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Art Historian Daniel Weiss Returns

Fall 2018

Art historian Daniel H. Weiss, A&S ’82 (MA), ’92 (PhD), has returned to Johns Hopkins as Homewood Professor of the Humanities, following eight years as president and then president and chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Weiss joined the faculty of the Department of the History of Art in 1993 and served as James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School from 2002 until 2005, when he became president of Lafayette College. In 2013, he was appointed president of Haverford College, serving until 2015, when he joined the Met. Last year, Weiss announced that he would step down from his role at the Met in June 2023.

“We welcome back our esteemed colleague with open arms,” said Christopher S. Celenza, James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “Dan brings a breathtaking depth and breadth of knowledge and expertise to the fields of art history and museum leadership. We look forward to the ways the presence of such a distinguished scholar will advance discovery across the school, and to watching students and peers alike flourish through his inspiration and mentorship.”

Weiss steered the Met—where he had been a regular visitor since childhood—through a time of financial struggle, taking the institution from high deficits at his arrival to a balanced budget by 2020. With some 1.5 million objects in its collection and an operating budget of $350 million, the Met is one of the world’s largest and most diverse art museums.

A New Beginning

Weiss is considered a leader across the museum landscape for such initiatives as turning down funding from the Sackler family over their connection to the opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma; prioritizing diversity and inclusion in areas ranging from hiring to collections and programming to community engagement; and increasing attendance—under his watch, the museum set records for three years in a row at more than 7 million visitors per year.

As Homewood Professor, Weiss will conduct research and teach. A specialist in the art of the Middle Ages, particularly French art in the age of the Crusades and during the reign of Louis IX in the 13th century, Weiss has also published widely on a variety of other topics, including higher education, museums, and American culture. His most recent books include Why the Museum Matters (2022), In That Time: Michael O’Donnell and the Tragic Era of Vietnam (2019), and Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal Arts (2013).

“It’s an honor and a special pleasure to return to Johns Hopkins,” Weiss said. “I look forward to rejoining the extraordinary community of scholars, teachers, and students at this great university. Teaching and mentoring students have always been great passions of mine. I look forward to being back on campus and to contributing what I can to the work of the Krieger School.”

A History in Art

Weiss, who grew up on Long Island, earned a BA in psychology at George Washington University in 1979. Interested in pursuing a museum career, he went on to earn a master’s in medieval and modern art at the Krieger School in 1982, and an MBA from the Yale School of Management in 1985. After four years of strategic management consulting in New York, he was ready to combine his interests in arts and education, and returned to Hopkins. He earned a PhD in western medieval and Byzantine art with a minor in classical Greek art and architecture and then joined the faculty, remaining at Hopkins for the next 16 years.

Weiss was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021. Also that year, he was one of the inaugural recipients of George Washington University’s Monumental Alumni Award, the highest form of alumni recognition the university gives to honor living alumni who have made an impact on the world through their work and service. He was elected to the Society of Scholars at Hopkins in 2018, and is the author of seven books.

Missing Piece in Human Genome Decoded

Fall 2018

The chromosome associated with male development, which is the last mysterious piece of the human genome, has been fully sequenced by a team of more than 100 researchers around the world, including Johns Hopkins University scientists.

The achievement completes the Y chromosome’s genetic code and unveils key details that could provide a crisper picture of the role the chromosome plays in male-specific development, fertility, and genetically triggered diseases like cancer.

The work was published in August in Nature.

“Now that we have this 100% complete sequence of the Y chromosome, we can identify and explore numerous genetic variations that could be impacting human traits and disease in a way that we weren’t able to do before,” says co-first author Dylan Taylor, a Johns Hopkins geneticist and doctoral candidate in the Department of Biology.

The sequence of DNA that comprises chromosomes encodes the genes and genetic circuits that guide the development and function of all cells in living organisms. The Y chromosome has been particularly challenging to decode because of its repetitive molecular patterns, but new sequencing technology and bioinformatics algorithms allowed the team to resolve these DNA sequences.

New Insights

The team revealed the structures of sperm-regulating gene families and discovered 41 additional genes in the Y chromosome. They also unveiled the structures of genes thought to play significant roles in growth and functioning of the male reproductive system.

