JANUARY 2026: JC Ambrose

"the scent of steamed crabs wafted, and Pabst flowed like water"

For January's Maryland Artist of the Month, Artists from Maryland is featuring JC Ambrose! Below, you will find her prose piece "Abstract Street," and an artist's statement.

JC Ambrose is a writer who serves on the faculty of her alma mater, the Baltimore School for the Arts. She is a recipient of the Presidential Scholarship at CCBC. Her work is published in The Write Launch and won the ALL WRITE COLUMBIA non-fiction Conference 2025.

Abstract Street

The eighties had a "fun sure is fun" demeanor in South Baltimore — with humming grit from the backyard, two lovers twirl, a wild delight dancing the jig at Copa Bay, where the scent of steamed crabs wafted, and Pabst flowed like water at corner bars and whole families lived in rows of brick houses that lined the narrow streets in a city trying to hold onto its heart through change on South Charles St. in the middle of the block just between which dead-ended at the port, to the dead eye saloon, just before the arch of the Hanover Street bridge on a Friday afternoon her walk home from school she would stop at the house on Heath Street for a snack before returning to the Charles Street house she fell and scraped her knee again, same spot as last time, now with a stinging pain, she knocked on Anna Lane's door, waiting for an answer, turned the crystal knob and truly fine with entering on her own the phone cord stretched taut to the cellar where her cousin dwelt, the second cousins, her mother's first, all went to Hammerjacks at night, a fun sure is fun kind of place, had the time of their lives living in South Baltimore as cousins lived on the second floor of the Italian-style row house, she loved their girlfriends; sometimes, she'd confuse the names and rat them out, unintentionally, she was ten, and her tongue was quickly becoming witty once they all started dating girls named Theresa though, Michael eventually married a Lisa muttering — Anna Lane, what's new? Well, Jessie, I will show you a dining room corner nook with an artist's easel she had never seen such an object at school was made only with masking tape to post paper for finger painting, but never anything as refined as an easel was in a Baltimore Elementary school, maybe in Roland Park, but not in South Baltimore, muttering — What are you doing, Anna Lane? What is this? Can I touch it? She wanted to touch everything, with an explanation — No, Jessie, it's delicate and called an easel which is needed as Anna Lane learns to paint at School #33, then, Anna Lane, told Jessie never to stop educating herself because where there is a will, there is a way home — maybe she doesn't know what a will is and will have the will to look it up in a dictionary when she gets home to Nana's because anything the family bohemian, Anna Lane, wanted to do, Jessie wanted to do, too, like marry into the Baltimore Italian Mafia, sounded fun, she would like to have a husband from across the pond—that's what Baltimoreans call the harbor from the Patapsco that sits between Fells Point and Federal Hill, Uncle Sugie was from Little Italy, Baltimore, in Fells Point and knew everyone in Baltimore from Pimlico to the Dundalk docks because he liked to gamble; there were many gains, and along with many gains came losses, too, but, Anna Lane pulled out a paintbrush from her cardigan jacket, she had been working on a still-life of a fruit bowl, off a glazed ceramic piece, which Nana had fired the perfect kitschy aesthetic from the decade at the corner kiln ceramic shop on Fort Avenue, a very pop art and slightly oval with a scalloped rim, pastel pinks, yellows, mint, and creamy off-white bowl with bananas, grapes, oranges, an apple, and a pear that she didn't want to have, nor to be the one to tell Anna Lane that her still life painting looked nothing like Nana's ceramic bowl of fruit, but, she did murmuring — Ahhh... You picked up on that it's supposed to be that way, called "abstract acrylic" lost at that point her hand pressed her bleeding knee and somewhat in need of the dictionary to look up in the word "abstract," she exclaimed her request and regardless, Anna Lane went on to explain that acrylic is a paint, not finger paint; you use a brush by focusing more on texture and movement, drying fast, making it a good companion for abstract art, Anna Lane's fruit on canvas was abstracted into round forms, like color fields of her impressions with a dusky green oval that might suggest a pear, while a dense, deep crimson blotch hints at an apple — a loose cluster of circular stamps or finger prints in muted purples and browns with a curved yellow banana crescent implies the moon's darkest, most ominous form along with thick textured strokes, possibly using palette knives or even cloth to press and scrape paint leaving raw areas with washed-out pigment, somewhere between shape and void, then soft terracotta, with muted sienna and burnt umber delectable depth like dull gold from a jar of change grandmother, Marilyn, had taken the bus to the Landsdowne Inn for a card reading with Miss Bessie back in Charles St., Nana awaited the call while sweeping the marble steps with a band-aid in her housecoat pocket.

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"Abstract Street" is a piece of non-fiction prose that functions as a braided memory—part neighborhood portrait and part coming-of-age vignette. It documents South Baltimore in the 1980s through the sensory logic of my childhood: movement before chronology, texture before explanation. Rather than presenting memory as a clean narrative, the prose allows recollection to sprawl, says what it remembers the way it was remembered with overlapping voices, half-finished thoughts, bars, bridges, cousins, and paint.

The piece was created through an intentional refusal of conventional punctuation and linear pacing. Long, breathless sentences mirror how memory behaves when it is triggered by smell, color, or touch—the sting of a scraped knee, the taut stretch of a phone cord, the pastel glaze of a ceramic fruit bowl. The language borrows from oral storytelling, family lore, and the interior monologue of my inner child, who did not yet possess the vocabulary for what I had learned, but I understood its importance. Descriptive passages slide between lived experience and art criticism, allowing the still-life painting to be seen both through my inner child’s confusion and my Great-Aunt’s retrospective clarity. Her name to me was Aunt Elaine; however, I called her ‘Anna Lane’ due to my family’s thick Baltimore accents. This layering reflects how meaning accrues over time: what once felt incidental becomes formative.

The work exists to preserve a disappearing emotional geography. South Baltimore is not presented as nostalgia but as a lived ecosystem—working-class, bohemian, familial, contradictory—held together by routine, humor, and resilience in a decade of transition. At its center is the moment of encountering art not as an institution, but as something domestic, fragile, and possible: an easel in a dining room corner, acrylic paint drying too fast, abstraction explained at eye level through concrete details. That moment marks the beginning of an education that is not sanctioned by school but transmitted through kinship and curiosity.

Ultimately, this prose exists to honor how art enters a life quietly and irrevocably. It asserts that cultural inheritance does not always arrive through museums or textbooks, but through relatives, neighborhoods, and offhand advice—never stop educating yourself—spoken while sweeping marble steps. The piece claims memory as a place collaborator in the making of an artist.