May 2010 Issue

WHAT CAN WE DO WITH THIS COOL VACANT BUILDING?• FARM-FRIENDLY DINING • HOMEMADE HOOCH may 2010 issue no. 71

ral u t l u ng c i g r e us m f e o s ’ t y s re cit e e h h t t r t s fo wha n a e m sce n e

Last ChanCe! CLoses May 23

CÉZANNE anD aMeRICan MoDeRnIsM Made possible by

Supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Additional funding provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art, The Henry Luce Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Leir Charitable Foundations, and the Thaw Charitable Trust.

Generous local sponsorship provided by The Rouse Company Foundation and by David L. Warnock and Deidre A. Bosley.

Paul Cézanne. Detail, Fruit and a Jug on a Table. c. 1890-94. Bequest of John T. Spaulding. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo ©MFA, Boston Morgan Russell. Detail, Three Apples. 1910. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given anonymously 1949 (349.1949.2).

Digital Image ©The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. ©Simone DeVirgile

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may 2010 issue no. 71

the art issue 32

contents

state of the arts

despite the city’s economic struggles—or perhaps because of them—baltimore’s arts scene is enjoying an extraordinary resurgence. what happened? and where is it going next? by david dudley

36

brushes with greatness

makers and consumers meet in the galleries of the cultural underground. by marianne k. amoss

38

the out-of-towners

why does the city theater scene attract so many artists from elsewhere? by john barry

school confidential 42 art a writer spends a year at mica in search of the meaning of art in america.

38

by michael yockel

44

still life with price tag

a budding collector makes the case for buying a few good masterpieces. by marion winik

departments 9 editor’s note last call

11 what you’re saying

short answer, long answer

13 what you’re writing

the most beautiful thing: sandwiches, a sunset, and a poet’s grave

57

17 corkboard

this month: rites of spring—flowermart, preakness, and the sowebo arts festival

21 the goods: australia-inspired cosmetics. plus: spring fashion, peruvian chocolates, and this month online at www.urbanitebaltimore.com: state of the arts: signing up for art classes, exploring can’t-miss venues, and more tips for taking in the baltimore scene film: anne haddad blogs the maryland film festival food: farm-to-table dining resources

a diy gutter cleaner

25 baltimore observed

the last castle: will a west baltimore landmark get a new lease on life? by brennen jensen

to peer: teens in namibia and baltimore share stories and solutions on hiv/aids.

29 peer by maria-pia negro

51 space

high and dry: a mount washington home throws its new owners for a loop. by greg hanscom

55 poetry utopia

by valzhyna mort

on the air: urbanite on the marc steiner show, weaa 88.9 fm may 11: irene hofmann on the twentieth anniversary of the contemporary museum may 12: howell baum, author of brown in baltimore, on school desegregation may 20: growing heirloom vegetables

57 eat/drink

the prodigal pepper: resurrecting baltimore’s heirloom hot stuff by scott carlson

61 the farm report: which local-food restaurants get the real goods? by michelle gienow

63 reviewed: maisy’s and mr. rain’s fun house 65 wine & sprits: liqueur by hand 67 the feed: this month in eating art/culture 69 past imperfect: two new books lay bare the city’s troubled relationship with race. by michael corbin

on the cover:

illustration by brian payne

plus: the maryland film festival, local music releases, and this month’s cultural highlights

86

eye to eye

urbanite’s creative director, alex castro, on christopher lavoie w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 1 0

7

issue 71 : m ay 2 0 10 p ub lish er Tracy Ward Tracy@urbanitebaltimore.com c r e ativ e d ir ec tor Alex Castro gener al m anager Jean Meconi Jean@urbanitebaltimore.com e d i t o r -i n -c h i e f David Dudley David@urbanitebaltimore.com m a naging ed ito r Marianne K. Amoss Marianne@urbanitebaltimore.com se n io r e d it o r Greg Hanscom Greg@urbanitebaltimore.com liter a r y ed ito r Susan McCallum-Smith literaryeditor@urbanitebaltimore.com proofr eader Robin T. Reid c o n tr ib uting w r iter s Michael Anft, Scott Carlson, Charles Cohen, Michael Corbin, Mat Edelson, Lionel Foster, Brennen Jensen, Clinton Macsherry, Tracey Middlekauff, Richard O’Mara, Andrew Reiner, Martha Thomas, Sharon Tregaskis, Michael Yockel, Mary K. Zajac ed ito r ia l in ter ns Maria-Pia Negro, Maren Tarro d e s i g n /p r o d u c t i o n m a n a g e r Lisa Van Horn Lisa@urbanitebaltimore.com t r a f fi c p r o d u c t i o n c o o r d i n a t o r Belle Gossett Belle@urbanitebaltimore.com d e sig n e r Kristian Bjørnard Kristian@urbanitebaltimore.com p r o d uc t io n in t e r n s Tyler Fitzpatrick, John Miskimon, Kelly Wise v i d e o g r a p h e r /w e b s i t e c o o r d i n a t o r Chris Rebbert website@urbanitebaltimore.com se n io r a c c o u n t e x e c u t iv e s Catherine Bowen Catherine@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan Econ Econsusan@urbanitebaltimore.com Susan R. Levy Susan@urbanitebaltimore.com account ex ecutiv e Rachel Bloom Rachel@urbanitebaltimore.com a d v e r t i s i n g s a l e s /e v e n t s c o o r d i n a t o r Erin Albright Erin@urbanitebaltimore.com b o o k k e e p i n g /m a r k e t i n g a s s i s t a n t Iris Goldstein Iris@urbanitebaltimore.com founder Laurel Harris Durenberger Advertising/Editorial/Business Offi ces 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211 Phone: 410-243-2050 ; Fax: 410-243-2115 w w w.urbanitebaltimore.com Editorial inquiries: Send queries to editor@urbanitebaltimore.com (no phone calls, please). The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. Urbanite does not necessarily support the opinions of its authors. To subscribe or obtain assistance with a current subscription, call 410-243-2050. Subscription price: $18 per year. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission

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urbanite may 10

photo by Chris Hartlove

photo by Melissa Baglow

contributors Freelance illustrator Mark Arsenault is a Maryland native who now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2006. Arsenault combines dry brush ink painting with abstract organic textures and a limited color palette to create earthy and ghostly atmospheres. In the spirit of the Dadaists, he tries to incorporate accidents and chance into his work. Arsenault’s illustration for this month’s Art/Culture feature (p. 69) was inspired by the practice of “redlining,” which—as described in Antero Pietila’s new book, Not in My Neighborhood—denied housing loans to African Americans. “I just thought of that visual,” he says. “What if you saw that on the street, the neighborhoods that were literally redlined off?”

Marion Winik’s essay about the pleasures of collecting original art, “Still Life with Price Tag” (p. 44), represents her second appearance in Urbanite, but the first under her own byline: She served as the magazine’s “Keynote” interview back in January 2008. The author of eight books of nonfiction and poetry, most recently The Glen Rock Book of the Dead (2008), Winik teaches creative writing at the University of Baltimore. Her other works include the memoir First Comes Love (1996) and several essay collections, including Above Us Only Sky (2005). She lives with her daughter Jane, a dachshund named Beau, and several eccentric pieces of artwork in the Evergreen neighborhood of Baltimore City.

Are we doomed?

editor’s note

Not just “we” in the planetary sense, because that way lies madness, or renting 2012. (Don’t do it! It’s terrible!) But “we” as in Baltimore, which so often seems to teeter between catastrophe and greatness.

This came up recently. In March, the urban-planning-critic-turned-doomsayer James Howard Kunstler appeared here at the invitation of the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore.

The agendas of these two entities are imperfectly aligned: The partnership is the nonprofit that encourages commercial and residential investment in the city’s central business district; Kunstler is the author of several books (and a blog called Clusterfuck Nation) that warn of the imminent collapse of technological civilization. Downtown Partnership president Kirby Fowler is a Kunstler fan, however, and Kunstlerism does share some core values with the group’s prodensity, anti-sprawl ethos. So Fowler signed up the two-fisted collapsitarian as the keynoter for this year’s State of Downtown Baltimore Report breakfast (Urbanite was also a media sponsor) and unleashed him on the city’s new mayor and other civic leaders. Hilarity, of sorts, ensued.

“You are going to see a fight over the table scraps of the 20th century,” warned Kunstler, who detailed a host of horrors awaiting us when the oil runs out and the food riots begin. (For specifics, see his novel World Made By Hand, discussed here in July 2008.) But it’s not all bad— we’ve got a good port and lots of livable older buildings. Plus, we’re on our way to returning to our pre-industrial population anyway. “Cities are going to contract,” Kunstler said. “You’re lucky you’ve already contracted.” Later, he lunched with a roomful of architects and developers.

“I suppose you want to convince me it’s all going to be OK,” he announced glumly. Indeed, some did—surely we can retrofit our buildings, add green technologies, develop alternative energy?

Kunstler was unmoved. We are doomed, he assured the gathered; we just don’t know it yet.

The message was sobering, but also inspiring. For one, how great is it that Baltimore’s buttoned-down business-boosters invited this character here in the fi rst place? That, to me, speaks volumes about the mindset around here these days, a sense of throw-out-the-rule-book adventure. It’s official: We will try anything. Second, it’s hard not to notice, as our visitor did, that Baltimore has a head start on fighting over the table scraps of the 20th century. Strip away the dystopian unpleasantness and you can read his scenario as something more heartening—an opportunity for older cities to reclaim their fundamental reasons for existence. Here, that means being an honest waterfront town again, a place that works because of where it lies and how it is stitched together, not because of how it is marketed and sold.

Urban reinvention has been a driving theme at Urbanite since I arrived almost three years ago; we’ve explored many variations on it, and it emerges again in this issue’s suite of stories on Baltimore’s art scene (“State of the Arts,” p. 32). The idea of leveraging the city’s burgeoning cultural energy into a force for broader community change isn’t particularly new, but the level of buy-in among leaders at the institutional level is, and it’s hard not to get swept up in their enthusiasm. The stars may indeed be aligning for that long-awaited Big Blow Up, the transformative passage to greatness that the city’s benches so boldly promise.

Or maybe not. And that too would be fine. Putting the pieces of Baltimore back together is an eternal work in progress, an unfinished symphony. It’s the struggle that keeps things interesting. Urbanite will continue to chronicle this adventure in the months and years ahead, at least until the oil runs out. This will be my last issue as its editor; you’ll find the magazine’s new editor (and current senior editor) Greg Hanscom in this space next month. It’s been a tremendous opportunity, and I’ll continue to visit these pages as a contributor and editor-at-large. I’ll also be looking forward to playing a role in Urbanite’s online reinvention (yes, there’s that word again), coming soon to a digital content delivery device near you. Great things await there, we have no doubt. Remember: We will try anything.

—David Dudley

Where do you think you’re going?

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what you’re saying

the long answer I am writing in response to the article “Waiting for the Green Collar Economy” (April).

