Baltimore-Based Artist Reminisces on Dog Days

Before he was an artist, New Zealand-born Hugh Pocock, 50, sold hot dogs in the heyday of Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

“Selling hot dogs was my first experience with real, hardcore work,” said Pocock, whose road to teaching sustainability and social practice was paved with jobs picking tobacco, driving dump trucks, planting trees, and cleaning oil barges.

“I can still do the Coke shout,” says Pocock, who often reprises the barker’s “COKE! COKE! COKE! GET YOUR COKE HERE!” to amuse his sons, Rowan, 12, and Jasper, 7.

It took Pocock years to create a life of which he could be proud. He earned a master’s degree in new genres while living in Los Angeles and made his way back to Baltimore through the one thing in which his parents had some hope for him: art.

“Art is about stirring the pot,” says Pocock, a Mount Washington resident who admires the work of Hans Haacke and the international collective of activist artists known as Futurefarmers. “If the pot isn’t stirred, what do we have? Just hot dogs and cars and people trying to make a living?”

Pocock is an instructor at the Maryland Institute College of Art.