Marisa Morán Jahn
Meet 2022–2022 Artist as Instigator Marisa Morán Jahn
Marisa Morán Jahn is an NYC-based artist whose artworks—designed with public housing residents, new immigrants, and working families—redistribute power. Her public artwork, films, toolkits, and collaborations have engaged millions. With architect Rafi Segal and developer Ernst Valery, she is a co-founder of Carehaus, the U.S.’s first intergenerational, care-based co-housing project, opening in Baltimore and Chicago.
Re/creation
During her residency, Marisa explored the importance of creativity in civic spaces, imagination, and the radical art of play. For her project, Re/Creation, Marisa designed wallpaper that celebrates an extraordinary period in Baltimore from the late 1960s through the 1970s characterized by energetic, ground-up civic initiatives in public housing and cultural efflorescence beyond. This wallpaper is displayed in a stairwell in the museum’s building as well as in Carehaus Baltimore.
Black and white photographs are in dialogue with hand-dyed paper created by artist Marisa Morán Jahn in collaboration with community developer Micah Campbell Smith, and the Dean of Nursing at Johns Hopkins University Dr. Sarah Szanton.
Dr. Sarah SzantonStructural resilience refers to the material and infrastructure that help communities overcome obstacles and meet their basic needs. Equally important are the forms of cultural expression such as art, sports, and play that are essential components of how communities thrive over time.
The photographs in the wallpaper surface a largely unknown exceptional moment in history characterized by citizen-led organizing in Baltimore’s Black community seeking to overcome systemic gender-based and racial discrimination.
Baltimore was one of the first cities to sign up for the Model Cities Program. The city’s official photographer, Robert Breckman Chapman, extensively chronicled citizens’ organizing efforts and the program’s outcomes — yet these images are rarely circulated nor seen today. With permission from the photographer’s archive, Jahn’s artwork remixes images to not only bring this unique history to broader, contemporary audiences — but also to capture the feeling of joy and solidarity described by the many older individuals that she, Smith, and Szanton interviewed who lived through the era.
How it started
To launch her residency, Marisa shared a presentation about how she uses art and design to create civic innovations and tackle public policy issues with a national audience of artists, cultural workers, and housing organizers.
Historical Images