In the above-mentioned article, Greg Hanscom quotes me as saying that the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) is slow-moving because of lack of administrative staff. In the conversation I had with Greg when he called, I stated many reasons that the WAP ramp-up in Baltimore was off to a slower-than-hoped-for start. I listed these reasons ONLY in response to his statements that it was being criticized for a slow start.

I stated that many of the contractors are new to this work. I stated that this was an impressive ramp-up and should have been expected to move a little slow at first.

I addressed city staff last and in a different context. I stated that they are doing a lot with what they have and that they would benefit from ramping up their staff in direct proportion to the program ramp-up. I felt I was speaking more as an advocate.

I have been speaking to a lot of press and policy folks who want to ask questions about the WAP ramp-up. I am always careful to deliver an even account of what is an exciting but daunting undertaking for ALL who are involved, from the Obama administration down to the weatherization worker.

We’re all working long and hard every day to deliver this important service in a manner that benefits Baltimore.

—John Mello is green projects director for Civic Works. memories of steel Having seen Deborah Rudacille’s Roots of Steel at the Towson Barnes & Noble store, I was very interested in reading her very fine article (the book excerpt “In the Shadow of Steel,” April), which brought a smile about having my feet X-rayed at the old Hess shoe store! As the author of eight published books myself, I want to say what a great achievement it is for her—or any author, really—to have a book published by one of the top American publishers. That is a big deal!

I’ve campaigned politically for myself and others in the Greater Dundalk area since 1974. In addition, I have been writing on

historical topics—especially on the War of 1812 in Maryland—since 1976 in the Dundalk Eagle. For these reasons, I took especial interest and delight in her article, which brought back many pleasant memories for me of one of this country’s greatest communities.

During the Second World War, it had one of the largest draft board memberships in the nation, despite the fact that many of its population were exempt from serving in the armed forces because they worked at Sparrows Point—as did my late stepfather, who also served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, then returned to the Point after the war.

Ms. Rudacille’s article represents the kind of piece that we need more of in Maryland journalism.

—Blaine Taylor, Towson I grew up in Edmondson Village, unaware that “white fl ight” created the home vacancies that many in the African American community seized to secure home ownership.

Many of the fathers in the neighborhood sojourned to General Motors, Dundalk Marine Terminal, and Crown Cork and Seal, but most of all Bethlehem Steel (“In the Shadow of Steel,” April). The work was dangerous, dirty, and hard, but the salaries gained by virtually unskilled laborers afforded them and their families lifestyles of affluence.

My uncle had two vehicles: one for work at the “Point,” as the Sparrows Point location of Bethlehem Steel was affectionately dubbed, and another for transporting the family. He had ten kids, and the Vista Cruiser station wagon was large enough to accommodate his children and some of us other kids. Little did we know that our family fishing trips, outings to Druid Hill Park’s pool, and Gwynn Oak Park were funded by Bethlehem Steel. All we knew was that he and my dad, who also had a brief stint at the Point working the coke ovens, whisked off us on these magical outings fi lled with pickle-and-pimento-loaf sandwiches and Motown music on AM radio.

We never knew that the reason for the peeling paint on the Point car was the result of acid rain from the airborne chemicals and particles that spewed from the towering smoke stacks and would later claim Unc’s life.

We’d see Unc picking up men who were total strangers, not knowing at the time that the lunch pails or bags that the men waved signaled that they were Point employees who needed a ride to work. I’m not sure if that practice was common in other communities, but in communities of color the underground carpool among Point and waterfront workers got you a twenty-five-cent ride to work if you flagged your work bag or lunch pail.

Man, those were the times; work was plentiful, and the bosses were paying. I remember hearing a saying that every day was payday at Sparrows Point. Too bad that we didn’t know that our fathers’ efforts to carve out a middle-class existence would be the death of them. The hard work and good wages from a job at Sparrows Point claimed many good lives. If only we’d known.

—Elmer L. Barksdale, Baltimore aliens, go home !

I would like to respond to “Extraordinary Voyages” (Urbanite Project, March). What is the use of searching for intelligent life in another galaxy? How are we going to reach them?

I am quite sure that any intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy would not want to correspond with such a race as ours that portrays violence, confusion, and selfishness.

Why would we want to interact with other intelligent life forms when we as a species are constantly at war with each other and display greed, selfishness, and genocide toward other races and countries?

We need to practice and to seek humility and compassion here on earth fi rst, rather than searching somewhere else.

—Charles Washington, Baltimore corrections On first mention in the April story “Degrees of Green,” we misspelled the name of Sandy Parker, chair of UMBC’s Geography and Environmental Systems department, as “Park.”

A caption for the portraits of retired steelworkers in the April story “In the Shadow of Steel” incorrectly identified Lee Douglas Jr. as Lee McLelland.

Urbanite regrets the errors.

We want to hear what you’re saying.

E-mail us at mail@urbanitebaltimore.com or send your letter to Mail, Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 1 0

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Read more extraordinary stories at www.gbmc.org.

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an older kid, Alberta, ran past me on the shaded lawn near the woods. A fox had been sighted, and she was racing to get a second glimpse.

My 4-year-old legs carried me into the woods behind her until I was deeper in the woods than I had ever been, and alone there for the fi rst time as Alberta’s longer strides soon took her beyond my sight.

Before I could become fearful, wonder overtook me. I stood, swaddled in veils— woven from the dust of the day and the golden rays of late afternoon sun; colored by countless leaves of maple, oak, and poplar; bejeweled with the sparkle of flitting gnats.

Then Alberta returned and marshaled me back to the shaded lawn.

I never saw the fox. I will always remember the light.

—Randall W. Wilke is a retired computer software engineer living in Baltimore. He occasionally writes to support his primary interest, painting. i knew 8-year-old s* through my work as a mental health therapist at an East Baltimore school. His mother had died of AIDS. His father was incarcerated and did not answer S’s letters or come through on his promises of birthday calls.

S and his brothers lived with an aunt and uncle. I visited him one day when their phone was no longer working. On that bright afternoon, it was somber inside, but not too dark for me to notice the parade of roaches on the dining room table where S’s aunt put down his peanut butter sandwich.

S told me that he would crawl under the bed and into the closet at night to escape sounds of neighborhood gunshots. His anxiety was great, and he often looked terrorstricken. His post-traumatic stress made it very hard to focus or learn anything in school.

But then it was summer, and our wraparound services program planned an outing to the harbor. We took S and a few others in a van, ate crab cakes and shrimp in a waterside restaurant, then boarded a water taxi to the Aquarium where dolphins and electric eels entertained the kids’ wide-open eyes.

We sat on the water taxi, satiated by the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of the day and enjoying the warmth of the sun now drifting toward the horizon. S looked straight

ahead and, in that candid way of children, said: “This is the best day of my life.”

—Dance/movement therapist Joyce Wolpert is writing a book called Middle Passage about her ten years in the Baltimore schools. The child’s name has been changed. after nineteen years of marriage, two teenage sons, working, and dealing with two sets of elderly parents, two hyperactive dogs, and myriad schedules and volunteer requests, the most beautiful sight for me is the neatly wax-paper-wrapped sandwiches sitting on the shelf in the refrigerator.

My husband knows that I do not like to make luncheon sandwiches, so he is willing to do so to give me a break. When I stumble down to the kitchen in the early morning, I put the kettle on for coffee, grind the beans, empty the dish drainer and the dishwasher, measure out the oatmeal, pour the juice, and set the table. And then I open the refrigerator door and spy the stacked sandwiches—and silently fall in love with my husband all over again. It is a beautiful thing to have one less thing to do in my morning.

—Baltimore County resident Virginia Ruth designs and implements corporate wellness programs, but she gets the greatest joy from writing. manic-expressive. That’s how we used to describe our son, Alex. When he wasn’t talking, he was singing; when he wasn’t singing, he was laughing; and if he was quiet, it was because he was asleep.

Conversely, one of his best friends, Molly, was a quiet, practical child who, after listening to Alex prattle on about why he may or may not be allowed to come out and play, would succinctly say to him, “Ask.” When Alex was 10, I bought him one of those little flying-saucer-shaped incubators, and together we procured three fertilized eggs from a local chicken farmer. Alex diligently followed the hatching instructions,

photo by aspheric.lens | fl ickr.com/photos/asphericlens/

The Most Beautiful Thing

what you’re writing

keeping the eggs warm and turning them regularly. He and Molly peered into the incubator daily. It was an exciting day when Alex announced that he could hear some faint cheeping coming from inside the incubator.

As luck would have it, I was the one who discovered the hatchling, which had chiseled its way into daylight while Alex was at school. (The other two eggs failed to produce.) That afternoon, I met Alex and Molly at the front door and told them the good news. They threw off their backpacks and dashed inside, rushing down the hall behind me. Cautioning them to enter quietly, I turned Alex’s bedroom doorknob. “Wait!

Me first, Mom!” he said urgently. “I want it to imprint on me so it will follow me around!”

I stepped aside and let Alex approach the incubator first, with Molly peering over his shoulder. The hatchling was wobbling on its too-big feet and struggling to support its too-big head with bulging eyes and a large, gaping beak. Scrawny pinfeathers clung to its pale, translucent skin.

My overjoyed son grinned broadly, as proud as a new father handing out cigars.

“Oh, Mom, isn’t he beautiful?” he exclaimed.

I agreed (how could I not?), but Molly, failing to detect any pulchritude in the poultry, responded in true Molly fashion with just one word. “Ugh.” —With her husband, Reisterstown resident Lynn Reeder provides business development and life-coaching services—and plays in an R&B band called the Groove Mammals. walking the pleasant lanes on the Île de Bréhat, a small green island off France’s Brittany coast, I made a discovery.

Bréhat is renowned for a mild climate that fosters palm trees, mimosas, and a stunning variety of flowers. It is also noted for its dramatic pink rock outcrops that draw an endless stream of visitors. Two light beacons stand on the island’s shores, from where thousands of these massive pink granite rocks—a stunning vista—continue w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 1 0

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into the sea. It is said that Matisse couldn’t resist the place.

New housing on Bréhat is strictly forbidden, and other than farm vehicles, there are no automobiles allowed on the tiny island, which measures a scant 2 miles long and 1 mile wide. It was along one of Bréhat’s lanes, one no wider than a footpath, that I came upon a poet’s grave. It was marked by a large, erect slab of pink granite bearing the name “Louis Guillaume,” the years 1907–1971, and the word “Poete.” The stone’s only other decoration was a small bronze bas-relief of Guillaume, his expression serious and melancholic. At the foot of the grave was a smaller monument of pink granite with five engraved lines of verse, translated as: All that I have not been able to say to you, you will know on the other side, when we shall sleep, mouth to mouth, in the eternity without words, black as the sea.

Later I learned that Guillaume, who was born in Paris and was a professor there, had spent most of his childhood on Bréhat.

Perhaps his final resting place was a fitting metaphor for his poetry—stark, concise and memorable. ■

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—William Amelia lives in a coastal town in Delaware but is originally from Baltimore.