“We completed the wiring diagram for all these genetic switches that get activated via the Y chromosome, many of which are critical to the genetic contributions to male development,” says author Michael Schatz, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in computer science, biology, and oncology. “We are at a point where scientists can start using this map. We were previously blind to different parts of the genome and different mutations, but now that we can see the whole genome, we hope we can add new insights to the genetics of a lot of different diseases.”

The Y chromosome, along with the X chromosome, is often discussed for its role in sexual development. While these chromosomes play a central role, the factors involved in human sexual development are spread across the genome and very complex, giving rise to the array of human sex characteristics found among male, female, and intersex individuals. These categories are not equivalent to gender, which is a social category. Additionally, recent work demonstrates that genes on the Y chromosome contribute to other aspects of human biology, such as cancer risk and severity.

Building Blocks

The research was led by the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the Telomere-to- Telomere consortium that in 2022 unveiled the complete sequence of a human genome, a decades-in-the-making revelation expected to open new lines of molecular and genetic exploration. However, that work was done with two X chromosomes. Now, using a donor with both an X and a Y chromosome, the consortium built a complete blueprint of the Y chromosome and every element of its DNA.

The new findings lay the foundation for high-quality genome assemblies that didn’t exist before, including for personalized genomes.

“The genome is a very personal thing—it has the basic instructions for the building blocks of our development and what makes us human,” says co-author Rajiv McCoy, assistant professor of biology. “We knew we had an incomplete picture up until now, but we can now see the entire genome from end to end for the first time.”

Other Johns Hopkins authors are Paul Hook, Winston Timp, Steven Salzberg, Nae-Chyun Chen, Ariel Gershman, Jakob Heinz, Stephen Hwang, Michael Sauria, Alaina Shumate, and Samantha Zarate.

Johns Hopkins Opens a New Home in Washington, D.C.

Fall 2018

exterior daytime view of Hopkins Bloomberg Center

People crossing walking inside Hopkins Bloomberg Center

One of the many seating areas inside Bloomberg Hopkins Center includes a colorful wall mural and a large window view of U.S. Capitol.

In October, hundreds turned out for the dedication of Johns Hopkins’ gleaming new building at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. It ushers in a new era for the university in the heart of the nation’s capital—and will soon also be home to JHU’s newest academic division, a School of Government and Policy.

The Hopkins Bloomberg Center brings new purpose and possibility to the university’s longstanding mission to connect the worlds of research and policy. In this new location—and building on the well-established reputation of the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington policy circles— Hopkins will educate future leaders and innovators, convene a range of viewpoints to foster discovery and dialogue, and create a vibrant new space for artistic expression and performance.

Data-driven approaches to policy

“The opening of the Hopkins Bloomberg Center marks a significant moment in the life of our university. The new center will deepen our presence in D.C. at a time when society is struggling to come together to solve problems and seize opportunities to advance the common good,” Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels said at the dedication. “Through the center, we will amplify our university’s proven capacity to bring the world’s greatest research and data-driven approaches to government innovation and policy.”

The Hopkins Bloomberg Center has been years in the making, beginning with the university’s 2019 acquisition of the 435,000-square-foot building on one of the world’s most iconic avenues, a street where generations of Americans have marched, celebrated, paraded, and protested. In the ensuing four years, the space has been transformed into a light-filled, vibrant center for learning, research, and public engagement, a modern multipurpose space actualized by a talented and creative team of architects, designers, artists, technicians, engineers, and construction crews.

The building will host programming from all corners of Johns Hopkins, bringing experts, students, and researchers from all of the university’s Baltimore and D.C.-based divisions together. This includes 40 projects and programs supported by the university’s Nexus Awards program; awardees include more than 100 scholars and researchers from all nine JHU academic divisions covering a range of topics, including artificial intelligence and health policy, the arts and humanities, global health and gender equity, and much more.

A home on Pennsylvania Avenue

“We are honored that the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center chose to open a new space on Pennsylvania Avenue in the heart of our downtown,” said Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser. “We have set the bold goal to win back our downtown by making Washington, D.C., a place for successful businesses and opportunity-rich neighborhoods. Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center brings a new hub for global leaders to convene, and new employment and educational opportunities to our downtown.”

Situated at the doorstep of the nation’s government in a location specifically selected to foster collaboration with policymakers and practitioners, the Hopkins Bloomberg Center will be a hub of interdisciplinary partnerships and convenings, and an academic engine to advance solutions to the challenges that confront city halls, Washington, and beyond.

