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.

Lee Boot (00:00): So now you're standing in front of the fourth and final large painting in this room. This painting is also part of the SEEe Project the systems exploration and engagement environment. Again, the first painting on this wall was that the West Baltimore Virtual sculpture is also part of the SEEe Project. I'll try to explain how in just a minute. And this painting is also an attempt to try to symbolize, depict a range in 3D space, even though this is imagined 3D space. This is just a painting a bunch of factors that led to white flight, white people leaving Baltimore City particularly around the middle of the last century. What were the factors that if you were going to try to visualize all of the factors in some large migratory movement like that in a 3D space, where would you put things?

(01:15): How would you arrange them? So you can see here I've kind of used the space under the map to talk about history. Now, I'm not labeling all these things here, that's why I'm giving you this in the audio tour. But when you look at that painting, the big red shape is actually the United States. You probably figured that out as if you were kind of floating above the Atlantic Ocean looking in at the United States. And you can see under the paint, under the red image of the United States. There's all kinds of notations really about, about, about racism, about how this country built so much of its economy on the backs of enslaved people. And you see you know, slave rosters and you see cell biology. You know, there were these crazy ideas about how one race was biologically superior to another.

(02:08): You know, where would you put that if you were trying to arrange the story of showing white people's kind of mass exodus from cities as black folks moved in? What a tragic phenomenon. So let me just say about this SEEe project that we are trying to figure out how to tell, again, very complex stories of complex systems in large 3D immersive environments. I am doing these paintings to try to imagine that myself before we build them, if that makes any sense. So this is really like a big sketch for how you might build a 3D world to explain some issue like this. So everything on this wall is related to the SEEe Project, and we hope to do a demonstration of that project at the peel and the not too distant future. But these are some artifacts from it.