Take an audio tour of a 2022-23 exhibition at The Peale, Baltimore's Community Museum! Listen to artist Lee Boot chat about his show "Lee Boot: Abstracts & Artifacts," on view at The Peale from November 2022-January 2023. You can see videos and interact with more media files using Smartify, the ultimate cultural travel app! Includes 21 narrated stops.

ee Boot (00:00): What you should be standing in front of now is a tall projection video image on the wall of a virtual sculpture, a fountain. Really, this fountain sculpture does not exist as a real tangible thing that you can touch. It only exists in virtual, in virtual form, and it's a it's, it's an artifact from a collaboration between the imaging research center and the Arch Social Club in West Baltimore. And some economists, some world class economists, including Donald Harris, Kamala Harris's dad, a Stanford university economist, and Gladstone, Hutchinson Fluney we call him who's an economist from Lafayette College, who works with Donald Harris a lot. And of course, the folks at Arch Social Club, John Harris and Miriam Blackwell, as well as a community organizer. Denise Griffin Johnson, a cultural organizer she would call herself who works in West Baltimore and with whom we have worked for many years now.

(01:09): This sculpture is a really interesting project for us. This virtual sculpture, it actually will exist in a game engine. It's, it's actually in game engine. It's, it's in a video. It's in video game software. So even though you're seeing just a video of it here in actuality in our lab, it's in an interactive 3D kind of game space where you can move around it yourself and look down in the fountain and all that kind of stuff. And the idea is to use something like this to project a sculpture of what could be on the sides of buildings or insides of buildings to celebrate the concepts that these economists have come up with. Again, working closely with that community. The ideas they have for how to develop a community are, are just fascinating. And each of the ideas are represented by a different component of this sculpture.

(02:09): So the horns mean one thing, and the, and the, the multicolored things that are floating up in the air mean another thing. And the kind of cube structures that go up the middle, these are all symbols of economic principles, economic development principles. So in a way, this sculpture is really old school. Like, think about, you know, back in the Renaissance or certainly hundreds of years ago when if there was a big sculpture in a public square, it, every piece of it would mean something. There would be symbols and icons and, and stories that people were familiar with. It wasn't like today where you might see a beautiful sculpture outside in a park somewhere, and it might be very abstract, or you might have no idea what it means. There might be a name you're kind of guessing on your own.

Lee Boot (02:58): When people see this projected, they will have a, a description of what it means. And the cool thing is they're actually thinking of building this. It would be, I don't know, 20, 30 feet high, really wonderful. And the transformation of West Baltimore. So I can't say enough about this project, but I've spoken too long, so I'll let you move on.