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for creative nonfiction from our readers. Each month we pick a topic. Use the topic as a springboard into your own life and send us a true story inspired by that month’s theme. Only previously unpublished, nonfiction submissions that include contact information can be considered. We reserve the right to edit heavily for space and clarity, but we will give you the opportunity to review the edits. You may submit under “name withheld” to keep your essay anonymous, but you do need to let us know how to contact you. If you’ve already changed the names of the people involved, please let us know. Only one submission per topic, please.

Send your essay to Urbanite, 2002 Clipper Park Road, Fourth Floor, Baltimore, MD 21211, or e-mail it to WhatYoureWriting@urbanite baltimore.com. Submissions should be shorter than four hundred words. Because of the number of essays we receive, we cannot respond individually to each writer. Please do not send originals; submissions cannot be returned.

Topic Burned Out Fact or Fiction Harvest

Deadline May 10, 2010 June 7, 2010 July 5, 2010

Publication July 2010 Aug 2010 Sept 2010

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I CHOOSE MY POWER

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Flowermart

May 7 & 8

For nearly a hundred years, Mount Vernon Square has been festooned in blooms for the annual Flowermart. Grab a lemon stick and take in the maypole dancers, the contests, and, of course, the flower displays.

Mount Vernon Square Free 410-323-0022 www.flowermart.org

The Solar and Wind Expo

May 7–9

Authorities in architecture, finance, the auto industry, and alternative energy technologies will share their green know-how at the threeday Solar and Wind Expo. The keynote address will be given by Bob Dixson, mayor of Greensburg, Kansas, which committed to rebuilding an energy-efficient city after a 2007 tornado.

Timonium Fairgrounds 2200 York Rd. $10 adults, $8 seniors, $3 children 6–12, children younger than 6 free www.thesolarandwindexpo.com

Preakness Celebration

May 11–15

On May 15, join the drunken masses on the infield of Pimlico Race Course for the 135th Preakness Stakes or watch the action from the stands, Black-Eyed Susan in hand. Celebratory events happen all week beforehand, including the Pee Wee Preakness toddler race in Federal Hill Park (May 11) and the crab derby at Lexington Market (May 13).

www.bop.org www.preaknesscelebration.com

Baltimore Bike to Work Day

May 21

Feel the wind in your hair! Bike to Work Day—a national event sponsored locally by the Baltimore Metropolitan Council—encourages commuters to leave the car at home. The day includes bike rallies in the Baltimore metro area and convoys led by experienced riders along safe routes; registered riders get a T-shirt and other goodies.

Free 410-732-0500 Register at www.bike2work centralmd.com

Balticon

May 28–31

A thousand dedicated fans descend on Hunt Valley for a four-day, round-the-clock celebration of sci-fi and fantasy. The many activities include author panel discussions, science presentations, writing workshops, live-action role-playing, and a Steampunk Ball. Guests of honor include author Tanya Huff and artist Howard Tayler (pictured).

Marriott Hunt Valley Inn 245 Shawan Rd. For admission prices and group discounts, call 410-563-2737 or go to www.balticon.org

Sowebohemian Arts and Music Festival

May 30

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Sowebo festival, which turns the Hollins Market area into a lively street party. Along with live music from local bands, there are dozens of food vendors and artisans, puppet shows, and the famous Sowebo poster exhibition.

26 S. Arlington Ave. Free www.soweboarts.org/festival. html

Photo credits from top to bottom: photo by John Valentini Jr.; © Vladimir Hroch | Dreamstime.com; photo by Middleton Evans; courtesy of Baltimore Metropolitan Council–Bike to Work Day 2009; photo by Sandra Tayler; art by Bob Helsey /photo by Sowebo Arts

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Earth Tones

photo by JaTawny Muckelvene Chatmen

While prepping models for photo shoots, makeup artist/stylist Jill Turnbull grew frustrated with the limited colors and low quality available. The solution? Do it herself. No Worries Cosmetics is a full makeup and skincare line, launched by Turnbull—an industry veteran who’s lived in Baltimore for seventeen years—in the early 1980s. Its name comes from the popular phrase coined by the Aussies, and the colors were inspired by the lush hues of the land down under, where Turnbull spent her childhood. There’s the blue of the Pacific Ocean in the eye shadow, the earthy hues of the Outback in the powder and lipsticks. And shades for a range of skin tones are available; Turnbull says every color works on every color of skin. “I couldn’t get the product I wanted, so I created it,” she says. “And it had to be really high-end. It is a professional product, but real people can use it.” Indeed: prices start at less than $10.

Find No Worries Cosmetics at Turnbull’s salon, Etches International (29 W. Allegheny Ave.; 410-296-8281) or online at www.noworriescosmetics.com.

—Elizabeth Heubeck

Nuts for Nuts

photo by Kelly Wise

In 1973, Ann Zinke was a stay-at-home mom looking for a way to supplement the income of her husband, Ed. She began selling small bags of dried fruit and nuts to friends and local businesses in her community of Silver Spring; now, Ann’s House of Nuts bills itself as the largest supplier of trail mixes in the world. The Zinkes sold the company in 2008, and last November, the company moved its corporate offices and outlet store from Jessup to Columbia (9212 Berger Rd., #300; 410-309-6887; www. annshouseofnuts.com). There, bulk items, overstocks, and imperfectly packaged items crowd the shelves, with snack and trail mixes stocked alongside bags of nuts and dried fruit. And the bargains make the trek to the ’burbs worthwhile: A dollar nets a 2-pound-bag of spicy peanuts, and currants go for $2.67 a pound. Nostalgic candies and gift items are also available.

—Maren Tarro

The Diva is in the Details

photo by Kelly Wise

Meet Julie Bent: smart, creative, and detail-oriented. Now, meet the spring line from Julie Bent’s Lot 201 (410-929-1183; www.lot201.com): smart, creative, and detail-oriented. In a workspace shared with fabric designer Sarah Templin at the Oliver Street Studios in Station North, Bent designs and sews her clothes with actual women, not superskinny models, in mind. “I want real people to wear my clothes,” she says. Utilizing A-line designs and flattering silks and cottons, her line of blouses, pants, and dresses are mindful of the fact that women’s bodies are constantly changing. This, her first ready-to-wear line, experiments with tucks and gathers. “After [women] hit 30, we want to accentuate different things—we don’t want to dress like we’re 19,” says Bent, who is working on an expanded line due to hit next spring.

—M.T.

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Retail Shop Open Monday - Saturday, 8am - 6pm Sunday, 8am - 4pm 4607 Hartford Road Baltimore, MD 21214 410-254-0122 www.zekescoffee.com

Mind in the Gutter

photo by Tyler Fitzpatrick

Forty-three-year-old financial advisor George Van Dyke (pictured) set out last summer to find an affordable way to sweep the leaves and litter out of the gutters of his Roland Park home. “Don’t let the house fool you,” he says. “I’m very thrifty.” With $25 worth of parts from Home Depot, he rigged up a contraption, attached it to his leaf blower, and voilà—clear gutters! (“It works just as well with a ShopVac,” he says.) At the suggestion of a neighbor, Van Dyke drew up plans and instructions; they’re available to the public, along with a detailed parts list, for $25 at www.guttercleaningsecret.com. (A dollar from every purchase is donated to Community Foundation of Carroll County to aid individuals dealing with a catastrophic illness.) Van Dyke estimates that, depending on the house, a tool can cost between $25 and $45; it works on gutters up to 25 feet.

—M.T.

Made to Last In the ’80s, Harris “Rick” Rubin was living in New York and trying to support his sculpture habit by fabricating interior metalwork for designers and architects. To focus on his own projects, he started a design firm, Harris Rubin Inc. In 2002, he returned to his native Baltimore and established a second shop (4603 Harford Rd.; 410-426-0062; www.harrisrubin.com), where he and his crew turn out original and custom tables, benches, and home accessories that he calls “transitional,” meaning equally at home in traditional and modern surrounds. Crafted from metal, wood (often from local trees), stone, glass, and mosaic tile, they combine functionality and beauty, with lots of attention paid to the finishing. “We’re always experimenting with new ways to treat the materials,” Rubin says. “It’s gotta pass the ‘ooh, ahh’ test.”

photo by Vince Lupo | Direction One

—Maria-Pia Negro

Chocolate Fix Growing up in Peru, Debora Varon was surrounded by a family of cooks.

After earning a master’s degree in food science and a PhD in genetics in the United States, she felt drawn back to her roots. “I was looking for something that combined creativity, pleasure, and tradition,” she says. “There’s this long history of cooking in my family, so I thought, ‘Why not me?’” Varon launched Izzy’s Chocolate (443-739-5710; www.facebook.com/pages/Izzys-Chocolate/ 306190116449) last March to bring the Peruvian treat chocotejas to the Baltimore market. Sweet dulce de leche combined with nuts or fruits then dipped in Belgian dark chocolate, the chocolates are enclosed in wrappers decorated with drawings in the style of the Nazca Lines, large geoglyphs etched in the sand of Peru’s Nazca Desert. The preservative- and sulfite-free sweets come in coconut, pecan, mango, and pineapple and are available at Ma Petite Shoe (832 W. 36th St.; 410-235-3442; www.mapetiteshoe.com) and Red Canoe Bookstore Café (4337 Harford Rd.; 410-444-4440; www.redcanoe.bz).

—M.T. photo by John Miskimon

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a l s o i n b a lt i m o r e o b s e r v e d : 29 Transformer: Local teens talk to peers in Africa about HIV/AIDS

baltimore observed

p r e s e r vat i o n

The Last Castle

Can National Register status save Baltimore’s coolest abandoned building?

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ommanding the heights above West Baltimore’s Mosher and Rosemont neighborhoods, the 135-year-old Hebrew Orphan Asylum conveys a fortress-like strength. A red brick edifice trimmed in stone, its turrets and ornate cornice suggest crenulated battlements. Only the sheets of weathered plywood over the windows testify to its diminished state: more than two decades of abandonment and decay.

Erected not as a fortified royal residence but as refuge for needy Jewish children, the asylum stands today as likely the oldest Jewish orphanage building in the country. But the building spent much of the 20th century as part of a community medical facility. In 1989, what was then called Lutheran Hospital merged with another institution, and the “castle” at Rayner Avenue and Ashburton

story and photography by brennen jensen

Street was eventually vacated. The boards went up, and assaults from the elements and vandals began.

This handsome hunk of Romanesque Victoriana, with its rich social history, might be the coolest abandoned building that few have ever heard of in Baltimore. But it might soon have a higher profile: Last month, the preservation-minded nonprofit Baltimore Heritage applied to have the asylum listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

“The asylum has been on our preservation watch list of important buildings whose fates are uncertain for a number of years,” says Johns Hopkins, the group’s executive director. The building, he feels, is a “slam dunk” to make the register, which could occur by

midsummer. The listing would provide tax credits and other restoration incentives to Coppin State University, which has owned the structure since 2003.

“There has been some ambivalence about what our plans for the building were,” admits Gary Rodwell, executive director of the Coppin Heights Community Development Corp., the university’s nonprofit development arm, which is now overseeing the asylum. “Having the building listed on the National Register should be a clear signal to everyone in the community and the city that our intent is to preserve and restore the facility.”

