A residency built on exchange — and on Baltimore.

"Once you find yourself in another civilization, you're forced to examine your own."

— James Baldwin

Baldwin wrote that after leaving Harlem for Paris, and later for Istanbul. He wasn't alone. For most of the twentieth century, the most important American artists — especially Black American artists — had to leave the country to find the creative and social conditions that would let them do their work.

Josephine Baker left East St. Louis for Paris in 1925. Romare Bearden went to Paris after the war. Lois Mailou Jones painted in Paris and Haiti because the American art world wouldn't take her seriously as a Black woman at home. Augusta Savage went to Paris on a fellowship, came back to Harlem, and built the Harlem Community Art Center — one of the most important artist training institutions of its era — because she understood that the goal wasn't to escape permanently but to bring what she'd learned home.

The pattern is clear: cross-cultural residency produces work that couldn't exist without it. The pattern is also unjust. For generations, Baltimore artists — like most American artists outside a few coastal capitals — have had to choose between staying home without international context or leaving home to get it. Nosreme is built to reverse that choice. We bring the world to Baltimore, so Baltimore artists can work in international conversation without having to leave.

That's the reversal the name carries. Not a rejection of the tradition Baldwin and Baker and Savage came out of — a continuation of it, inverted. They went abroad because they had to. We're building so the next generation doesn't.