Each First Thursday Festival, we’re excited to present a different interactive exhibit featuring members of the Baker Artist Portfolios. This month’s exhibit, “Welcome Home,” is curated by Shaawan Francis Keahna:
Shaawan Francis Keahna
What is a home? Is it a house you have some degree of ownership over? Is it a safe haven from the chaos of the world? In The Archipelago Conversations, Édouard Glissant tells Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Accordingly, a new style of architecture will emerge concerned with the interior rather than the exterior. An architecture which will permit you opacity, let you live without being seen.”
In this exhibit, the curator recreates the elements that defined “home” for him in his earliest years: a wooden table, a CRT television set, mirrors on every wall, and paper lining the tabletops to scribble all over. Home was where his artistry began, a kind of opaque space, sequestered from the context and reality of his surroundings. Is this a room on Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis, or a suburban kitchenette? Are we on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation or the Meskwaki Settlement? Is there sovereignty here, or subjugation? We don’t know. What we do know is we feel safe. We are safe.
“Welcome Home” is a call for communion among anyone who can hold a crayon. It’s a reminder that being creative is not about monetization, but about expression. It is a response to the stimuli we face in the world, whether the world is outside our walls or inside. It is also, more literally, a recreation of the curator’s childhood, using the generously shared memories and family lore of Baltimore’s most brilliant Baker artists.
The artists would like to thank Baker Artists and WTMD for the opportunity to welcome you home.
Jordan Carter
Meet the artists:
Shaawan Francis Keahna (b. 1997, Minneapolis, MN) is a writer, producer, cartoonist and musician. His visual work has been shown in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, All My Relations Gallery, the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts, and the Watermark Art Center. He’s a regular columnist for Mister Magazine. Other places his words can be found include the Hoxie Gorge Review, Tension Literary, Unstaged, and forthcoming in Never Whistle At Night Part II: Back for Blood. Keahna lives and works in Baltimore.
Jordan Carter (b.1996, Peoria, IL) is an interdisciplinary visual artist who has been creating since 2017. Crossing the bridge from the world of neuroscience —while bringing some things along— they have fully immersed themselves in the realm of creativity. Through documentary and fine art photography, video portraiture, and assemblage sculpture, their creations are deeply layered. They have curated and participated in a number of exhibitions through The Deutsch foundation, Mera Kitchen Collective, and Our Art Room Agency. They incorporate intergenerational archives and bring their work into the physical via curated installations of sights, sounds, and staged rooms. Informed through a Black Queer diasporic lens, Carter articulates the intricacies of the living and the dead; creating rooted worlds with pasts, presents, and futures—all the while leaving room for fantasy.
Amaka Erika Korie
Amaka Erika Korie is an artist and healer who unifies and uplifts through radical reflections and stories. Amaka is the creator of Mira Mma, an upcycling affirmation art studio. Mira Mma is an ode to her Igbo heritage—combining the English word “mirror” with the Igbo word for beautiful, mara mma. Through Mira Mma, she transforms discarded materials into custom affirmation pieces that encourage viewers to radically accept and celebrate their reflection. Amaka earned her BA in Film and Television from Howard University’s Cathy Hughes School of Communications, graduating Magna Cum Laude in 2021. Her expansive art practice also includes filmmaking, acting, and writing.
Eileen O’Donnell is a multidisciplinary artist who has been working with clay for over 20 years. In 2024, she was awarded a Maryland State Arts Council Grant for Artists. While primarily a sculptor, she has also worked as a cinematographer and production designer for narrative features and short films. As an artist’s assistant, she has worked with a variety of artists, among them Richard Torchia and Debra Masters. Recently she traveled to the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts to learn
Eileen O’Donnell
from internationally recognized ceramic sculptor Kyungmin Park, and is currently preparing sculptures for a solo show at the Manor Mill in the fall. She teaches Foundations of Handbuilding at the Baltimore Clayworks. You can see Eileen making sculptures with her studio buddies on YouTube at @eileenodonnellsculptor
Miceál O’Donnell was raised in Jersey City, NJ, received his Bachelor’s in fine arts at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. He studied writing with Pulitzer Prize winning author Stephen Dunn, and spent years playing clarinet in a hardcore/punk band. In 2000 he joined the U.S. Coast Guard, where he earned the USCG Achievement medal. After the military, he lived in New Orleans, where he began a more formal pursuit of filmmaking. Some of his recent experience includes working as a producer on a TV show following the RAFA Racing Club on the IMSA 2025 circuit, and directing and animating a short starring Emmy Award Winning actress, Sheryl Lee Ralph.
Since moving to Baltimore, he won 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place in the Baltimore Screenwriting competition in consecutive years. In 2018, he was a finalist for the Baker Artist Award. In 2019 he was awarded the Maryland State Art Council Individual Artist Award, and the Creativity Grant in 2021, and in 2023, the MSAC Professional Development Grant. In August 2025, his short animation,
Safra
“Heart Attack!” will screen at the Sidewalk Film Festival.
SAFRA is a multimedia holistic art form. They practice the art of indigenous storytelling in order to convey the multitude of worlds they exist in. SAFRA is the shapeshifter, a hybrid of “GodHeads”. She transforms herself into her primordial state, her first incarnation in which she embodies the divine trans dark feminine. Their movements are an expression of the occult and sacred forms of life beyond the human world and allows herself to not just shapeshift her physical body but the energies she occupies and all those who witness. SAFRA is a primordial messenger, she is an ancestor of the African Sibyl or Prophetess. She utters with her sacred heca ancestral messages to enable a global spiritual intervention. She stakes claim to the body she lives in and land she lives on in order for black/indigenous peoples to reclaim sovereignty and healing for themselves. SAFRA is an activist and focuses on being a love-body to the world, a medicine woman of dark light and deep truth, reinforcing the ushering of a Matriarchal future.