Coppin State acquired the 6-acre Lutheran Hospital complex, located about a mile south of campus, seven years ago, with hopes of developing the site. More than $3 million in state and city funds

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Not a scene from Oliver! Young residents of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum exercise in the building’s gym, circa 1911.

were used to raze vacant hospital buildings and clear the tract for future development. Spared were the asylum and the adjacent Tuerk House, an inpatient addiction recovery facility carved out of a 1940s hospital building. Stanley Battle, Coppin’s president at the time, championed converting the asylum into a public boarding school for inner-city students, a concept that lost steam following his 2007 departure. Now Rodwell envisions some form of mixed-use development, combining commercial, office, and academic space. Its marketability could be bolstered by proximity to a MARC station and the planned Red Line transit project.

The building has since been structurally stabilized, but significant interior damage has already been done. Rodwell says a collapsed skylight and related water intrusions left the building “too dangerous” to give a reporter even a cursory look inside. “There are structural challenges that have to be met, but we think preservation architects can figure ways to address them,” Rodwell says.

“What you have is an exterior that could be restored and an interior that would have to be totally redeveloped.”

Given the asylum’s many retrofits over the last century, it’s likely that little inside dates back to the days when its halls echoed with children’s voices. When the Hebrew Benevolent Society erected the building in 1875 at a cost of $54,000 (replacing a smaller orphanage that burned down), its hilltop perch was deep in the bucolic suburbs. The orphanage, built to house as many as 150 children, had its own kitchen garden and dairy cows. A newspaper of the day dubbed its opening “a gala day of the Israelitish.”

Blame it on Dickens novels, but today one assumes that all 19th-century orphanages were grim and dingy institutions, full of sadistic masters with a whip-hand over hollow-eyed charges. But evidence suggests that the Hebrew Asylum was clean and modern by the standards of the day, with indoor

—Brennen Jensen

baltimore observed SAFE STREETS, INTERRUPTED : On March 22, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake kicked off Youth Violence Prevention Week by announcing a $1 million grant to Safe Streets, a program that employs former gang members and ex-offenders as mediators to reduce shootings in targeted neighborhoods. (See “Murder, Interrupted,” May ’08.) On April 12, the mayor suspended the program’s funding. What happened? In short: Guilt by association. In a federal indictment released that day, a worker affi liated with the West Baltimore nonprofit Communities Organized to Improve Life (COIL) was charged with distributing heroin as a high-ranking member of the Black Guerilla Family (BGF) gang. The Baltimore City Health Department had awarded a contract to COIL in August 2007 to administer the Union Square site of Safe Streets, which also has offices in East Baltimore and Cherry Hill. That contract was not renewed in 2008 because COIL failed to properly implement the program, according a 2009 evaluation by Johns Hopkins researchers. The feds allege that the gang used COIL as a cover for its drug activities.

The seriousness of that charge—and COIL’s erstwhile association with Safe Streets—was enough to convince the city to freeze funding for the program and investigate further.

Safe Streets is based on CeaseFire, a program devised by Chicago public health researcher Gary Slutkin. Using former gang members as “violence interrupters” to defuse disputes, the model has proved effective in curbing killings in Chicago and Baltimore: Researchers at the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found “a clear reduction in gun violence” in East Baltimore’s McElderry Park, says Center co-director Daniel Webster. He’ll now join a city task force to investigate possible gang infi ltration of the Safe Streets sites. Based on his first look at the lengthy federal indictment, he believes that “this was a problem with COIL, not with Safe Streets,” he says.

Gardnel Carter, the current site director of Safe Streets-East, was told to ground his his fourteen outreach workers immediately until that investigation is complete. “We deal with gang members every day—that’s our job.

But to say that we’re controlled by the BGF is unfounded,” he says. “We have a very strenuous interview process to make sure we don’t get people walking both sides of the fence.”

Still, Webster isn’t surprised that the city pulled the plug, pending further review.

“It’s the nature of the beast,” he says. “I’d hope that people understand that there are risks to hiring ex-offenders. But you have to ask: What is the alternative?” w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 1 0

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plumbing and central heat. Most of its young residents were not even orphans—they were simply poor Jewish kids who had lost a breadwinning parent. Other religions and ethnic groups ran similar facilities; in 1910, there were nearly thirty orphanages in Baltimore, comprising an ad-hoc safety net for the city’s immigrant population.

“What most children had at that time was not comparable to what children had in the Hebrew Asylum,” says Nurith Zmora, professor of history at Minnesota’s Hameline University and author of Orphanages Reconsidered: Child Care Institutions in Progressive Era Baltimore. “In the orphanage they had their own bed, they had a building that was 70 degrees in the winter, they had three meals and a chance to go to school at a time when other children were already out working by the fifth grade.”

The asylum closed in 1923, replaced by a newer facility off Greenspring Avenue.

The West Baltimore General Hospital took over the building, then Lutheran Hospital in 1945, both caring for people in what increasingly became distressed surroundings. Area disinvestment intensified in the 1970s when transportation planners wanted to send an interstate careening through the environs— plans whose legacy is the U.S. 40 “Highway to Nowhere.” In the 1980s, the asylum assumed its last duty, as a community center and locus for the city’s sundry heath and social service programs. Mayor William Donald Schaefer was on hand to cut the ribbon when this incarnation kicked off.

Will an officially landmarked Orphan Asylum live to enjoy a new role? Preservationist Hopkins thinks that the hulking structure could be a “community catalyst.” He compares it to the American Brewery Building on the city’s east side, another abandoned landmark long marooned in a sea of blight. A $22 million renovation completed last year saw it become the gleaming headquarters for the nonprofit social service agency Humanim.

“They are both large, iconic, historic buildings with deep roots,” Hopkins says. “The asylum has the potential to help transform the community, just as the American Brewery is doing in East Baltimore.”

That’s exactly what seven-term city councilwoman Agnes Welch, who represents the area and once had an office in the asylum, thinks can happen. She remembers the building as “a hub of community activity,” not a magnificent ruin.

“It’s so sad what happened to that building, because it was gorgeous,” Welch says.

“Right now the neighbors are tired of looking at it like that. We need to give them a little bit of hope.” ■

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urbanite may 10

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hat do ninth-graders from Baltimore have in common with teenagers from Namibia? This, at least: They both live in areas where HIV/AIDS is all too prevalent. The Baltimore-Towson metropolitan area had the fourth highest rate of new AIDS cases in the nation in 2007; 2 percent of city residents tested positive for the virus that year. In Namibia, in southern Africa, the numbers are far worse—more than 15 percent of the population carries the virus. Now, teens from Baltimore and Namibia are exchanging ideas in an effort to prevent the spread of this devastating disease.

The U.S.-Namibia HIV/AIDS education initiative is the first project of the nonprofit Focal Point Global, created in 2009 by identical twin sisters Hassanatu and Hussainatu Blake, who grew up in the northwest Baltimore neighborhood of Gwynn Oak. The Blakes, now 27, are no strangers to crossing cultural borders. Their father is from Baltimore, and their mother is from Cameroon. Their work (Hassanatu is in public health, and Hussainatu works in law and international relations) has taken them to the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe, where they have seen young people struggling with

photo by Thomas Jonas

Peer-to-Peer

Crossing cultures: Facilitator Naethra Sreekrishna (right) works with Namibian teens Ndahafa Elago and David Penda to brainstorm ways to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS.

extreme poverty, disease, and child exploitation, who are unaware that these issues also affect their peers elsewhere.

“We decided to start an organization where youth can connect on an international level with their peers and create social change in their communities,” Hassanatu says.

This winter, six teenagers from Swakopmund, Namibia, and four ninth-graders participating in the Baltimore Educational Scholarship Trust program (B.E.S.T.) spent three days learning about HIV/AIDS and developing projects to help their communities.

Then, using the video-conferencing program Skype, the two groups shared their stories.

For the students, the distinct realities of the two countries suggested different

solutions. In Namibia, people often avoid being tested for HIV/AIDS for fear of becoming stigmatized. The students there decided to walk with people to clinics to get tested and teach their communities about how the disease is, and is not, spread. In Baltimore, in contrast, the disease is underground, rarely talked about, according to the students. They decided to create high school clubs to discuss HIV/AIDS and do community outreach.

Participant Dania Morris, from Maryvale Preparatory School in Brooklandville, says the group was nervous about the conversation with the Namibian teens at first, but by the end they were exchanging stories about life. “There were differences in our experiences,” she says. “But there were more similarities. It was really surprising.”

Focal Point plans to hold another teleconference on June 6 to see how the projects are progressing. The group’s next project will bring together young people to discuss human trafficking. “All youth tend to listen to their peers,” Hassanatu says. “If you can give them the right information, they start educating and mobilizing one another.” ■ —Maria-Pia Negro

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Scenes from a cultural revolution, and what it might mean for the rest of us

By Davi d Du dley ILLU S T R A T I O N B Y

B R IA N P AY N E

P

icture 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 hangerson 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

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“I have brought New York curators to Baltimore and shown them what’s here,” says Irene Hofmann of the Contemporary Museum. “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.”

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?”

T

he forces behind this renaissance are institutional, generational, and geographical. Arts boosters have long touted Baltimore’s artistfriendly 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 “Art School Confidential,” p. 42.) More MICA students equals more art scene.

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-againstthe-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 continued on page 81 w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 1 0

35

Brushes with greatness

b y m a r i a nn e k . a m oss photography by michael northrup

O

n 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 avantgarde: 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.”

New discoveries: Paul Kahla, an engineer, checks out an exhibit at Area 405. “I have such an admiration for what I see,” he says. “It makes me wish I was an artist.”

A whirlwind tour of Baltimore’s underground arts spaces brings together the creators and the collectors.

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.”

It’s true that the city’s cultural energy has not exactly translated into a lucrative collector base for Baltimore art makers. Collector Rachel Rabinowitz, who is also on the tour, says art-buying tends to happen largely at a handful of commercial galleries such as C. Grimaldis Gallery in Mount Vernon and Goya Contemporary in Hampden. And nonprofits like School 33 and Maryland Art Place throw annual group sales. (For more on where to buy affordable original art, see p. 51.) But Rabinowitz—whose grandparents, collectors Israel and Selma Rosen, donated a Picasso print and a Robert Rauschenberg lithograph to the Baltimore Museum of Art—thinks the numbers are about right. “The amount of people in the population that are art collectors is a small group,” she says. “I think we’re very well served.”

Nancy Rome, an art lover and member of Evergreen’s advisory council who organized the day, says she modeled the tour after one that Rabinowitz did with the Baltimore Museum of Art a few years ago. “People loved what Rachel did,” Rome says. “Will people take a risk spending a day doing something they know nothing about and might not even like? It may not work, but it’s worth a shot.”

Despite leaky ceilings at Load of Fun (120 W. North Ave.; www. loadoffun.net), the tourgoers gamely traipse through the building, greeting some of the building’s thirty-odd artists in their studios. They cluster around a slideshow on architect Sergio Martinez’s MacBook.