From the Krieger School Dean

Fall 2018

This coming spring will mark the 50th anniversary of commencement for the first full undergraduate class at Hopkins that included women. That’s quite a milestone for the university and for this remarkable group of women, many of whom will return to campus for Reunion Weekend 2024, April 5–7, to share their stories.

During their four years at Hopkins, that group of female undergraduates faced challenges and even obstacles at times. Not everyone was pleased with their arrival. But they knew they were breaking new ground, and they pursued their studies with dedication and vigor.

The move to accept women to its undergraduate programs was a sea change for the university and a positive, if belated, step in the right direction to bring new and important voices to our campus and classroom lives. Now, half a century later, our quest to welcome diverse voices to our community is stronger than ever—indeed it is the only way we will continue to grow and flourish.

Without different voices and viewpoints, a vibrant university like ours would not only be prone to navel-gazing, but also miss out on critical new knowledge that only arises when multiple efforts are made together in the name of a single goal: discovery.

It’s not just the discovery that happens in the classroom or the laboratory—it’s the understanding that we can hold diverse viewpoints on critical topics and still work side by side with respect for one another. In fact, our feature article on page 18 explores civic education and the importance of teaching our students how to productively engage with people who may have different opinions or ideas. If we ever expect to emerge from our nation’s current state of polarization, it’s critical that we first learn how to have dialogues across differing viewpoints.

As that determined and courageous first class of women at Hopkins knew, having an array of unique voices creates a community that is curious, engaged, and always discovering.

By ensuring that our community includes as wide an array of voices, viewpoints, backgrounds, and experiences as possible, we hope to serve as a small-scale example of the kind of democracy our nation aspires to. Our community in all its richness remains at the heart of all we do. Thank you for making your voice a part of it.

Christopher S. Celenza

James B. Knapp Dean

The Political Dynamics of Disasters

Fall 2018

When war or natural disasters occur, many activities of daily life still proceed due to the efforts of everyday people who quickly adapt to extraordinary circumstances.

Sarah Parkinson has dedicated her research to studying the behavior of organizations that are active in conflict and crisis zones. In recent years, Parkinson has focused increasingly on medical professionals, especially first responders. Ranging from local clinicians to international volunteers, these providers inhabit complex roles by working across political lines when treating people from rival factions or different nationalities.

If we want to understand the politics of conflict and disasters, it’s important that we look at most people’s lived experience, which is not on the front lines.”
—Sarah Parkinson

“It’s not their job to stand out, but medical professionals can have significant influence on public safety and social change in their societies,” she says. “If we want to understand the politics of conflict and disasters, it’s important that we look at most people’s lived experience, which is not on the front lines.”

Preparing for Challenges

An Aronson Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies in the Department of Political Science, Parkinson is undertaking a new project researching where war and disaster overlap.

One such place is in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, which often house a mix of Palestinians, Syrians, and even migrant workers. Civil defense groups there have taken the lead in fighting wildfire outbreaks and promoting public health by educating the local population about diseases such as cholera.

“I plan on talking to various civil defense agencies in Lebanon and elsewhere about how they’re doing their work and preparing for challenges,” she says. “The research will examine the ways in which unexpected actors in crises can contribute to political dynamics.”

Parkinson’s ongoing research traces back to her dissertation work at the University of Chicago, where she earned her doctorate in 2013. Over the years, she has engaged in extensive field work in the Middle East and North Africa, working with Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Lebanon, humanitarian responders in Iraqi Kurdistan, and members of civil defense agencies in places such as Tunisia.

Repurposing Social Networks

She came to Johns Hopkins in 2016 and has further developed means of using social network theory and ethnographic methods to examine how organizations handle crises. Some of the work recently culminated in her award-winning book published in early 2023, Beyond the Lines: Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon.

In the book, Parkinson examines the evolution of Palestinian militant groups during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). Engaging in backstage labor such as supplying their forces, unmasking collaborators, and disrupting the operations of rivals was critical to the groups’ resiliency. Also key, though, was the effective repurposing of social networks to serve local populations and garner support, for instance by providing essential services such as health care—tying in with Parkinson’s focus on medical professionals in crisis zones.

Overall, Parkinson argues, the traditional emphasis on reporting the numbers of lives lost in disasters— both human-caused and natural in origin—alongside high-level political actions can unintentionally erase the politically pertinent activities of on-the-ground groups.

