Susan Washington

_Photo by Andrew James Wies_

In a city that too often loses its talent to bigger markets, [AREA 405](https://www.area405.com/) is proving you can stay, build, and thrive right here.

Walk into the space and you feel it immediately. It isn’t a white box - it’s a conversation. Brick, steel, the memory of machines. A 5,000-square-foot industrial shell, preserved so the work can push against it. Art speaks to the room and the room speaks back. That tension is part of the magic.


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AREA 405 began as an artist-driven rescue mission. When the building was on the verge of being converted into luxury condos, the Central Baltimore Partnership stepped in with local partners to preserve what matters most in a creative city: space. Since then, the team has done the unglamorous work that changes everything - lead abatement, HVAC, and accessibility improvements - transforming it into a safer, more welcoming gallery that still wears its history with pride.

Today, the building is alive with creative energy. Approximately forty studios occupy the upper floors, all of which are currently rented by a mix of long-time tenants and newer graduates establishing their practices in Baltimore. “We were able to keep a lot of the original community,” says Joyce Liang, Area 405’s gallery manager. “We’re not displacing artists, we’re bringing new ones in.” That continuity gives the space its pulse and keeps the city’s creative ecosystem connected.

That same energy carries through the ground floor, where exhibitions, performances, screenings, music, and workshops all share the same walls without sanding off the edges. “It took time to learn how to balance it,” Liang admits. “We want the space to stay radical but also sustainable. You can be bold and still take care.”


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Their current exhibition, _**Pitted: Home at the Heart of an Empire**_ (on view through November 21, 2025), captures that ethos perfectly. Curated by PULP, a collective of twenty recent MICA graduates, _**Pitted**_ explores what it means to slow down and reclaim the act of making in a world that never stops refreshing. The show opened October 10 during the Station North Second Friday Art Walk, filling the building with sculptural and material-driven works that feel both raw and intentional.

The curatorial text compares our tech-driven pace to a ship hurtling across open water, an empire of speed and profit- while the artists aboard long to disembark, touch the ground, and plant something that takes time to grow. That tension between acceleration and grounding becomes the show’s quiet metaphor, made tangible through steel, fabric, resin, and found material.

One standout piece interacts with an old shade-press left in the building: a long-haired figure stretched through the machine, head still poised, lashes on, lipstick smudged but defiant. Liang laughs, describing it: “It’s rebellious and funny at the same time-like saying, ‘We might get crushed by the system, but we’ll still have our nails done.” Another sculpture reshapes a window frame into a kneeling human form, offering the show’s quietest message: making a home often begins in silence.

**_Pitted_** extends beyond the gallery walls with public programs like the World-Building Workshop: Imagining Otherwise and GRIOT GENDER, a storytelling and identity workshop led by Oreoluwa Akinyode. Supported by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation and Free Fall Baltimore, these activations reinforce the exhibition’s communal spirit, art not as product but as practice, language, and shared process.



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Baltimore loses too many young artists to bigger cities. Area 405 is a counterargument you can walk through: affordable studios, space for emerging voices, and mentorship through proximity. When a festival like Sweaty Eyeballs needs room to stretch, 405 says yes. When a Pride-month project needs a home for trans histories, 405 says yes. When a Baltimore-born designer wants to stage a fashion show during New York Fashion Week, 405 finds a way to make it sing inside a sculpture show.

“This is cultural infrastructure,” Liang says. “We’re showing that artists can build careers here. You don’t have to leave Baltimore to make it.”

The next chapter opens in 2026 with a tenant exhibition curated in-house and a month of activations including workshops, screenings, performances, and a gallery-naming celebration honoring Dr. Leslie King Hammond, a cornerstone of Baltimore’s art history.


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If you haven’t yet, catch _**Pitted**_ before it closes on Friday, November 21, 5–9 p.m. Walk the show slowly. Let the building be part of the reading. This isn’t just another gallery; it’s proof that Baltimore’s art scene isn’t waiting for permission, it’s already building its own empire.

AREA 405 is Holding the Line for Baltimore’s Artists

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