They check out Julia Pearson’s black and white photos and Melissa Webb’s vividly colorful, whimsical costume designs. And then they scoot back on the bus, shielding their heads from the rain.

A few blocks away, the power is out at Area 405, an unheated, 60,000-square-foot former brewery that dates back to 1848 (405 E. Oliver St.; 410-528-2101; www.area405.com). Co-owner Stewart Watson blames the new construction across the street, where ground has broken for the $15 million City Arts building, a residential development designed with artists in mind (planned are apartments, townhouses, a gallery, and a performance space). The hardy artist/volunteers has been working all morning to light the cavernous space, even running extension cords from the Oliver Street Studios (also under the Area 405 umbrella) next door. But the jury-rigged setup gives out a few minutes after the tour group starts looking around the gallery, where a group show titled Hive is up. So, in picturesque bohemian style, the Evergreen crew light candles and dole out lunches as the artists hook up a generator.

“I wouldn’t think to come in a place like this,” says D.C.-based architect Jonathan McIntyre, the partner of Evergreen’s Abbott. “I don’t

know the rules.

Still lifes: Tourgoers pose amid the artwork in Load of Fun. Is this private space or public space or personal space?” He contrasts it with the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia, a more mall-like facility that offers art classes and open studio hours for the public.

Accessibility is worth considering: At the H&H Building at 405 W. Franklin St., the next stop, the group has to wait in the rain while someone locates the correct doorbell. After being buzzed in, they trundle into a squeaky, graffiti-covered elevator to the third floor and then walk out into the open Whole Gallery, where a group show titled Animal Attraction is up. “Oh, what a terrific space!” says one of the tourgoers.

Alex Ebstein and Seth Adelsberger, who run Nudashank (http:// nudashank.blogspot.com), which splits the floor with the Whole Gallery, share their story with the group: They’ve lived in the building for two years and launched their gallery a year ago, to give young artists a space to show their work and get national-level promotion. As the others mill about, Anna Romaniuk, an engineer and Hopkins alum, inquires after a pyramid-like piece by New York-based artist Tatiana Berg that she hopes to buy.

Back on the bus, Karen Ruppert says she’s glad to be on this insider’s tour. She’s brought along her daughter, Kiersten, a junior at Furman University studying art history. “These are things we would never see,” she says. “You get stuck in suburbia and don’t take advantage of them.”

The final destination of the day is also the most upscale—Jordan Faye Block’s eponymous gallery in Federal Hill (1401 Light St.; 443955-1547; www. jordanfayecontemporary.com). It’s housed in an elegant former Pratt library building that served as a home and gallery for tour guide Hughes (see Urbanite, July ’08) before Block took the space over last fall. Here, she shows the work of the twenty artists she represents and prepares young, unrepresented artists to enter the marketplace, hosting workshops to teach newbies the ropes and throwing parties where they can mingle with potential collectors.

“Selling art in this town isn’t necessarily easy,” Block says. “A lot of artists don’t know how to go about selling their work.”

As the rain pours down outside, the tourgoers sip champagne and wander around the gallery, taking in the art and perhaps planning some future acquisitions of their own. It’s the kind of thing Alice Warder Garrett would have loved. ■ —Marianne K. Amoss is Urbanite’s managing editor.

Web extra: More underground art spaces at www.urbanitebaltimore.com w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 1 0

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Out-ofThe Towners

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Why are theater artists flocking to Baltimore?

S

Anywhere but here: Visiting theater artists have found a home away from home on Baltimore stages.

1: Yury Klavdiev’s The Polar Truth, part of Towson University’s New Russian Drama Project. Photo by Tina Staffieri.

2: Olga Mukhina’s Tanya Tanya, also in the New Russian Drama Project. Photo by Jay Herzog.

3, 5, 6: Playing Dead, performed at Single Carrot Theatre. Photos by Chris Hartlove.

4, 7, 8: ... the itsy bitsy spider ..., performed at Theatre Project. Photos courtesy of Studio Six.

ince he became executive director of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance in January, it’s been part of J. Buck Jabaily’s job description to explain what makes Baltimore so attractive to up-and-coming theater artists. And while he acknowledges the usual answer—low rent—there’s more to it than that. “Baltimore is becoming a place where, not just starving artists, but people in the initial years of their career can network and find their way around.”

The word is getting around: For ensembles and writers, national and international, the city is getting a reputation as a place to work and develop.

Jabaily himself can vouch for that. In 2007, he and an ensemble of like-minded University of Colorado graduates went looking for a place to move in and move up. They found that in Baltimore: They built up a small space in the Load of Fun building on North Avenue, dubbed it Single Carrot Theatre, and started mounting an eclectic series of productions by playwrights past and present, ranging from Shakespeare to Sheila Callaghan, whose Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake) is coming this month.

The Single Carrot team found support from existing cultural institutions, including Center Stage, Everyman Theatre, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. They also found plenty of soulmates in Baltimore’s underground, with venues such as the Annex Theater, the Strand Theater (see “The Play’s the Thing,” Oct. ’08 Urbanite), and the Creative Alliance all giving space to younger theater groups inside and outside the city. Audiences have responded accordingly: For the last three years, Single Carrot has been selling out productions in their forty-five-seat venue. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 1 0

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courtesy of Ric Royer

The experimentalist: Performance artist Ric Royer performs his play The 50 Greatest Ladies and Gentlemen in 2009.

“We hear ab out Baltimore being unpretentious and

This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon: Philip Arnoult, who founded Baltimore’s Theatre Project in 1971, has been bringing outside artists to Baltimore for decades. “It’s a dance,” he says. “The onetimers are the exception rather than the rule.

The people who keep coming back to Baltimore wind up developing a lasting relationship to an audience that is thoughtful and receptive.”

Theatre Project, currently under the direction of Anne Fulwiler, continues to offer a dependable venue for out-of-state and experimental performers and theater groups. This spring brought several frequent out-of-town performers, including Vermont’s Sandglass Theater and Philadelphia’s Sara Felder. Florida-based writer/performer Al Letson, who is scheduled to come to Baltimore on May 23 for a free reading of his piece Crumbs: a possibly true story, gained national recognition with Griot, a 2005 play commissioned by Theatre Project.

Actor and director Vasanth Santosham, with the New York-based Studio Six, chose Theatre Project as a site for an April production of …the itsy bitsy spider…, adapted from Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed (also translated as The Devils).

The ensemble, made up of American graduates of Moscow’s Art Theatre School, is currently based in New York City, but Santosham says Baltimore offers an ideal atmosphere for emerging artists to introduce their work. “In New York City, whenever you think you’re doing something new, you find that there’s someone else on the other side of town who’s done the same thing,” he says. “And people like to watch the established groups. It’s hard to get anyone’s attention.”

That may also be why, this year, Baltimore has become the focus of a group of young Russian playwrights looking for a U.S. foothold.

The Baltimore-based Center for International Theatre Development—directed and founded by Arnoult—and Towson University’s Department of Theatre Arts are currently hosting the New Russian Drama Project, which is giving Russian playwrights the opportunity to stage newly translated productions for American audiences. The project will conclude this month with a conference in which artistic directors and theater professionals from around the country, as well as Russian playwrights and critics, will come to Baltimore to discuss and publicize the work—and possibly set the stage for future productions in New York City.

Baltimore has also begun attracting foreign playwrights through its international play readings, hosted by Center Stage. This April, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, Israeli playwright Motti Lerner, and German Hannah Moscovitch, as well as Caryl Churchill and Tony Kushner, were in town for readings. Center Stage resident dramaturg Gavin Witt says that there’s a reason these playwrights come here to develop their work. “We hear about Baltimore being unpretentious and working class. But it’s also got a reputation as a place where audiences are smart, committed, and willing to engage. People come to Baltimore to get feedback.” Lerner, whose production The Murder of Isaac played at Center Stage in 2006, said it all, according to Witt. “After a post-show discussion, [Lerner] told [Center Stage artistic director] Irene [Lewis], ‘This is the first place I’ve been where people weren’t yelling at each other.’”

Like many creative immigrants, performance artist Ric Royer touts the city’s relative affordability and proximity to Philadelphia

working class,” says Center Stage’s Gavin Witt. “But it’s also got a reputation as a place where audiences are smart, committed, and willing to engage.

People come to Baltimore to get feedback.”

and New York City. He came to Baltimore from Buffalo, New York, in 2003. Since then, he’s successfully showcased his work in the Annex Theater in Station North, 2640 in Charles Village, and elsewhere. But Royer notes that, as the city hones its reputation as a place for developing new performers and artists, it’s also undergoing growing pains.

When Royer found a home in the Load of Fun complex in 2008, he says, it was a dream come true. He installed a black box performance space in the building, which became a nexus for Baltimore’s experimental theater community.

But Royer’s relationship with the building’s owner collapsed after fourteen months, and now he’s once again looking for a permanent venue while he organizes periodic shows downtown at the 14Karat Cabaret, which has been hosting edgy performers since 1989. His challenges are mirrored by many a local artist in town looking to make the next step up from the affordable underground. “There’s this point where we need personal and financial stability,” he says. “That’s the irony of success. Once we start making the real estate attractive, it becomes a bargaining chip.”

Royer thinks that Baltimore needs to find a way to retain those artists who, after getting their foothold here, are moving to midcareer. His suggestion: a more central arts hub, which, in the middle of the city, could offer a permanent physical location for smaller ensembles. Until that happens, though, he has advice for outside theater artists who are interested in the Mid-Atlantic. “Baltimore offers these windows of opportunity. Even if it’s only for fourteen months, you should take advantage of them.” ■ —John Barry writes frequently about Baltimore’s theater scene for City Paper. He wrote about arts funding cutbacks in the June 2009 Urbanite.

Web extra: More upcoming highlights from Baltimore’s theaters at www.urbanitebaltimore.com w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 1 0

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Observe and report: Larry Witham has been shadowing classes at MICA for several months, gathering fly-on-the-wall material for a book about a year in the life of a major American art school.

A writer trains his gaze on MICA for a year in search of the meaning of art in America.

By miCHael yOCkel photography by dennis drenner 42

urbanite may 10

Art school Confidential

A

bit after 9 a.m. on a Wednesday in late February, the nineteen students in Kenneth Martin’s Sculptural Forms class circle around an elongated, jury-rigged structure, one of nine vaguely similar shapes that irregularly dot the floor of a warehouse-like space in Maryland Institute College of Art’s Station Building.

Constructed from small pieces of wood and plastic piping that have been nailed, glued, and tied together with various oddments—two pairs of boots at the base, a slab of dried ramen noodles inserted in its midsection, an upside-down Trader Joe’s coffee tin on top—the spindly, 8-foot tower resembles a collaboration between Alberto Giacometti and Rube Goldberg.

Martin is pleased with the creation. “It is a cohesive and readable gesture,” he tells his class. (Translation: It’s good.)

