Michaela Baldwin's PROCLIVITY Explores Grief and Civic Rupture at Elsewhere

Michaela Baldwin's 2023 installation PROCLIVITY at Elsewhere, a residency and living museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, transforms a dilapidated space into a meditation on silence, omission, and urban displacement. The work features broken mirrors, rusted box springs, an old toilet and sink, and poems including 'Treaty of Silence' (2022). Baldwin's research into Greensboro's zoning decisions and housing developments that displaced Black communities informs the piece, which treats civic rupture as parallel to personal grief. The artist, born in West Point, Mississippi, works across painting, drawing, installation, and digital illustration, often drawing on craft traditions like sewing and crochet. Her earlier series AFTERSHOCK (2022) uses charcoal and graphite to explore grief's emotional shifts, while paintings like Granny's Pearls (2021) address cultural memory and domestic history. Baldwin describes herself as 'a collector of remnants, memories, objects, gestures.'