When I was doing my residency at Hopkins, I lived in the Copycat Building. I came across this new documentary and book about the building via The Atlantic Cities blog:
Rob Brulinski and Alex Wein are just two of the hundreds of artists who have lived and worked over the past 30 years in Baltimore’s Copycat building, a former bottle cap factory in the recently coined Station North district. But in the decades since it became the center of Baltimore’s avant garde community, they’re the first to document the building’s entire history into a book.
The Copycat Project is a 160-page photographic catalog of current tenants, highlighting the potent creative scene that continuously germinates inside the old industrial space. The book also sheds light on the long and varied past of the building, since, as Brulinski puts it, “everyone knows what the Copycat is, but no one knows the history of it.” The book will be published in June and available for purchase on the artists’ website.
If you know Baltimore, you know the Copycat Building. It’s quite a special place. The contrast between my two worlds— one at Hopkins and one as part of the center of the Baltimore art scene— helped my career in unimaginable ways. For me, designing a practice that focused on the creative scene just made so much sense. Here’s a photo of me in my space.
It was massive and only $700 a month. I took a few ten thousand photographs in that space. Good times. Thank you Rob & Alex for documenting the Copycat.
(Source: vimeo.com)
