Baltimore School for the Arts — where Tupac studied

Tupac Shakur enrolled at the Baltimore School for the Arts in 1986, at the age of fifteen, and spent roughly two years there studying ballet, jazz, acting, and poetry before his mother Afeni moved the family to Marin City, California. The school — a magnet arts high school in Baltimore's Mount Vernon neighbourhood — is where Tupac's literary and artistic formation took place in its most sustained and structured form. He studied under teachers who took his talent seriously and gave it framework; he performed in school productions, wrote poetry that he would later describe as the foundation of his lyrical approach, and began developing the emotional range that made his best rap music something categorically different from most of what surrounded it.

He was working on a production of A Raisin in the Sun when Afeni decided to relocate. The move to California cut his time at the school short, and Tupac never completed his education there — but the Baltimore years are among the most important in his biography. His classmate was Jada Pinkett (later Pinkett Smith), who has described him as her best friend during those years; the friendship survived and remained close until his death. The school also introduced him to the writers and poets — Langston Hughes, Giovanni, the Black Arts movement — who gave him a literary framework for what he wanted to say.

The Baltimore School for the Arts continues to operate at 712 Cathedral Street and is now one of the institutions most closely associated with Tupac's early development. It acknowledges his time there explicitly in its institutional materials. The irony is that his most sustained formal education was in ballet and acting rather than music, and that the artistic discipline of those years is audible in the precision and control of his best records.