The Fifth Annual Tom Miller Week Celebrates the Local Artist’s Enduring Legacy

Just south of North Avenue, two murals face each other in a flash of primary color on Harford Road.

On the west corner, a three-story painting depicts a man reading a book, its pages inscribed with the words of an African proverb: “However far the stream flows, it never forgets it origin.” On the east, there is a block-long scene of city life: children riding bicycles, sitting on stoops, eating ice cream cones.

Despite their size and splendor, these artworks can be easy to miss amidst the zoom of traffic at this busy crossroads and the lurking shadow of the Eastern District Courthouse, especially since some of their yellows and blues have faded in the sun. But not for Deyane Moses who vividly remembers the first time she saw them.

“They were larger than life,” says the 38-year-old artist and archivist, who was visiting the area on a field trip to the nearby National Great Blacks in Wax Museum from her native Northern Virginia in the 1990s. “I remember stretching my neck way up, like, ‘Wow!’ I had never seen a mural that big before, much less of a Black person.”

Little did she know then that, decades later, the muralist would become a pivotal part of her own artistic practice.

This month, from Feb. 15-22, Moses will launch the fifth annual Tom Miller Week in honor of the late artist, beloved not only for his magical murals, sprinkled from Oliver to Cherry Hill, but also his playful and poignant screenprints and painted furniture. Inspired by masters like Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, his distinctive Afro-Deco style speaks to the Black experience, at times through satirical societal critique or somber personal reflection, at others through an all-out celebration of only-in-Baltimore joy.

Born in 1945, Tom Miller grew up in Sandtown-Winchester—a “whimsical” child, his mother once told The Baltimore Sun. He attended Carver Vocational-Technical High School with dreams of becoming an illustrator, and, upon graduation, got a scholarship to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), becoming one of the first Black students to enroll after its desegregation.

This is how Moses rediscovered him, as a student there herself. She’d started her career in the Army as a broadcast journalist, along the way finding a passion for sharing Black stories, which she later brought to art school. At MICA, studying photography and curatorial practice, her thesis would result in the Maryland Institute Black Archives, an ongoing project dedicated to preserving the history of the school’s Black artists.

“That’s how I stumbled upon Tom Miller,” she says. “I realized then that I had met him—or his work, that is—all those years ago.”

Delving into the past, she learned about Miller’s life and legacy, from becoming one of the first local Black artists to have a solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1995, to the declaration of Tom Miller Day by Mayor Kurt Schmoke, ultimately taking place only once, that same year.

“I thought, ‘Let’s revive that,’” says Moses, who launched a limited celebration with an online reading by Schmoke during the early pandemic days in 2020, followed by a commemorative mural painting with local artist Ernest Shaw and musician Rufus Roundtree, Miller’s nephew, in 2021. “It just kept growing and growing from there.”

Now, with an outpouring of interest and support, Tom Miller Day has evolved into an entire Tom Miller Week. This year will include community programming at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum and Maryland Center for History & Culture, as well as a months-long exhibition at the Eubie Blake Cultural Center, on view from Feb. 15-April 19. The latter will showcase a range of locally owned works by Miller—some well-known, others never-before-seen—as well as artifacts gathered from friends, family, and fans.

In the future, Moses hopes to launch a traveling retrospective, restore his murals throughout the city, and even create an art scholarship for students at Carver—helping his story live on in Baltimore, and beyond. (In 2000, Miller passed away due to complications from AIDS, at age 54.)

“I just want more and more people to see his work,” says Moses, who now teaches at MICA and works as director of programs and partnerships at Afro Charities, where she is preserving the century-old AFRO American newspaper archives. Last year, she also led a multi-institution initiative to recognize another local art legend, Elizabeth Talford Scott. “To preserve this history, to preserve these legacies, is vitally important,” says Moses. “Like they always say, if you don’t know where you’ve been, you don’t know where you’re going.”

Besides, for Moses, Miller’s work epitomizes the best of this Baltimore—its monuments, its waterfront, its rowhouses, its people. Two of his screenprints now hang in her living room, depicting Baltimoreans of all ages shopping with arabbers and savoring a summer crab feast.

“These are the good times in Baltimore,” she says. “Everyone here can relate.”