“A significant issue is that policy is often made from headline news, and that’s not what policy should be based on,” she says. “It’s the wrong set of relationships among affected populations being looked at.”

Note: This story was reported before the violence in Israel and Gaza started on Oct. 7.

Questioning Reality and Our Place in It

Fall 2018

Questions surrounding the nature of the universe and the fabric that holds existence together have long intrigued humans. This contemplation is exactly what united celebrated Argentine poet and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges, pivotal German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and pioneering German quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg.

“Three people you couldn’t think were more different in a variety of ways, all managed through their own ways of thinking about the world to come to a remarkably similar understanding about the relationship between the human intellect and the ultimate nature of reality,” says William Egginton, the Decker Professor in the Humanities and director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute.

[This book] tells a cautionary tale about the danger of assuming reality must conform to the image we construct of it, and the damage that our fidelity to such a seductive ideal can wreak. ”
—William Egginton

In The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Egginton probes four central themes: Are space and time infinitely divisible? Is there a supreme, unconditional being? Is there an edge to the universe? Do we choose our own path, or are our choices predetermined by our physical environment?

“[This book] tells a cautionary tale about the danger of assuming reality must conform to the image we construct of it, and the damage that our fidelity to such a seductive ideal can wreak,” he writes. “Most of all, it sings an ode to the boundless potential of our knowledge, once we have worked ourselves free from the blinders imposed by imagined perfection.”

The Stories Behind the Ideologies

Egginton uses narrative nonfiction to explore the book’s main characters, tracing their evolution of thought from their childhoods to their triumphs and tribulations in relationships and careers.

An incident that greatly influenced Kant was the morning he arrived late to a carriage ride with English merchant Joseph Green. Kant saw Green’s carriage moving down the road, and despite his gesturing, his friend kept moving.

“Kant was ruminating about questions like, ‘How do we know what the right thing to do is when life is nothing but change and disruption?’” Egginton says. “I think that’s how you can explain this famous affinity that Kant would have for regularity, for structure in life and not simply going with the flow of things.”

Different Perspectives

Kant approached the questions central to Egginton’s book with a skeptic’s eye—space and time are not necessarily things that exist in reality, but take shape via our own perception; they are “mapping devices,” Egginton says. Borges similarly believed in the subjective interpretative nature of reality, that humans have no way of encountering the world as it is without putting it into this subjective packaging. Heisenberg’s work in quantum physics and his seminal uncertainty principle—that it is impossible to simultaneously know the exact position and momentum of a particle—suggests that reality is inherently uncertain and open to interpretation.

So where does that leave the reader, grappling with the nature of the world around them?

“What unifies these three characters is they had an uncommon resistance to a very common way of thinking about the world, that it must exist independently of our ways of measuring it,” Egginton says. “I’d like the reader to come away with a kind of skepticism as to their own certainty about the way things must be out in the world.”

Ask the professor: Danielle Evans

Fall 2018

Danielle Evans
Associate Professor in The Writing Seminars

A&S: How to do you embark on writing a short story, and how do you know if it’s going to work?

Danielle Evans: I always carry a notebook with me because I usually have a running list of more than 75 ideas that are pushing me in the direction of a story. Once I land on something, it’s kind of like putting a puzzle together: if I’m thinking about a character and a space, for example, I need to understand why I want to connect those two things and identify some of the ways I might do that. After I’ve entertained the different pieces in my head for a while, I will write a quick draft, always looking for the point where the story really opens up. Sometimes I don’t know what I have until the story is over and I can see what it’s really about.

So from that first draft, I start making foundational edits and then start doing lots of rewrites. It’s a long path to get to what I’m happy with. I tell my students that it’s ok to be in a space where you’re trying to figure out if you’ve given the characters enough room to breathe. I also encourage them to consider the intention of a story they have written, and I will share with them what I understand the intention to be. I want them to experiment with the stories they write.

Danielle Evans is author of two story collections:
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self and The Office of Historical Corrections

Prizes/Awards: Her first collection won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston/Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for fiction; her second won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and was a finalist for the Aspen Literary Prize, the Story Prize, the Chautauqua Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. She has also been awarded the New Literary Project Joyce Carol Oates Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including The Best American Short Stories and The Paris Review.

Yulia Frumer on edible landscaping

Fall 2018

Birds usually snag Yulia Frumer’s blackberries before they have a chance to ripen, but she gets to enjoy plenty of other treats growing in her yard just blocks from the Homewood campus.