“Look how beautifully it’s organized. You have this giant mass of activity down here setting up structural themes. You know what it desperately needs?” he asks, pausing to set up his punch line. “Skis.”

The students chuckle. Over the next hour, they migrate from structure to structure, which they’ve built in teams as part of an assignment called “To Build the Tallest Tower,” while Martin and teaching intern Ginny Huo lead a group critique. Hovering on the periphery is a middle-aged man—gray hair, wire-rimmed glasses, sensible shoes—closely, quietly observing the proceedings, occasionally jotting notes. There but not there.

Larry Witham has spent the past six months engaged in this unobtrusive participation, sitting in on a host of MICA classes as research for a planned book. His working title? Art Schooled.

“There’s a courtesy I try to follow, and that’s to not disrupt a class and try to get there on time,” notes Witham, 57. This isn’t his first go at art school: He graduated with a bachelor’s in fine arts from San José State in 1974. But he is not actually taking classes; rather, he maintains fly-on-the-wall status—embedded on MICA’s campus. “To get a feel for this, in some of the classes I’ve drawn and painted,” he allows.

“It humored the students and faculty to see this old gray-haired guy coming in to find out if he still had it.”

A career journalist who spent twenty-one years as a reporter for the Washington Times, Witham has published ten books, most on religion and society, including A City Upon a Hill: How Sermons Changed the Course of American History (2007) and By Design: Science and the Search for God (2003). This month, Oxford University Press will issue his Marketplace of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion .

Almost a year ago, Witham decided to explore a completely different subject. “I’ve always wanted to write a book on the arts,” he says, “because that was my training as a young man. I looked at all my old notes and thought, ‘Well, there’s an art school in Baltimore. Maybe I’ll do a year in the life of an art school.’”

Witham, who lives in Burtonsville in Montgomery County, also visited schools in Philadelphia, D.C., New York, and Chicago in the course of his research. But he focused on MICA, both for convenience and because he wanted a school “on the curve of prominence,” he says.

“It’s a great time to tell its story, even though it’s not a New York or a Los Angeles school, which are, typically, the big urban art scenes. It’s

“Today, you can do almost any-

thing and it is called art,” says La

Witham. “T he argument you hear

rr y

most now

is, ‘Art is what the artist says it is. ’”

grown, and it’s reached a plateau in its growth and is now learning how to make the most of its scale.”

True: MICA has ballooned over the past ten-plus years. Its student population mushroomed from 1,240 in 1999 to 1,857 in 2009, with a concomitant boost in both the number of full-time faculty members (from 113 to 265) and course offerings (611 to 1,017). MICA also added five new MFA programs. U.S. News & World Report does not rank undergraduate art schools, but Ray Allen, the school’s provost and vice president for academic affairs, says that MICA would be somewhere near the top. “That’s reflected in the schools we’re in direct competition with.” He ticks off New York’s Cooper Union, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Rhode Island School of Design. “For a long time, we’ve been a very national school—much more so than, I think, many Baltimoreans realize.”

Still, Witham says, “The question arises: ‘Why would anybody read a book on Baltimore?’ Publishers ask that. But these kinds of cities do make a great story. And there is an art scene here. Someone just told me that a professor at Cooper Union told his students that Baltimore has a more lively art scene than New York now.”

Along with using that scene as an entry into a significant American subculture, Witham is striving to address a deeper question: “What on earth is art or the visual arts? What role do they play in the world today, and why should we care about them?” He’s also interested in showing how art education balances its high-minded mission with the demands of the real world. “Art schools live in a competitive college and university environment. They cannot sit on their laurels and say, ‘We’re a haven of creativity and art.’ They have to deal with the marketplace. They have to have a track record of producing young citizens who do things in the world that people can make sense of, whether it’s financial productivity or beautifying the world or doing something socially that improves society. And I’ve learned that the public still probably doesn’t understand how an art student can do all of those things—make money, change society, and make the world a little more beautiful.”

MICA gave its benediction for Witham to research unencumbered, issuing what amounts to a full-access pass to shadow classes and talk to students and administrators. “It was a gut call,” remembers Allen. “We sat down and talked together. The decision was, ‘Can I trust this guy to behave responsibly and not be a muckraker?’”

Comparing what he’s observed with his own art school days in the 1970s, Witham has been surprised by the far broader contemporary interpretation of the discipline. “Today, you can do almost continued on page 83

still life WITh PrICe TAG In hard times, is it worth making room in your budget for buying art? k iNi W N RiO by a m n o y i B rat r t s h u ill bi be b ro

T

he other night I visited some friends in their rowhouse in TuscanyCanterbury. After we’d made the usual 2010 small talk about how broke everyone is, my friend sighed. “You’re going to think I’m crazy,” she said, “but I want to get your opinion on something.”

She led me out of the kitchen to a wall in the living room. “It’s a Stuart Davis,” she said. I recognized the style. A jazzy geometric image reminiscent of Picasso and Miró, the print was on loan from a dealer so she could make up her mind about it. The price tag: $575.

“The only way I can think of paying for it,” she said, “would be to sell this piece over here.” She gestured to a lacquered persimmon cabinet. It seemed a decision out of an O. Henry story: The two complemented each other perfectly.

Why would someone in financial straits put her furniture on eBay to buy a print?

You have to call it love.

I understood her dilemma. I’ve always been deeply drawn to art and artists, and, I have to say, got some good deals back in the day. My first husband, a hairdresser, traded a perm for a Day-Glo acrylic of a man falling through space. Another time, we wrote a struggling friend a check for $250 for her amazing but very mentally ill painting of the Velveteen Rabbit. Both are still on my walls.

My second husband, a philosopher of aesthetics, traced his career back to a childhood encounter with Vermeer’s Girl in a Red Hat and now writes whole books about loving art. Our merger caused a surge of art acquisition, and by this time I was both flush enough and rash enough to spend real money. Eleven hundred dollars, once, for a beautiful Chris Terry still life that arrived from Utah in a packing crate the size of our dining room table. When we divorced, we had a harder time splitting up the art than the kids.

The bond you form with an image made by another person out of their creativity and skill is different than the connection you feel to a functional object or a decorative one. It is the way we connect to music and stories, but a painting is an object you live with and actually own, connecting you in a profound and unusual way to the person who made it, as if by a wire through the collective unconscious.

Certainly, original paintings can be expensive, and much-cheaper posters and prints do a fine job of dressing up the walls and bringing out the colors in the rug. Well, stuffed animals are cuddly and lowmaintenance, but having one is nothing like having a cat or a dog. But how do you decide how much to spend on your new best friend? Is an $8,000 Samoyed worth more than a $500 dachshund or a $75 pound pup? Is a dog more like a pair of shoes or a trip to Europe?

Change dog to painting, and we know even less.

I

’d been wandering the Avenue in Hampden on a First Friday, window-shopping with my daughter and her friend. As we grazed the wine and cheese at the Antreasian Gallery, my eye fell on a photorealist painting of a motel overlooking a shimmering turquoise swimming pool. A midnight sky sets off the neon-lit stucco building; white letters on a blue awning give the work its title: Oasis.

In the pool is a woman in a red two-piece bathing suit, her back to us. Her image is distorted by the movement of the water, and it is when you start looking at how the artist, Patrick Kluga, accomplished this that you are struck by the looseness of the brushstrokes throughout the painting—especially because from a distance it could almost be a photograph. It is also through the figure of the woman that you enter the narrative of the piece, the mystery of the lone person in the pool at night. Like a film noir, it is a painting noir: Even the branches of the potted plants seem to know something is up.

“My father owned a motel when I was little,” I said dreamily to gallery owner Robert Antreasian, who had noticed my fascination.

He showed me other Kluga works, cityscapes around Hampden and Mount Vernon. And then he told me the price, which was $3,100.

I had moved to Baltimore just three months earlier and had not been able to sell my house in York County, Pennsylvania, before I left. It had been languishing on the market for months, unfurnished, unloved, and unlucky. One set of buyers had copped out the week before closing, and now there were about two showings per month, despite a dramatically lowered price. A pipe had burst and there was mold growing in the basement. As the proud owner of this albatross as well as my new place in Evergreen, I was in no position to be buying a $3,100 painting.

Even though art occupied a loophole in my otherwise frugal moneymanagement style, this was three times the hole’s current size.

Nevertheless, I was obsessed with Oasis. I started taking friends by to visit it; it was top on the tour for out-of-towners. After a month or so, Antreasian suggested I put down a deposit since it would probably kill me if someone else bought it. I knew he was right. But I also knew that w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 1 0

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even if the house sold and I got some money out of it, the painting would be out of my price range. What I wanted to pay was $1,800, or $2,000 at the most.

How did I come up with this number? I didn’t know what the painting was “worth” and never even considered that it might have investment value. What I knew was, this painter dude had probably worked much, much harder and longer than I did on the last article I sold to Ladies’ Home Journal for that amount of money and that he had created something Q: How firm are the prices listed for timeless, while I had created recycling. pieces in a gallery?

So given that, wasn’t it an insult to offer so much less than they were asking? I was embarrassed and unsure, so I decided to call my best friend, Sandye.

A: Buying art is more like a buying a Buick than buying a Sandye is an artist, a person of strong ideas and tastes, and, like me, a paragon sweater at the Gap. In other words, it’s OK to haggle. Robert of frugality with certain weak spots.

Antreasian of Antreasian Gallery (1111 W. 36th St.; 410-235She took a look at the painting online and told me to go ahead and make 4420; www.antreasiangallery.com) says he’s never been an offer. I was buying for love, not for investment, and it made her happy to insulted by an offer, no matter how low. “Offer me $100,” he says. think of someone loving a painting as much as I did this one. She said how “I can always say no.” Most galleries have a mark-up that as much much a painting “should” cost is a question with many different answers. as doubles the amount the artist gets; in some cases, they may The price suggested by the gallery and the artist and the price that ocreduce their cut. curred to me were close enough, she thought, that we could try to come to agreement.

Q: How can I tell if I’m getting a good price?

Embarrassed to call or do it in person, I sent the gallery a handwritten note through the mail. The summer of 2009 was a good A: There is no hard and fast answer, but you can learn what other time for bargains—everybody was making deals. The gallery owner works of the artist have sold for either by asking the gallery owner or by agreed to my suggestion, which was that I put $200 down and pay searching on the Internet. At Nudashank Gallery, which showcases work by $1,800 more if and when I sold my house. emerging artists, co-curator Alex Ebstein notes that you should inspect the A couple more months went by. I sold the house, but for so piece closely. If it’s a painting on canvas, for example, it should be constructed much less than I had planned that I freaked out again about properly. the price of the painting at the last minute. In the end, I paid $1,800 total. And I brought Oasis home.

Q: Is it safe to buy the work of unknown artists?

