Carpenter Mike Cutsail and a colleague stood outside their work van on North Charles Street yesterday and gawked at the procession passing before them.
Roughly 40 to 50 people, some in costume - like the man wearing a plastic top hat with daffodils sprouting from it - were sweeping past them, maneuvering push brooms and mini piles of trash. Musicians followed along, keeping the pace.
"We're just wondering what the hell they're doing," Cutsail said. "It's not every day you see a bunch of people sweeping in the streets."
Yesterday marked the second time this month that the city came together in the name of student art, when Maryland Institute College of Art sophomore Jonathan Taube launched his Baltimore Sweep Action Parade.
It's part of the school's two-month-long art exhibition in the Mount Vernon parks, Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square. And it's something of an accidental opposition to the first art project: the golden - and, some said, god-awful - chain-link fence.
Up until Thursday, when most of it came down, the fence blocked access to the parks around Mount Vernon Place and united Baltimoreans in the kind of disgust and discussion usually reserved for the city's roaming rat packs.
It was spit on, vandalized, maligned and the subject of multiple letters to the editor ("My comments on [student artist] Lee B. Freeman and his `public art' would be unprintable," wrote Baltimore's Rosalind Ellis.)
And now that Freeman's fence is finished, there's Taube's heap of trash, ready for sunflower seeds to be planted on top. It, too, roused residents into a state - though often just one of confusion.
Taube, 20, had placed four teams of people at various compass points around the city at 11 a.m. and charged each with sweeping - literally - its way toward Mount Vernon Place. Some were accompanied by marching bands and the occasional stilt walker, because, well, why not?
And when they met at the agreed-upon spot in the southern park about 1 p.m., all the trash they collected - the banana peels, cigarette butts, the doll box and shattered car window glass - was scooped up and put in Taube's sculpture. (Taube made an executive decision to leave behind the dead rat his group found.)
His sculpture is a broom-bound cylinder with a Plexiglas and steel base, an homage to the Washington Monument, titled Monument to Collective Effort. Taube topped off the trash with topsoil and intends to add flower seeds - bioremediation, he says - once the dirt settles. It will remain there until the end of May.