Frumer, who holds the Bo Jung and Soon Young Kim Professorship of East Asian Science as associate professor in the Department of the History of Science and Technology, was already an experienced vegetable gardener, but stumbled into edible landscaping during the early days of the pandemic. “You can have something beautiful in the garden, and have it be edible, or if you want to grow something edible, you can also make it beautiful,” she says.

Just down the hill from her fig and quince trees, oyster mushrooms sprout several times a year in the tree stumps Frumer inoculated with spores. Herbs including sage and tarragon, nasturtiums and dill spill down a vertical stone spiral she constructed near the sunchokes. There’s a hedge of pomegranates to share with the neighbors, and around a corner are persimmon, plum, and native pawpaw trees, and medicinal herbs including echinacea, valerian root, and chamomile. Even the daylilies are edible.

It’s been a Zen experience of relinquishing control to weather, pests and disease, and plants with minds of their own, Frumer says. “One of the lessons is that you can’t get too attached to any of this.”

close-up of hand holding branch filled with blackberries — PHOTOS: LARRY CANNER

Digital Comedy Series Takes Dad Jokes Seriously

Fall 2018

In the first episode of the online comedy series Turf Valley, a couple of suburban dads, after waving good-bye to the morning school bus, turn their attention to a very tall, very athletic-looking neighbor.

“That guy’s definitely played some ball,” one says to the other. “You don’t let hands like that slip through your fingers.” Their gawking soon escalates from awkward to embarrassing.

The incident, like much of the seven-episode first season of Turf Valley, draws from the real life of its co-creator, Adam Rodgers, Faxon Director of Film and Media Studies.

“One of my neighbors played football at the University of Maryland,” says Rodgers, who really does live in the Ellicott City, Maryland, neighborhood of Turf Valley. “He was like 6-foot-5 and super fit. We were all a little jealous in a fun way, so that became the basis for the pilot episode.”

Rodgers, who grew up in Baltimore County, co-wrote the series with Tom Ventimiglia, who teaches screenwriting at the Baltimore School for the Arts (BSA).

A New Season

The two are now working on a second season of the series, which has been praised for its non-toxic depictions of at-home dads and has won a fistful of awards, including Best Web Series at WorldFest Houston and the Independent Shorts Awards.

“The show isn’t about how incompetent fathers are, or how weird it is for a dad to be the primary caregiver,” writes Shannon Carpenter, author of The Ultimate Stay-at-Home Dad (2021). “It’s just about three dudes making life work for their family.”

Rodgers and Ventimiglia were invited to HomeDadCon, an annual convention for at-home dads, held in September in Milwaukee. “We brought one of our actors and shot a little piece of an episode at the convention,” Rodgers said.

Each Turf Valley episode—shot, edited, and acted by professionals—is between six and 10 well-paced minutes. The cast includes Charles Mann, who played defensive end for the Washington Redskins and San Francisco 49ers before turning to acting.

Rodgers discovered the joy of filmmaking as a student at Duke University and earned a master’s degree in fine art at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Close to Home

As a screenwriter and director in Hollywood, his credits include Racing for Time, a television movie starring Charles Dutton and Tiffany Haddish; The Response, a 30-minute film that was short-listed for an Academy Award; and At Middleton, a feature romance starring Vera Farmiga, Andy Garcia, and Nicholas Braun.

He joined Hopkins and moved to Maryland in 2018.

Rodgers says his screenwriting classes at Hopkins are “more of a sharing sort of dynamic” because his students are so engaged and hard-working. “The most satisfying thing, I think, is helping young artists discover their voices,” he says.

He started Turf Valley in 2020 as a pandemic project. Working from home like many others at the time, Rodgers found inspiration right outside his Turf Valley window.

“I was just charmed by the fact that I got to walk my kids to a bus stop, and the dads would hang out after we dropped our kids off,” he says. “That was the original launching pad. We would have these interesting conversations after the kids were gone.”

Since then, Turf Valley has grown into a sustainable creative endeavor with a growing audience. It’s funded primarily by product placements of local businesses, and gives students from Hopkins and BSA the opportunity to learn about filmmaking by shadowing professionals as paid interns.

Rodgers says his ultimate goal is to secure more national sponsors, boost the budget, and make a distribution deal with a streaming service.

Do We Hear Silence?

