Guests: Jalen Thomas and Chris Metzger
Host: Christopher Kardambikis
Recorded on February 27, 2026
This is the third of three episodes focusing on the recent publication: Even the Score, guest edited by Lindsay Buchman and published by Homie House Press.
Jalen Thomas is an interdisciplinary artist from Prince George’s County, MD. Her work combines photography, quilting, and design to examine Black girlhood and Black feminine domestic identity. Operating in the intersections between creative play and domestic labor, Thomas’ work is inspired by her mother often creating in collaboration with and for her. Working primarily with textiles and archival family photos Thomas participates in liberatory Black homemaking practices and oral storytelling traditions that have been passed down through generations of Black mothers, sisters, and friends.
Currently serving as an Americorp Artist in Residence at 901 Arts in Baltimore, MD, Thomas continues to pass along these traditions to youth by teaching with a commitment to care, joy, and radical imaginative creation. She holds a BS in Graphic design from Stevenson University and an MFA in Community Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Christopher Metzger is a socially engaged artist/educator living and working in Baltimore, MD. As Professor and Department Chair of Art and Graphic Design at Stevenson University, his creative practice often engages communities in collaborative-based projects that encourage an exploration of self within larger social frameworks. Centered on fostering community and the investigation of representational justice through a historical and contemporary lens, his work often critiques and challenges the status quo while developing critical perspectives and an urgency to bring about social change through acts of creative resistance.
Working primarily within photographic media and design, Metzger’s personal work is deeply rooted in, and informed by, his relationship to his wife and kids, a Black woman and two biracial sons. Often dealing with themes related to race, class, and identity, they examine their lived experiences through their individual identities and memories, while navigating places and spaces collectively as a family in search of joy, love, and truth.
As an artist/educator, Metzger has come to embrace the symbiotic nature of his creative practice. His art is his teaching, and his teaching is his art. For Metzger, these identities are one in the same. Guided by community, agency, justice, and care and informed by his research into decolonizing art and design education, Metzger’s work is committed to the process of un/learning and interrogating the narratives, structures, and systems that have historically been put in place to divide and exclude.
Episode artwork by Homie House Press
“Paper Cuts Theme” by The Early
@theearly_band // http://theearly.net