Picture this: It's a golden age for young artists in Baltimore. In once-vacant warehouses and rundown rowhouses, creative types—students and recent grads of the Maryland Institute College of Art, plus newcomers and associated hangers-on lured by the city's vibrant cultural community—are setting up shop. They live and work in collective studio spaces, stage edgy spectacles on city streets and in DIY performance spaces, and occasionally attract the attention of the national media. Fed by Baltimore's native grit and socio-economic tumult, they create innovative, collaborative work that blurs the lines between artistic disciplines, challenges the status quo, injects life into underused corners of the city, and speaks to a unique cultural moment—the challenges of contemporary American urban life. In 1969.

Or is it 1979? Or 2009?

"This is not a new thing," says Megan Hamilton, who as the longtime program director of Highlandtown's Creative Alliance is both a player in and gimlet-eyed observer of Baltimore's ever-emerging emerging art scene. "I've been here since 1979. Artists were changing the city then, too. The bottom line is this is always happening."

Indeed: It was happening when John Waters and his troupe created their absurdist dreamland in the wreckage of late-'60s Baltimore. It was happening in the early 1980s, when public-spirited artists launched a cooperative "Street School" amid the blight of Hollins Market and birthed a short-lived Soho-style transformation of Sowebo. Later that decade, new contemporary art venues emerged, the blue-collar streets of Hampden saw the tentative stirrings of hipsterdom, and various movements (Zines! Poetry slams!) swept the city's shifting bohemian frontiers, each threatening to break wide open and transform humble Baltimore into a national-level arts incubator and destination for cutting-edge culture.

Now a chorus of cultural leaders has taken up that refrain again. Cathy Byrd, the new executive director of Maryland Art Place near the Inner Harbor, calls Baltimore "the land of opportunity" for art makers and art lovers. "We're in a position to re-identify as beyond the fringe," she says. At the Contemporary Museum in Mount Vernon, celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, Executive Director Irene Hofmann sounds a similar note. "I have brought New York curators, L.A. curators to Baltimore and shown them what's here," says Hofmann, who came here from the Orange County Museum of Art in 2006. "They're excited about it; it's fresh to them. I'd like to see that as the aspiration—when the rest of the nation starts paying attention to the art world here."

Observers of previous cycles of cultural boom-and-bust might be skeptical, but something could be different this time. Even if you think Wham City is a kind of energy drink and haven't been to a gallery opening since the Schaefer administration, you can't help but notice the upwelling of commercial and residential activity in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. Ditto the attendant surge in the city's live music and nightlife arenas: There are more clubs, more galleries, more theaters, more happenings, and more general cultural buzz than most longtime Baltimoreans can recall for a long time. (See "Brushes With Greatness," p. 36, for a tour.) "I call it the sidewalk café quotient," says Bill Gilmore, head of the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts (BOPA). "When you go out, you see people you don't know. How often does that happen in Baltimore?"


The forces behind this renaissance are institutional, generational, and geographical. Arts boosters have long touted Baltimore's artist-friendly rents and strategic location in the Boston–NYC–D.C. corridor, but that became more critical when housing prices hit the stratosphere and bohemians fled en masse. The rising enrollment and stature of the city's art school has also played a significant role. (See
But perhaps there's more to it than that. Much has been made of the collaborative quality of this new creative class—their love of social media and collective public action, their unruly habit of wandering between disciplines. The artist and filmmaker Catherine Pancake, who co-founded the annual Transmodern Festival for performance-based and interdisciplinary work, notes that there's something fundamentally different about the prevailing zeitgeist, especially compared with that of her grunge-era generation. "When I was young, it was me-against-the-world. Very individualistic," she notes. "Now, they want dialogue. There's this strange optimism."

And that gregarious spirit seems to have infected the city's mainstream arts establishment, where collegiality and collaboration have replaced the frostiness that reigned during the 1990s, a time when local artists tended to feel moodily estranged from the city's major cultural institutions and when the institutions themselves were sometimes at each other's throats. (During the mid-1990s, the Baltimore Museum of Art and MICA were engaged in a legal tussle over the fate of the George A. Lucas Collection, which was then owned by MICA but displayed at both the BMA and the Walters Art Gallery. The suit was settled when the two museums purchased the collection from the school.) "In those days, there wasn't any leadership in power that really valued dialogue," recalls Peter Bruun, the director of the community arts group Art on Purpose. "It was everybody for themselves."

That started to change with the opening of the American Visionary Art Museum in 1995, which injected Baltimore with a wild shot of outsider cool, and the 1997 arrival of current BMA director Doreen Bolger, who normalized relations with MICA, encouraged collaborations with other arts institutions in town, and reached out to the local artist community. Today, Bolger is a frequent envoy to the cultural hinterlands and the unofficial head cheerleader for the artists who dwell there. Other mainstream arts leaders—Gary Vikan of the Walters Museum, AVAM's Rebecca Hoffberger, MICA president Fred Lazarus—have been similarly supportive. The result: a cultural fringe that feels enfranchised by the establishment, with large and mid-sized institutions actively involved in promoting new work in domains outside their traditional territories. The once-staid BMA just served as a live music and experimental film venue for April's bleeding-edge Transmodern fest, for example; the Contemporary Museum sponsors the acclaimed experimental music series Mobtown Modern.

