Join us for a behind-the-scene conversation with the artist who created Harmony Park and the curator of Inviting Light at Blue Light Junction
Harmony Park artist Ekene Ijeoma and artist and curator of the Inviting Light site installations, Derrick Adams, will share a public conversation about the project moderated by Maura Dwyer, whose led community engagement for Inviting Light as a Project Coordinator for The Neighborhood Design Center.
Seating is limited: Please RSVP to save a seat!
About the Installation
Harmony Park is a site-responsive landwork—and the artist’s largest work to date—that transforms two vacant lots in Baltimore into a public sculpture park and garden. Sampling the checkered pattern—a symbol of unity found in the Maryland flag and Kente fabrics—the park serves as a stage for interspecies play, inviting neighbors and pollinators to find harmony through touch and sight. This work comments on the dual crises of social division and environmental degradation, suggesting that communal reconciliation and ecological restoration are intrinsically linked and should be addressed simultaneously.
The park features a contemplative landscape of varied stones and two interactive installations designed to channel energy between people:
- Energy Poles: Checkers: This interactive light installation invites participants to use touch to connect 11 light poles. By linking bodies—which consist of roughly 60% water—participants act as electrical conductors to power the lights. The pole lights are arranged to form the silhouette of a roof when viewed from the side, suggesting the metaphor of this country as a home that takes all of us to build.
- Sight Lines: Checkers: Located at the back of the park, this installation invites participants to use sight to connect across 11 stone stools.
The ground is covered with a checkered pattern of various types of rocks, such as River Rock and Pea Gravel. Through a call-and-response between these installations, neighbors and pollinators, a collective composition takes form, building a public stage for the community’s rhythmic efforts toward harmony.
Related Event
Harmony Park Opening Event, Friday, April 17, 6:30-8:30 pm
About the Artists
Ekene Ijeoma is a Nigerian-American conceptual artist who researches social, political, and environmental systems to poetically expose inequities and mutually empower communities. His multidisciplinary practice spans community-based landworks, interactive light installations, and data-driven performances that expand upon Black-American and African experiences, symbols and practices through design and technology. In recent years, environmental justice and ecological restoration have emerged as recurring themes in his work. In 2022, Ijeoma founded Black Forest, an initiative to plant over 40,000 trees for Black lives and archive Black nature across the U.S. and the diaspora. His work has been presented by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, The Kennedy Center, Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art.
Derrick Adams is the artistic director of Inviting Light and curator of the light-based site installations. His artwork spans painting, collage, sculpture, performance, video, sound, and public activation and explores how identity and personal narrative intersect with American iconography, art history, urban culture, and Black experiences. Adams’s work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and shown in public spaces at the National Mall, Rockefeller Center, and Chicago’s Navy Pier. He is the founder of Charm City Cultural Cultivation, a non-profit organization that supports and encourages underserved communities in Baltimore through The Last Resort Artist Retreat, a residency program that subscribes to the concept of leisure as therapy for the Black creative; The Black Baltimore Digital Database, a collaborative counter-institutional space for collecting and safekeeping the data of local archival initiatives; and Zora’s Den, a community of Black women writers.
Inviting Light is facilitated by Central Baltimore Partnership (CBP) in partnership with the Neighborhood Design Center (NDC) and the Mayor’s Office. The project is made possible through funding and grants from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the National Endowment for the Arts, Baltimore Community Foundation, BGE, and the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development. Together, the partners aim to activate public spaces, support artists, and strengthen neighborhoods through meaningful cultural investment.