After heart surgery, one of Baltimore’s busiest artists refuses to slow down

Ainsley Burrows seemingly never stops creating.

The Baltimore-based artist is a flourishing painter, writer, party thrower and spoken-word performer, to name just a few roles. These days, he’s doing it all with a new piece of equipment he never expected to need: a heart defibrillator implanted in his chest.

“It has a Bluetooth in it that is constantly recording what’s going on with my heart,” Burrows said, pointing to his collarbone.

Just months prior, one of the city’s busiest artists was forced to slow down for once. The 52-year-old lay in a Largo hospital bed, recovering from surgery — the result of a routine checkup that led to the discovery of Burrows’ enlarged heart and increased risk for heart attacks.

“That’s the only thing that’s always in the back of my mind: Like, damn, I could have just died in my sleep,” he said recently inside his chic studio and home in Harwood.

The health scare has reinvigorated Burrows. “I’m about to be a monster,” he said with a grin.

He’s done it before. A car accident when he was a graduate college student should have killed him, Burrows said, but it only strengthened his resolve to pursue art over accounting, his family’s preferred path.

“I was like, I’m going to be an artist because that’s what I feel like in my soul that I need to be,” he recalled. “I didn’t give myself any limits on what kind of art I wanted to do.”

With new exhibitions and plans to open a performance arts space in Baltimore, the Jamaica native is deepening his ties to his adopted home, where Burrows has become one of its most versatile art figures.

“He’s a renaissance person,” said Derrick Adams, the acclaimed artist from Baltimore.

Adams and Burrows met in New York in the mid-1990s after Burrows moved from Jamaica to Brooklyn as a teenager to reunite with his mother. “He was a popular young poet at the time,” Adams said.

Burrows learned of the intoxicating power of words from his great-grandmother, who never spoke plain directions.

“It was always some abstract riddle,” Burrows said. He would one day showcase his own talents with words, starring in a Guinness commercial in which Burrows delivers an impassioned poem.

Burrows was introduced to Baltimore as a member of a traveling New York slam poetry team. He felt an instant connection to the audience and the city itself, and he knew his next home wasn’t too far.

“We get a dope art community. It’s affordable. We’ve got dope people,” Burrows said. “It’s Baltimore.”

It’s here Burrows has emerged as a painter with a striking style known for its bold color palettes and surreal blending of the abstract and the figurative. Is that a large egret in 2024’s “Daughters of the Sky”? Why is it wearing a fedora?

After encountering his large-scale works, Burrows’ style of swirling lines and dramatic composition is easy to recognize.

Quid Nunc Art Gallery owner Nancy Blackwell was “blown away” by Burrows’ paintings. Her space at 1007 N. Charles St. in Mount Vernon hosted his 2025 solo exhibition, “Bone, Smoke & Thunder.”

“The way that he’s able to tell a story through abstract art is amazing,” Blackwell said. “He’s only scratched the surface on his skills and abilities.”

Some of Burrows’ latest paintings are on view in “5X5 Baltimore: The Art of Black Men” at the Eubie Blake Cultural Center through Aug. 22. The joint exhibition, located at 847 N. Howard St., also includes works by Al Johnson, Charles Stonewall, Ernest Shaw and Jeffrey Kent.

Visitors will see Burrows’ “Emmett Floyd,” a reference to Emmett Till and George Floyd, which outlines a mother holding her dead son in her lap — a nod to Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary clutching Jesus, the artist said.

Derek Price, executive director of the Eubie Blake Cultural Center, said he valued Burrows’ perspective as a Jamaican living in America.

“All these artists have a story,” Price said. “His work was a lot about immigration and the challenges of immigration.”

“My work is always about the underdog,” Burrows said.

Painting is just one facet of Burrows’ life as a full-time artist. “The Sweet Spot,” the Black burlesque show he founded with his partner, Laurielle Noel, celebrated two decades this year. The reggae dance party Boom Selecta, another production by Burrows and Noel, will return to Mobtown Ballroom on Sept. 26.

Months after May’s heart surgery, Burrows looks back to his dapper self, focused on his next steps. He’s working on new, Afrofuturism-leaning paintings ahead of a fall show at Quid Nunc.

In the longer term, he plans to purchase a Station North building for a permanent home for “The Sweet Spot,” which previously toured the country.

Whether it’s burlesque, painting or another venture, Burrows said, his art will always reflect his life and the experiences that continually shape it. Others, he hopes, will see a part of themselves in it.

“The more experience you have,” Burrows said, “the more you might have a chance of finding that thing that connects with somebody.”