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Ode.

@anode.tous

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Ode. is a restorative arts community for the Black and somethings, a home for every version of you, every history that shaped you.

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A few decades on, the Avenue is rewriting itself again.

The State of Maryland designated this corridor a Black Arts & Entertainment District in 2019. The Avenue Bakery has been holding court since 2011, selling Poppay's rolls — named for the owner's grandfather — and quietly working to reclaim the legacy of the corridor. The Eubie Blake Cultural Center keeps the piano in tune. Arena Players just opened another season. The Arch Social Club still has its lights on.

The Avenue is not finished. It never was.

Ode. is a restorative arts community for the Black and somethings, building a home in Baltimore. We are not the first. We are not the last. We are the next room in a house that has been built and rebuilt, by hand, for over a hundred years.

Come build with us.

Love, Ode. by @anode.tous

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3 months ago

Beloved Dreamer,

This week's flower goes to Brandon Donahue-Shipp.

A student of airbrushing, assemblage, and collage. Baltimore. A 2026 Sondheim Art Prize finalist — the kind of nod the city only gives the makers it has already been watching.

Watch him at work and the story gets quiet. He is not in a hurry to finish. He is in a slow, careful conversation with the surface — the cursive that loops itself into music, the face that emerges where the graphite stays patient, the palm tree that lands like a memory of somewhere warm.

A student. Notice how that word is doing real work in his bio. Mastery is not the language here. Practice is.

Pull up to @bdonahueshipp. Tell him where you saw him — that's how the trail stays warm.

We name the seedling that is already a tree.

Love, Ode. by @anode.tous

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3 months ago

In April 1968, Dr. King was killed in Memphis.

In the days that followed, Baltimore burned. Most of what burned, burned along Pennsylvania Avenue.

The fire was an answer to a country that had spent decades refusing to listen. The buildings that came down were buildings that had been redlined, disinvested, and abandoned by the people whose names were on the deeds. The grief was for King, and for everything that had already been taken.

The Avenue did not recover the way it should have. The bulldozers that came after — wearing the language of renewal — did the rest.

We tell this part because we are not in the business of pretty stories. The Avenue is a love letter to a place that was hurt. Restoration is the work of remembering both at once.

We are still here. by @anode.tous

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3 months ago

In 1953, eight Baltimoreans started a theater that traveled — Coppin State, the Druid Hill Avenue YMCA, the Great Hall at St. Mary's, the Murphy Auditorium at Morgan State — for ten years before it found a permanent home.

Sam Wilson. Jimmie Bell. Bernard Byrd. Doris Dilver. Aurthur Thurogood. Irvin Turner. Joe Wilson. Julius Wilson.

We say them because they should be said.

Seventy-three years later, Arena Players is still running — the oldest continuously operating African American community theater in the United States, now at 801 McCulloh Street.

Generations of Baltimore actors learned what a stage was there. Generations of children walked into those seats and found out the people on the wall could be from their block. The theater never sold itself short, and it never forgot who it was for.

Community theater is a phrase that flattens what Arena is. Sanctuary is closer.

This is our inheritance. by @anode.tous

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3 months ago

The Arch Social Club was casually founded in 1905 and incorporated on March 15, 1912. Since 1972, it has held court at 2426 Pennsylvania Avenue.

It is widely regarded as the oldest continuously operating African American social club in the United States. Through the Great Migration. Through Jim Crow. Through the uprising. Through every renewal and every threat of renewal. The doors keep opening.

There is a thing this country does where it tells Black community spaces to celebrate their twentieth anniversary like it's a miracle. Arch is celebrating its hundred-and-fourteenth.

Old as a sycamore. Roots like one too.

We come from this. by @anode.tous

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3 months ago

Two Baltimore-born artists. Two of the Royal's most beloved.

Chick Webb. Born 1905. A drummer with a curvature of the spine that should have stopped him and didn't. He led the Savoy Ballroom band that made Harlem dance, and he gave a seventeen-year-old Ella Fitzgerald her start.