The next time she came to visit, Sandye saw the painting on the wall over my desk, where I look at it a hundred A: Depends on what you mean by “safe.” While the investment value of an times a day. She pointed out that the other two paintings I emerging artist is unknown, you can often get a great deal on a beautiful piece. own are pictures of water, too. One is an idealized image Eduardo Rodriguez’s Gallery 788 in Pigtown (788 Washington Blvd.; 202-210-8361) of Barton Springs in Austin, Texas. The other is from Bali, is non-juried and commission free, so all the money you pay goes to the artist. a lily pond overseen by crested white birds. The picture “Most artists underprice themselves,” says Rodriguez, who has some large-scale, extends in 3-D form onto the wooden frame, carved with beautiful paintings that aren’t much more than a wall hanging from IKEA or bamboo and leaves. Why, I have an art collection, I realized.

Pottery Barn—between $50 and $1,500.

This collection, which cost $3,500 so far, is probably worth more than my five-year-old Toyota, which cost $22,000 Q: Other than galleries, where should I look for affordable when it was new. Not that I care, because unlike the car, I hope original art? to own these paintings all my life. Then my kids can fight over them, or sell them at the estate A: Baltimore has great opportunities for free-range art buying—the sale for $10, like my sister and I Lotta Art sale in April and Open Studio tour in October (www.school33. did with the artwork of my mothorg); Artscape, held July 16 through 18 this year (www.artscape.org); er’s we didn’t care for. And when Maryland Art Place’s annual Out of Order benefit auction (www. our whole civilization is a pile of mdartplace.org); and Maryland Institute College of Art student rubble, they’ll find a few things shows (www.mica.edu) and senior exhibits at Carver Center for Art of beauty among the Wii controland Technology (http://carverhs.bcps.org). This arts magnet high lers and the hubcaps, and that’s school in Towson has senior shows starting in April through the how they’ll know who we really end of the school year in late May, with openings on Tuesday were. ■

’s e n i t s i l i h P A t r A g n i y u FAQ for B

—University of Baltimore creative writing prof Marion Winik (www.marionwinik.com) is the advice columnist for Ladies’ Home Journal, a book reviewer for Newsday and the Los Angeles Times, and the author of First Comes Love, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, and other books.

evenings. For information, call visual arts chairman Joe Giordano at 410-887-2775.

—M.W.

House paint: Oasis in the author’s home office photo by John Miskimon

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House on a hill: “I have never felt that a house has a personality,” says Merritt Pridgeon of her handsome (and troublesome) Mount Washington home. “This one definitely does.”

High and Dry A stately hilltop home nearly sank into the swamp, but lived to see another day.

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space

M

erritt Pridgeon talks about her house the way a sailor might speak of a ship. It’s a “she,” not an “it.” And while she’s made of solid Butler stone, there have been times in the past three years when Pridgeon has worried that the three-story home might come unmoored from her spot atop a knoll in Mount Washington.

Pridgeon, a self-described “recovering lawyer,” and her husband, Phillip Closius, who is dean of the University of Baltimore law school, moved to town from Toledo, Ohio, in 2007. They saw the house for the fi rst time on Easter weekend—and made an offer the same night. “We knew the minute we pulled up, this was something special,” Pridgeon says. Early on, she noticed both a storm drain and a sanitary sewer cap in the street below the house and wondered about drainage issues, but she put it out of her mind. Her fi rst plan was to remodel a small room on the third floor, tucked up under the roof, and create a quiet workspace.

The saga that followed gives credence to the old quip from naturalist John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Before she got to work on the interior, Pridgeon hired a crew to strip the house of its shaggy coat of ivy—both the English and poison varieties—and clear away a thick screen of shrubbery. “I really wanted to unclothe the house,” she says. “The color of the stone is so beautiful.”

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Perhaps it was the defoliation that did it, perhaps it was just the steady rain that fell while the crew worked, but before long, the stone patio in front of the house had turned into “a swimming pool,” Pridgeon says. Six weeks of stone masonry work later, the patio was rebuilt so that it drained properly, but the mason hinted ominously at larger water problems. The next fix, they knew, was to replace the rusted and leaky rain gutters.

But with the gutters working properly, the drain that carried water away from the back of the house to the city storm sewer soon backed up, swamping the yard. To add insult

space

Rainwater is now funnelled into a pair of old oak whiskey barrels. “I couldn’t bear those plastic things,” Pridgeon says. to injury, the sanitary sewer backed up into the basement. And the problems didn’t end there.

“Every once in a while, I would be working in the yard, and some random person would stop and say, ‘I love your house,’” Pridgeon says. “There were moments when I was tempted to say, ‘Really? Make an offer.’”

Enter Polly Bart, a LEED-accredited builder and president of Greenbuilders Inc. near Butler, who took stock of the house and its many quirks and set to work. Bart had workers install ventilation fans controlled by humidistats in the bathrooms to help alleviate moisture problems. She replaced the clogged storm water drain out back with a new system that funnels rainwater into a pair of old oak whiskey barrels—“I couldn’t bear those plastic things,” Pridgeon says.

Unused water flows into a vegetated swale, where it seeps back into the ground, well away from the house, rather than running into the city storm sewer.

The storm water fix was an eco-friendly and relatively inexpensive alternative to digging up and replacing the old drainpipe, Bart says. “The expensive solution”—a new pipe to the storm sewer—“would have sent that water to the Chesapeake Bay. Our solution allows that water to seep back into the aquifer.

We managed to create a lovely conversation with water.”

Eventually, they did get back to remodeling the third floor—the project that had inspired Pridgeon in the first place. The bathroom was redone with nontoxic Marmoleum on the floor and, for the walls, clay plaster that absorbs moisture from the air when the

Highlights: On the sun-splashed third floor, a hand-painted sunflower reminds Pridgeon of her time living on the Eastern Shore. “The landscape there is kind of harsh and flat,” she says, “but in the fall there are the sunflowers.”

room is wet and releases it when it’s dry. And Pridgeon got her quiet workspace, a room on the house’s west side that is flooded with sunlight each afternoon. The space is done beach-cottage style, with cracking paint on the floor to match an old stool Pridgeon’s grandmother left her. In the center of the floor is a giant, hand-painted sunflower.

Asked how she is feeling about the house at this point, Pridgeon says there are still

issues—bubbling paint in the stairway and a front door that recently needed repair. But the new gutters survived the record snows of the winter. “She served us well during the blizzard,” Pridgeon says, sizing up the house from the front patio. “We’re pretty much at peace.” ■

—Greg Hanscom is Urbanite’s senior editor.

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Utopia

poetry

by valzhyna mort

have you seen a girl with blue hair? have you seen my Malvina? after the sunset our town is deserted like a train station in its schedule there’s nothing but the sun and the moon. the ocean rushes at seagulls like a dog on a leash and the tower clock clears its throat every hour but never dares to speak out. and till the next dawn lovers fi x our bodies with saliva—they oil our pores with hands—they repair our faces. that is why we don’t look anything like each other. we are hand-made.

like overripe plums falling from trees to tame the horse of the planet and then with their lips dry from thirst they rush to our mouths and through them they pull out our hearts like buckets full of cold water out of wells and then they let them fall down with a roar. and this is why our hearts ache. if a heart could be pulled out like a tooth if memory could be killed we’d have been so happy living under the yellow lemonade flag.

during the day the waves curl up like the locks of blue-haired Malvina and we brush them with our soft bodies

and the new day is at the town gates like a trojan horse that carries inside the whole army of the sun our men take it to the central square their naked bodies like god’s forefinger and our love to them is dangerous and blind like a wasp that swarms around the house.

we welcome you to the colony of the sun whose yellow flag—a glass of lemonade—waves over every table the ocean massages the planet’s core and the night waits through the day in our black hair

we eat malachite grapes and waffles thin as a spider’s web and the sun marches through the town wearing a triangle of birds, a napoleon’s hat.

in the afternoon our blood boils and pours out through our nose and mouth onto white ocean stones turning them into red apples and we offer those apples to our lovers and they break their teeth against them.

when it gets dark we put ocean shells to our ears and listen holding our breath to Malvina with her head shaved bald who weeps while picking up in the dark blue locks of her famous hair.

this is why we know neither good nor evil. sometimes our words can cut meat. when we are betrayed we go deep into the water and watch how our heartbeat scrambles the ocean into foam and throws high waves on the shore where children drown and again the moon hangs like a white cocoon so that at dawn a red moth would open its wings and come down to the brook and our men try to subdue it they jump on its back

photo by Doug Barber

Born in Minsk, Belarus, in 1981, Valzhyna Mort made her American debut in 2008 with Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press). In a New Yorker review of that poetry collection, Mort was described as “an envoy for her native country, writing with almost alarming vociferousness about the struggle to establish a clear identity for Belarus and its language.” A winner of several international poetry awards, in 2009 she received a fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.

She is a visiting poet at the University of Baltimore.

“Utopia” is from her forthcoming collection.

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wine & spirits

The dirt on farm-totable dining

Maisy’s and Mr. Rain’s Fun House

Handmade liqueurs

67 the feed

This month in eating

The Prodigal Pepper On the trail of the fish pepper, Baltimore’s historic hot stuff

O

n a cold and wet October day, Mick Kipp and I went to One Straw Farm to see a bit of Maryland’s heritage ripening in the ground. Kipp drove his truck up the muddy road between the fields and stopped at a row of low bushes with odd green-and-white leaves. The multicolored fruits hanging off them looked like Christmas lights, but with white stripes. When I picked one and bit into it, I fi rst tasted a tangy sweetness followed by a potent heat in the back of my throat.

These were fish peppers, a strikinglooking hot pepper that was once famous in this region but is now very rare—almost lost, in fact. But Kipp, who is known around town for the line of spice blends and rubs he sells at his Whiskey Island Pirate Shop (www. whiskeyisland.com) inside the Mill Valley General Store in Remington, hopes this modest row of about thirty plants represents the vanguard of a fish pepper comeback. He sees

by scott carlson

a day when farmers’ markets sell bushels of peppers and restaurateurs cook dishes laced with the fiery fruits. He’s planning a line of fish pepper dusts and sauces, and he’s formed a partnership with One Straw Farm, an organic farm in White Hall, to pull this off. “This is a two- to five-year project,” he says, “to see if we could grow enough peppers so that we could seed them, offer them fresh, offer them for drying and sauces, and make them available to the community.”

I should mention that this is a project that I played a small role in starting. In 2008, I got a copy of Gary Paul Nabhan’s Renewing America’s Food Traditions, a book that catalogs rare and endangered food varieties of North America, such as Honey Drip cane sorghum, Seminole pumpkins, or Java chickens. One page struck me: a photograph of hot peppers in green, purple, orange, and red, striped from top to bottom with white to

match their variegated foliage. The text explained that the fish pepper was fi rst grown in 19th-century Baltimore, largely by African Americans, and was so named because it was used in the region’s oyster and crab houses.

I took the book to Kipp, Baltimore’s best-known hot-pepper aficionado, whom I’ve known since I wrote a profi le about him in the Sun a few years ago. Kipp was hooked from the moment I showed him the picture; I gave him the book and never got it back.

