Exploring her African heritage through quilts
The Christian cross made from African mud cloth stands under a quilted archway as if marking the entrance to an earlier, simpler style of worship. This art work, "Pentecostal Cross #4," is part of a quilt series by Columbia artist Carole Yvette Lyles which is featured in an ABC documentary "Creativity: Touching the Divine," a show which examines how people express their religious beliefs. It airs today ) at affiliate stations across the country, but will not be seen in Baltimore because Channel 13 chose not to run it.
A Baltimore native who grew up in Walbrook Junction and graduated from Morgan State University, Ms. Lyles spent seven years working for Citicorp as a vice president for human resources before entering academia.
She teaches management at Loyola College, works as a management consultant and expects to receive her doctorate next year from George Washington University's School of Business and Public Management.
Since she took up quilting four years ago, her art quilts have been exhibited in various shows including the internationally juried show "Women in the Visual Arts 1994."
Her work as a quilter explores the 46-year-old artist's relationship with her African heritage as well as her spirituality.
However, Ms. Lyles, a member of Pentecostal Baptist Church in Catonsville, says her creation of a series of Pentecostal crosses took her by surprise.
"I didn't expect to be doing religious art," she says. "I think it comes from my need to understand the place that spirituality plays in my life."
Since June, Emilie Press has been one of the few constants at Baltimore's American Youth Hostel.
Ms. Press, 18, developed a program that pairs local residents with hostelers and finds economical ways for them to savor local culture.
The volunteers, culled from hostel membership lists, accompany visitors to Baltimore attractions such as Center Stage, the downtown farmers market, Edgar Allan Poe House and the Walters Art Gallery.
In exchange for her work, Ms. Press, who graduated from City College in June, gets a free room at the Mulberry Street hostel, and the opportunity to drink coffee with folks who spend months and years trekking around the globe.
"It's kind of weird living in a place where you come downstairs and there are all these people whom you've never seen before," Ms. Press says in the hostel's common room, decorated with a grand piano, a hideous lime-green couch (donated) and a map of the world.
Ms. Press has found that few hostelers arrange their itinerary around stopping in Baltimore. Generally, they are "just passing BTC through" on their way to somewhere else.
But through the grapevine, visitors have come to realize that the Baltimore hostel is well run and that the city isn't just a place to make a pit stop and then move on, she says.
Ms. Press, who will enter Bard College in New York next fall, also has the urge to wander.
Soon, she will leave the hostel and her day job, hop into her 1981 Volkswagen bus and drive cross-country. Then she's off to Katmandu in Nepal, where she plans to serve as a volunteer -- in what capacity, Ms. Press is not sure. "I'm willing to do anything," she says.
Stephanie Shapiro