Ethel Ennis. Born 1932. A voice that turned down the chance to leave Baltimore for the world more than once — because Baltimore was where she lived. She sang the National Anthem at Nixon's inauguration with no orchestra, no fanfare, and made it sound like a hymn.

A drum kit and a voice. Both raised here. Both ours. by @anode.tous

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4 months ago

Cabell Calloway III moved to Baltimore as a boy and walked into Frederick Douglass High School with a voice that was already louder than the room.

He worked the Avenue before the Cotton Club ever heard of him. Minnie the Moocher came out of a kid who learned to phrase a song between Druid Hill and the Royal.

Eight decades later, his hi-de-ho is still in the air at the corner of Penn and Lafayette.

The Avenue raised him. We raised him too. by @anode.tous

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4 months ago

Just past Lafayette and Pennsylvania, a bronze woman stands eight feet tall, head tilted, jaw set. Behind her, panels rising up — children, prisoners, grief, the south.

This is Billie Holiday's Baltimore.

She came of age here. She washed steps here. She listened here — to Bessie Smith, to Louis Armstrong, on a Victrola in a back room — and built the ear that the rest of the world would eventually borrow.

By the time her voice was the one this country could not stop listening to, she was somewhere else. But the Avenue knew her first.

You can stand at her feet on a Saturday afternoon and hear her if the wind is right.

That child in you is still here. by @anode.tous

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4 months ago

Beloved Dreamer,

This week's flower goes to Innocent Mwaipungu — Mikato Art.

Tanzanian-born. Baltimore-rooted. A painter who came to the brush the way many of us came to ours — through a season that asked the work to be a lifeline.

In the pandemic, when the world went small and the rooms got loud, he turned toward the canvas. What he made there was not a project. It was a record — of his family, of an inner world he refused to let those years take.

He was also among the makers Tyree Guyton called in to put hands on Let the Record Show at Harborplace. The kind of yes that lands when someone has been doing the work in private long enough that the public room finally notices.

Pull up to @mikato_art. Find him at innocent__mwaipungu. Tell him where you saw him — that's how the trail stays warm.

We name the seedling.

Love, Ode. by @anode.tous

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4 months ago

For forty-nine years, a building at 1329 Pennsylvania Avenue held a stage that everyone wanted to step on.

The Royal Theatre. Opened in 1922 as the Black-owned Douglass; renamed the Royal three years later. Demolished in 1971.

If you sang Black music in this country between those years, the Royal was on your tour. Duke Ellington played here. Ella Fitzgerald. Pearl Bailey. Sammy Davis Jr. Lena Horne. Count Basie. Louis Armstrong. Redd Foxx. James Brown. Nat King Cole. The Supremes. The list is a roll call you do not get tired of reading.

The building is gone. The marquee is a memorial. The lineage is in the hands of every Black maker who ever stood under a light.

We carry it. by @anode.tous

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4 months ago

In West Baltimore in 1887, a child was born to two parents who had been enslaved.

He learned the organ before he learned the alphabet. By fifteen he was playing ragtime in a Baltimore bordello his mother said God did not want him in. By thirty-four, he had co-written Shuffle Along with Noble Sissle — the first all-Black Broadway musical — and changed what stages were allowed to look like.

Eubie Blake performed for almost a century. He kept a way of laughing that everyone who met him remembers.

The Avenue was his apprenticeship. Baltimore was his root.

We are still in this lineage. by @anode.tous

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4 months ago

Pennsylvania Avenue, West Baltimore.

A few blocks of asphalt that held — for the better part of a century — the loudest, most beloved, most rhythm-soaked stretch of road in this city. They called it the Avenue. They called it Black Broadway. They called it home.

We are spending the next ten posts there.

Not as a museum tour. As a benediction.

Pull up.

Love, Ode. by @anode.tous

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4 months ago