we needed at the time,” he said.

Over the years, I thought about that moment at Arlington and have come to learn of another dimension of the fight heard by 70 million people worldwide. Louis and Schmeling were complicated products of their time with cultural, political, and racial implications. Schmeling walked a tightrope: he had tea with Hitler and gave the Nazi salute after one fight, had a Jewish manager, but he was not a Nazi, nor was he a racist. He even personally saved two Jewish children by hiding them at his residence. Louis, revered by Blacks during an America in the thrall of Jim Crow racism where even the Northern press traded in racist headlines, had become the hope of an America as a land of opportunity. Both were caught in a drama bigger than boxing. They were avatars of contradicting ideologies.

After all this and the “great rematch,” Schmeling and Louis became lifelong friends, the German even assisting the “Champ” financially until his death in 1981.

And I thought about the little boy in Prussia glued to the radio, hoping for a hint that at least for a moment the world could be right.

As I left, I looked back up at the Arlington hills where 400,000 souls lay buried: Union, Confederate, Black, white and brown, men and women, families of the fallen. The sacrifices, the loss.

I was standing next to a small marker inscribed with “Infant Civilian.” Where it all begins.