Friday June 13, 2014: My name is Shelby Norton and I am an Interdisciplinary Sculpture student at MICA. During my freshman year I took a class called Community Arts Partnership (CAP): Finding Baltimore. An advocate for restorative justice came to talk to the class with a psychologist from the city jail. He 
liked what we were doing in the class and arranged for us to meet with the art group at Patuxent Institution in Jessup, MD. It was a pivotal moment for the way I view art and my career path. To this day, Dr. McCamant is a dear friend and mentor. I worked with him for a year through the CAP program at the Baltimore City Detention Center in the ward of psychiatric health as an art therapy intern building community. The jail was in unrest with Black Guerilla Family (BGF) scandals, and Dr. McCamant had been petitioning against some of the warden’s unjust decisions when he was asked to resign from that position. He continued to work for the state at JCI, but I didn’t work with him for a full year. I was interested in getting back into the line of work, but was out of touch with Dr. McCamant. I heard that a MICA professor, Mikita Brottman, was doing groups at JCI, so I contacted her and asked to be her intern. After it was approved, I invited both Dr. McCamant and Mikita to an art opening at Gallery 405 where they met and discussed working together.
Read more about Shelby’s experience.
