The plump sassy cardinal that is Beulah Smith's first work of art went on view yesterday at the Marlborough Apartments, where until the 1940s Etta and Claribel Cone displayed one of the world's great collections of modern
paintings.

Smith's stitchery - a cardinal chirping embroidery notes - may never go to
the Baltimore Museum of Art like the Cone Collection, which reopens this
weekend in newly renovated galleries. But it's certainly a charming bird.

"That's my favorite bird, the cardinal, especially the red ones. And the
red one is the male. I like red," says Smith, who is 84 and has lived 18
years at the Marlborough - not quite half as long as Etta Cone, who died
in 1949. Claribel died 20 years earlier.

Beulah Smith stitched her cardinal as part of the Marlborough Art Project,
which brought together Maryland Institute, College of Art students and
Marlborough residents to explore the building's history, its residents'
past and present, notably the Cones, and their connection to the larger
community.

The Marlborough, on Eutaw Place, has undergone several transformations
since the Cones' time, some of them quite unhappy for the building. The
handsome Beaux Arts exterior remains elegant. But the interior was gutted
in the 1970s, and the lobby, ballroom, dining room, lovely woodwork and
architectural details were obliterated and the Marlborough emerged as
low-income housing. Once again, at the end of the 1990s, a church-based
group redesigned the interior as housing for the elderly. The apartments
now seem warm and comfortable and utilitarian.

George Ciscle, a founder of the Contemporary Museum and curator in
residence at MICA, directed the project.

"I designed a course through the Maryland Institute," Ciscle says. "This
course was for a group of students to work with me and the architect and
an artist in residence named Maria Teresa Fernandez to come up with an
actual plan and to decide how could we connect with these residents."

The students did research at the Pratt Library, Maryland Historical
Society and other places, conducted oral histories, visited apartments and
found that many of the residents collected things like porcelains and
etchings. Some also did their own artwork.

So the students designed an arts workshop for residents to produce works
to express their own history. About 20 residents participated. There was a
reception last night to open the exhibit of their work in the Marlborough
community room - nice, though perhaps not quite as gala as the museum
party under way at the BMA last night.

And if Smith's cardinal never gets hung at the BMA, she did create a work
of art there, a handsome fabric collage with three flowers at the bottom
and a blue-figured panel, not unlike the patterned backgrounds in a
Matisse still-life. She and about a dozen other residents visited the
museum for the first time with the project.

They went through the Cone Collection and then made their own collages in
the afternoon.

"They gave us the paper and stuff to work with and long tables," Smith
says. "And we just worked on it ourselves."

But she didn't really care for the art in the Cone Collection.

Her tastes run more to realism than abstraction. She has nice
reproductions on her apartment wall of a couple of seascapes, a bucolic
country scene faintly Kinkaidesque and a view of Mount Fujiyama.

Smith was probably the most experienced seamstress in the Marlborough
Project. She worked about 18 years in the clothing industry as a sewing
machine operator, and she's been a dressmaker.

Perhaps the most inventive needlework is in the work of Willie Suggs,
whose stitchery seems as inspired as a trumpet improvisation in a jazz
solo. He did in fact call one stitch-work riff "Jazz."

"Yeah, I liked it," he says. "It keeps your mind clear."

At the BMA, Suggs, 79, made a very handsome, well-composed collage of
cloth squares with a tree of hearts just off-center. "Yeah, I worked a
little bit out there," he says.

And he did like the Cone Collection works: "I enjoyed it. Some people
didn't. But I did. I sat there, and I really enjoyed it."

But the wall hangings in his room are less abstract. They include a
drawing of Jesus, a molded conquistador, his certificate of baptism, which
occurred a couple months ago, and his honorable discharge from the Navy.

He had never heard of the Cone sisters before the project. He was unaware
he lived on their floor. And he wasn't too impressed, either.

But Suggs has always been impressed with the Marlborough.

"I lived on Madison Avenue, and I used to work at the Druid Hill garage,
and I delivered cars here," Suggs says. "At the side door, downstairs.
That's when big shots living here then, lawyers, doctors living here
then."

But in segregated Baltimore, during the Cone era, the only African
Americans living at the Marlborough were servants.

"Anybody told me I would be living here, I wouldn't believe it," Willie
Suggs says. "No. I just wouldn't. It's one of those things. When I moved
here, I said, 'Well, I ain't going to move no more. I'm through moving.' "

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