There's some enlightened self-interest in this change of attitude: With traditional audiences aging and post-recession corporate support shaky, luring the young creative class over from its DIY haunts has long been understood as essential to the seaworthiness of the Baltimore scene's "supertankers," as Bruun calls them—the BMA, Center Stage, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, among others. "The major institutions realize at the leadership level that the way they do business has to change," he says. "The doors have been blown wide open."

That cause was taken up in 2001 by the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance (GBCA), which is charged with lubricating relations between arts organizations, big and small, and promoting Baltimore's cultural tourism bona fides. Under Executive Director Nancy Haragan, the GBCA launched the American Idol-esque Baker Artist Awards and the citywide Free Fall Baltimore festival, among other projects. Along with free admission policies at the Walters and BMA, such efforts have helped extend the reach of established organizations. "Cultural institutions have to go out and show they want people to come in the door," says J. Buck Jabaily, the 25-year-old founding director of the Single Carrot Theatre company who took over the GBCA helm from Haragan in January. "That means more education and outreach programs—taking it out into the community and engaging people directly."

One cultural endeavor in which Baltimore might legitimately stake a claim as a national leader is the emerging field of community arts. (MICA now offers a master's degree in it.) Jabaily, who famously relocated his Single Carrot troupe here from Colorado in 2007 in search of cheap East Coast urban authenticity (see "The Out-of-Towners," p. 38), understands the concept of bridging the gap between art and real life on the streets; he hails the efforts of groups such as Baltimore Clayworks, which opened a satellite site in Mondawmin Mall to better access West Baltimore residents who might not venture to Mount Washington. "How can we make ourselves more relevant? I guarantee you there's not an arts institution that doesn't ask themselves that question every day," he says.

Which brings us to the missing element in this unfinished revolution: The broader attention—and serious funding—to put the scene over the top. As Art on Purpose's Bruun notes, "It takes money to have a national megaphone." This June, GBCA plans to lunge for that megaphone by touting economic impact figures generated via the Maryland Cultural Data Project, an online tool for collecting and distributing operational data from more than 150 arts organizations. The numbers speak to the size and might of the city's arts economy (almost ten thousand jobs, more than $148 million in direct expenditures) as well as the impact of events such as the Artscape festival, which last year brought in more than $25 million in total revenue (it only cost $860,000). The takeaway: Invest a little in helping to spread the good news, then reap the tourism dollars and redevelopment investment that would rain down on America's newest cultural capital.

Despite that transformative scenario, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's proposed city budget would hit several arts-related programs, including a 30 percent cut—some $700,000—from BOPA, which administers Artscape. BOPA's Gilmore is more concerned about the bullseye on the Creative Baltimore Fund, which offers grants toward the general operating expenses of a host of arts organizations; in 2008, it amounted to $1.2 million. "That's serious—we need to get that back," Gilmore says. "It's very far-reaching." 

The mayor also made arts news in April when she proposed adding a third arts and entertainment district on the city's west side, joining the Station North and Highlandtown districts, as a means of accelerating long-stalled redevelopment. This notion has been kicking around since a Schmoke-era proposal to brand Howard Street as an "Avenue of the Arts," and former mayor Martin O'Malley revived the idea in 2006. But the National Endowment of the Arts rejected BOPA's request for a $250,000 grant to help fund a study on the economic impact of arts district designation. Gilmore says that BOPA will look for local sources to fund the $500,000 study, which would help determine exactly what the designation has achieved in Station North and Highlandtown, and whether adding a third district risks leaching life away from the existing ones. "Maybe we're diluting the soup, or maybe it shouldn't happen until 2015," Gilmore says. "Protecting what we have is always number one."

This is a recurring theme: Cultural leaders talk a lot about the "arts ecosystem," the delicate balance of economic conditions, public support, and ineffable cool that keeps rents low, major institutions healthy, audiences in the seats, and energy in the air. Too much gentrification and the artists flee; too little and the scene withers from neglect. "Any arts ecosystem is fragile. It needs care and maintenance and constant attention," Gilmore says. And the only constant, he adds, is change: "You've gotta be constantly freshening and rebuilding and reinventing."

Which is why the latest refrain of this current wave of arts boosters might sound a little overfamiliar: The revolution never ends; the cutting edge keeps moving restlessly forward. "This generation is building on the work that previous generations did," says Creative Alliance's Hamilton. "If there's an existing scene, it just draws more of a scene. It's like an Indian burial ground. The bones go on top of the bones."

—David Dudley is Urbanite's editor-in-chief.


  On the air: More on the art scene from Irene Hofmann of the Contemporary Museum on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on May 11.