Fall 2018

We’ve all heard of silences that speak as loud as words. Now Rui Zhe Goh has put that cliche to the test.

Goh, a doctoral student studying philosophy and psychological and brain sciences, decided to investigate whether silence affects our auditory system the same way that noise does. In earlier experiments, researchers found that people tend to perceive a single extended sound as lasting longer than a duo of short sounds, even if the sequences are equivalent in length. The same illusion affects visual objects—a rectangle will often be perceived as longer than two squares side by side, despite their lengths being equal.

But those studies were about the presence of something, either a visual object or auditory event. Could the same effect be seen in the absence of something?

“We’re trying to ask whether you can hear silence; can silence be an auditory object?” Goh says. “Does this illusion that happens with auditory objects also happen with silence?”

Goh, working with Chaz Firestone, assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Ian Phillips, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Psychological and Brain Sciences, designed an experiment that mimicked the earlier sound experiment. Participants listened to a recording of bustling, murmuring sounds similar to that of a crowded restaurant, broken by a pair of short silences and one long silence. Then they were asked to characterize the lengths of the silences.

Perception of Silence

The result was identical to the research on sounds. Most people perceived the single, unbroken silence as longer than the duo of silences. Not only that, but the proportion of responses identifying the single silence as longer was identical to the proportion of responses that had found the single sound was longer in the original auditory experiment.

Even Goh was affected. “I knew exactly how long each sequence was because I programmed it—but when I heard it, the single silence sounded longer, and that was fascinating,” he says. “It shows our auditory system doesn’t just divide up sounds, it can divide up empty periods of time to produce auditory events of silence.”

Goh is following up his research with experiments on visual absences. “When you’re in a magic show, and something disappears in front of you, there’s a moment where you experience the absence of the thing,” he says. He has presented the same pattern of sequences using objects disappearing on a screen, with similar results.

Event Segmentation

The process behind this persistent illusion may be event segmentation, Goh says. Our auditory systems, for example, receive a continuous flow of acoustic input, but must break the flow of soundwaves into segments that correspond to the discrete sounds we hear.

Music and theater, even speeches, depend on silences for drama and impact. “Events are important for us, but not just events where there is a stimulus in the world. Events where an auditory stimulus stops are also important. We think that our project can help explain why these experiences have the kind of impact they have on the audience.”

While everyone is familiar with silence, few spend much time thinking about it. “I came into grad school wanting to study our experience of time,” Goh says. “Silence is the experience of time passing, empty time passing. It could be seen as the purest experience of time.”

Collective Creativity

Fall 2018

Divya Nair paints a mural of a blue jay on the wall inside The Allston apartment building.

Divya Nair ’23, outgoing co-president of bARTimore at Hopkins, works on the mural she and co-president Eesha Verma ’23 designed and painted together on the first floor of The Allston apartment building in Charles Village, where many JHU students live.

bARTimore is a 50-member painting and muralling club dedicated to connecting Baltimore and Johns Hopkins through art and murals. Since 2019, members have completed three large mural projects, in addition to smaller themed projects throughout the year.

“Oftentimes we view art as an individual project, but in bARTimore I made a lot of friends doing these collaborative types of murals, and it’s been a great way to meet people as well as de-stress and bring out some of my creative side,” Nair says.

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Explore KSAS

Academics

Student & Faculty Resources

Across Campus

Art Historian Daniel Weiss Returns

A New Beginning

A History in Art

Missing Piece in Human Genome Decoded

New Insights

Building Blocks

From the Krieger School Dean

Questioning Reality and Our Place in It

The Stories Behind the Ideologies

Different Perspectives

Ask the professor: Danielle Evans

Danielle Evans
Associate Professor in The Writing Seminars

Yulia Frumer on edible landscaping

Digital Comedy Series Takes Dad Jokes Seriously

A New Season

Close to Home

Do We Hear Silence?

Perception of Silence

Event Segmentation

Collective Creativity

A New Beginning

A History in Art

New Insights

Building Blocks

Data-driven approaches to policy

A home on Pennsylvania Avenue

Preparing for Challenges

Repur­posing Social Networks

The Stories Behind the Ideologies

Different Perspectives

Danielle EvansAssociate Professor in The Writing Seminars

A New Season

Close to Home

Perception of Silence

Event Segmentation

Repurposing Social Networks

Danielle Evans
Associate Professor in The Writing Seminars