Social Practice
The Compound
Established 2010
The Compound is an artist-run nonprofit in Baltimore City that supports individual and collective production within experimental cultural, social, and urban space. Prioritizing affordability and sustainability, the compound provide’s spaces to Baltimore’s artists and artisans. The complex of units that make up the Compound includes local small businesses, individual artist studios, event spaces, and experimental living spaces for artist-residents of the Compound.
In 2010, Baltimore artists Nicholas Wisniewski and Marlon Ziello purchased the 20,000 square-foot former S.W. Betz forklift factory in the East Baltimore Midway neighborhood. The complex had been vacant for more than six years. In collaboration with other local artists and members of the local community—without outside investment and largely through sweat equity—the once-vacant factory was transformed into a multi-purpose community hub. Today, the Compound provides affordable housing to working artists, cost-effective work/studio space to artisans and community-based organizations, and employment and educational opportunities to Midway residents and youth. Since 2010, the Compound has been a site of robust community building in the Midway neighborhood including public educational programming and cultural events.
Midway Neighborhood Cooperative
The Midway Neighborhood Cooperative is a cooperatively owned and run construction and neighborhood development company. Made up of Midway residents and business owners, MNC is dedicated to principles of affordability, sustainability, solidarity and participatory planning rooted in a democratic workplace. MNC works to build neighborhood resources for and by residents of the Midway neighborhood.
Baltimore Development Cooperative
Established 2007
The Baltimore Development Cooperative (BDC) was an artist collective comprised of Dane Nester, Nicholas Wisniewski and Scott Berzofsky that had an interdisciplinary practice that used the strategies of art, research, and activism to critically engage with urban spatial politics. Co-founded in 2007, the group produced tours, exhibitions, workshops and site-specific projects in public space. The BDC is dedicated to the analysis of neoliberal urbanism and the invention of alternatives based on social, economic and ecological justice in the city.
Participation Park
Project of Baltimore Development Cooperative:
Established in 2007
Participation Park was an ongoing public art project and activist initiative started in 2007 by a collaboration between Scott Berzofsky, Dane Nester, and Nicholas Wisniewski that was based on converting a vacant lot in East Baltimore into an urban farm and social space. Against the increasing privatization of public spaces in the city and the top-down forms of urban planning that design them, BDC squatted the land and collaborated with neighborhood residents to produce a space that responded to our collective needs and desires. Inspired by movements to ‘reclaim the commons’ and demand a ‘right to the city,’ the park was an experiment in democratic spatial practice, inviting everyone who participated in the use of the space to engage in the political process of shaping it.
Camp Baltimore
Established 2005
Headquarters, Contemporary Museum Exhibition 2007-2008