On a rainy Saturday morning in March, a chartered bus rumbles down the curved drive of the Evergreen Museum and Library, the stately 19th-century Italianate mansion in North Baltimore. As the bus heads south, its twenty passengers watch the mansions of Guilford give way to the rowhouses of lower Charles Village. First stop: gritty North Avenue, main street of the Station North Arts and Entertainment District.

Evergreen Museum put together this bus tour as an introduction to the city's underground art scene. For $80 a head ($65 for museum members), including box lunch and champagne, attendees can visit five outposts of Baltimore's cultural avant-garde: Load of Fun, the furniture warehouse turned studio/gallery/performance space that has helped transform the corner of Howard Street and North Avenue, followed by Area 405, an artist-owned facility that holds down the eastern end of the Station North district. Then it's on to two galleries in the H&H Arts Building, a hulking West Side industrial edifice named after the defunct camping supply store on the first floor, and finally Jordan Faye Contemporary in Federal Hill.

The Evergreen Museum might seem an unlikely force for promoting the cultural fringe, but its history proves otherwise. In the 1920s and '30s, diplomat John Work Garrett and his wife, international art patroness and collector Alice Warder Garrett, filled the mansion with contemporary art, music, and star-studded dinner parties. The couple brought the first Picasso to Baltimore, along with works by Edgar Degas, Ignacio Zuloaga, and Raoul Dufy. Alice was a great champion of her favorite artists; she organized an exhibition in New York for Evergreen resident artist Léon Bakst (whose whimsical stencils still cover the walls of the second-floor theater) and opened a short-lived gallery in Paris to introduce traveling Americans to contemporary artists.


"We continue with their vision," says Rosalie Parker, development coordinator for Evergreen and Homewood Museum, both owned by Johns Hopkins University. She points out Evergreen's artist residency program and the biannual Sculpture at Evergreen exhibit, which dots the estate's sloping hills with site-specific, contemporary sculpture (this year's exhibition opens May 2; for more information, call 410-516-0341 or go to www.museums.jhu.edu). This bus tour, Parker says, is in the same adventurous spirit. "Hopefully it will open [people's] eyes to all the things happening in Baltimore that the Garretts would have been really proud of."

Artist Jason Hughes, a 2006 Sondheim Prize finalist who is co-leading today's tour with Evergreen Director James Abbott, also wants the trip to connect Baltimore artists with art appreciators who have the means to invest in local talent but don't always know where to look. "Baltimore's not the best place to sell work. It's a thing we're always struggling with," Hughes says. "The people who are more successful show their work out of town."