Resurrecting heirloom fruits and vegetables is the latest wave in the local food revolution. For some, heirloom varieties have the appeal of oddity—black tomatoes, purple potatoes, cone-shaped cantaloupes, and so on. But growing heirlooms also preserves genetic diversity, which may help future breeders create plants that resist diseases or survive changing climates. Nabhan, who lives in Arizona, is particularly interested in

photography by la kaye mbah

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eat / drink Maryland Piccalilli with Fish Peppers 1 or 2 ripe fish peppers, chopped 4 lbs tomatoes, skinned, seeded, and chopped 1 cup of chopped bell pepper 2 Vidalia onions, chopped 1 cup sugar ¼ cup mustard seed ¼ tsp cloves, whole 1½ tsp ground ginger 1 tsp turmeric 1 cup apple cider vinegar

recipe

bringing back the “mission fruits” of the Southwest—figs, grapes, olives, and pomegranates imported

by Jesuit missionaries in the 1700s.

“The issue here is not about some sort of retro thing, preserving the past in a static way,” he told me recently. “It’s a question of having enough diversity to provide us options for the future.”

The histories of heirlooms— often some hybrid of legend and fact—are part of their appeal, and the story of fish peppers is deeply Red redux: Pepper entrepreneur Mick Kipp is planning to reintroduce the embedded in Mid-Atlantic food fiery fish pepper, once a Baltimore staple. lore. A mutation of the serrano pepper that fi rst appeared around 1870, fish peppers start out white before jalapeño, and other varieties—cross-pollinate. turning orange, purple, or red. They were Part of Kipp’s challenge is learning how to primarily grown by African American “truck breed true plants. In his classic gardening farmers” who supplied produce for seafood bible, Heirloom Vegetable Gardening, William houses around the bay, where young white Woys Weaver makes that sound fairly dauntpeppers were favored because they could be ing: Because of their mutant nature, fish blended invisibly into cream sauces. Fish peppers go through “genetic turmoil” now peppers pack considerable heat—rating and then, he writes, occasionally producing about 45,000 to 75,000 units on the Scoville weak, top-heavy, and sterile plants. And they scale that measures the spiciness of chili should be grown close together, for maxipeppers. (A jalapeño ranks between 2,500 mum cross-pollination, yet 500 feet away and 8,000 Scoville units.) One legend says from everything else. that hot fish peppers will only come from But Alexia Savold, a horticulturalist for seeds planted in a fit of anger. the Accokeek Foundation, a nonprofit that According to Nabhan, fish peppers went preserves Maryland history at a site along the into decline in the mid-20th century, after Potomac River, says fish peppers are “super oyster populations crashed and seafood easy to grow”—just start them inside in houses started to close. Kipp has asked farmFebruary, put them out in May, and they take ers and customers at the Waverly market if care of themselves. Savold grows fish peppers they have heard of the fish pepper. Only one, in the foundation’s museum garden in southan older African American man, had a vague ern Prince George’s County and offers some recollection of them from when he was a kid. of their seeds through Seed Savers Exchange Finding seeds proved to be tricky: In the (www.seedsavers.org), an Iowa nonprofit that weeks before planting time last spring, Kipp distributes heirloom plant seeds. The 19thordered fish pepper seeds from several horcentury fish pepper is a bit anachronistic ticultural catalogs, only to be told that none for the 18th-century living history museum, were in stock. He finally scored two packets she says, “but we like to have them on hand from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds (http:// because their story is so good.” rareseeds.com), a Missouri company that Even though Kipp has already seeded specializes in rare varieties. Then he hooked dozens of peppers from last year’s crop, I got up with Drew and Joan Norman of One Straw more pure seeds from Savold and passed Farm to grow his first row of 2-foot-tall plants. them to him. He’s going to grow them far Once they ripened, Kipp tried the pepfrom other peppers at One Straw Farm this pers out in the kitchen, whipping up a creamspring and see whether his seeds sprout of-mushroom soup with blue cheese and fish true—or at all. In time, he hopes, the project peppers. “It had a warmth that just fi lled the will yield a large, regular crop of fish peppers, mouth—it was delicious,” he says, noting enough that he can start offering them to that the cream blunted the heat. But, to his school gardens and churches, particularly in disappointment, he found that the fish pepthe city’s African American community. “It per’s taste was similar to that of a serrano or might be a way of giving some of their hericayenne. He’s hoping that the flavor had been tage back,” he says. ■ affected by the cool, wet summer, and that —Scott Carlson wrote about urban gleaning in future batches will pop with a new taste. the January 2010 Urbanite.

It’s also possible that his peppers weren’t true fishes. When I visited the row of plants On the air: More about heirloom veglast fall, I noticed they were growing next etable gardening on The Marc Steiner to other pepper varieties, like jalapeños.

Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on May 20.

Capsicum annuum peppers—including fish,

In a large glass mixing bowl, combine the chopped vegetables with sugar, spices, and vinegar. Transfer to a saucepan and add a scant ¼ cup of water. Cook over low heat for 30 minutes. Pour into quart jar and seal or refrigerate. Makes 1 quart.

—Adapted from Renewing America’s Food Traditions, edited by Gary Paul Nabhan (Chelsea Green, 2008)

“Bleu Fishroom” Pepper Chowder Serves 4

1 lb white button mushrooms, chopped (including stems) 1 cup chopped onion 1 stick butter ¼ cup flour 3 cups chicken stock 2 cups half-and-half 8 oz blue cheese ¼ cup fish pepper, minced Over medium heat, sauté onions in butter. Slowly add flour to make a roux. Cook 5 minutes, stirring constantly—be careful not to burn the roux. Continue stirring and slowly add chicken stock.

Increase the heat to a high and add chopped mushrooms. Simmer for 10 minutes, stirring often. Slowly add half-and-half and stir until chowder starts to thicken. Just before it boils, add chopped fish peppers, crumbled blue cheese, and salt and pepper to taste.

Reduce heat to medium and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes.

Serve in individual bowls with crusty bread.

—Recipe courtesy of Mick Kipp

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The Farm Report

eat / drink

Can you tell which farm-to-table eatery has the real goods?

by michelle gienow

O

ne of the trendiest trends in eating out these days is “farm-to-table” dining— that is, tracking the provenance of the food presented on a restaurant plate every step of the journey, from field to four-top. Knowing who grew your food takes care of all sorts of corollary queries: Was it grown organically?

How many miles did it travel to reach that plate, and how many stops did it make along the way? But amid the chatter, it can be hard to tell which restaurants are truly proffering local farm-raised food—particularly because not every restaurant waves its buy-local flag.

Traditional restaurant sourcing depends heavily on buying from distributors, who in turn often buy from wholesalers, who—at last—buy from the farmer who produced the animal or vegetable. It’s a system based on economies of scale that renders ingredients available year round, independent of season or climate. It’s also extremely convenient: A chef can order a menu’s worth of supplies with a single phone call.

Reliably offering a truly locally grown menu is not so simple. Jeff Smith, chef-owner of the Chameleon Café in Hamilton, has spent the last eight years building alliances with local farmers. “It took a long time to build a base of local producers I could count on,” he says. “It’s only within the past couple of years that I felt comfortable calling this a local foods menu.”

photo by Liliya Zakharchenko | Dreamstime.com

Today, Smith calls his suppliers names like “George” (of George’s Farm Market in Parkville) or “Karen” (of Ferguson Family Farm in Parkton) rather than “Sysco” (the huge food-service mega-distributor headquartered in Houston, Texas). He estimates that in spring and fall, about 25 to 50 percent of the fare on Chameleon’s menu comes from a farm within 50 miles of the restaurant. The local cut dips lower in winter but rises close to 100 percent in the summer. “This summer we will be running a three-course special where it’s all local except for the salt and pepper,” he says.

Since produce grown cleanly and conscientiously on local farms costs more than anonymous veggies from wholesalers, the farm-to-table dining phenomenon has so far been heavily focused on upscale whitetablecloth restaurants, often run by committed chef-owners such as Smith. Woodberry Kitchen, for example, features ingredients from a “local heroes” roster of farms, orchards, and creameries. And at the Dogwood Restaurant in Hampden, even the chips and dip are “hand-cut organic Tuscarora potatoes” and “local Keswick quark-fresh herb dip.” Now, however, a proliferation of local food providers—availing themselves of more sophisticated methods of distribution—are enabling affordable eateries to join the farmto-table party.

The regional Atwater’s mini-chain of five bread and soup cafés emphasizes locally and organically produced meats, cheeses, grains, and vegetables—at prices that allow for daily dining. Owner Ned Atwater uses his eateries as retail outlets for regional producers such as Trickling Springs Creamery and Broom’s Bloom Dairy.

Unlike Atwater’s, which carefully lists all the “food partners” that stock its larder, other restaurants have moved to local sourcing with little fanfare. Donna Crivello buys from Great Kids Farm, which is run by the Baltimore City Public School system, for her Donna’s eatery in Charles Village. The Spro coffee shop, with locations in Towson and Hampden, buys all its milk, cream, and eggs from local dairy farms where the cows are grass-fed. In Charles Village, Carma’s Café sources seasonal organic vegetables from local farms via multiple CSA (community supported agriculture) memberships, as does

Café Boheme in the Inner Harbor. Zia’s Café in Towson buys from Springfield Farms in Sparks. The Golden West Café is local going in and out: Eggs, beef, and chicken come from Springfield Farms, and vegetables in season come from One Straw and other local farms; in return, Golden West composts food waste and offers the soil to small farms and community gardens.

Joe Edwardsen of Station North’s Joe Squared Pizza might seem more interested in hosting art shows and live music than nerding out on which farm made his cheese, but he says he gets all of his meat directly from Maryland farms, and, during harvest season, most of his produce, too. “It’s not that we’re huge locavores so much as we like to use the best ingredients, and often those are local.” Buying local is easier than it used to be, he says; Edwardsen works with a distributor that buys its produce in Jessup, home of the Maryland Wholesale Food Center, which is the main supplier of produce to stores, restaurants, and some farmers’ market vendors in a five-state area.

“You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to buy local food—you can still go to Jessup and buy Maryland,” he says. “In the Mid-Atlantic there’s no reason not to be getting your mushrooms from Pennsylvania, your pork from Virginia, your beef from Maryland.”

And increasingly, restaurants are doing just that, even if they give it only a backpage-of-the-menu mention—or none at all.

“They want to sell you what you want to eat,” Edwardsen says. “So the key is, if you want local, ask for it.” ■ —Freelance writer and photographer Michelle Gienow blogs about food at http:// baltivore.blogspot.com. This is her first story for Urbanite.

Web extra: More farm-to-table resources at www.urbanitebaltimore.com w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 1 0

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one sip, one bite—it’s love.

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photo by Tyler Fitzpatrick

House of wack: The curious Mr. Rain lands atop AVAM.

Since it opened in 1996, the restaurant atop the American Visionary Art Museum has struggled, sometimes thrillingly, with the fundamental dilemma of its existence—how to be the culinary analogue of the fevered works that hang in the galleries below. At first, the answer involved hiring a self-taught chef, Peter Zimmer, who alternately dazzled and puzzled Schmoke-era diners with pricey “tall food” at his Joy America Café. But weird will only get you so far, even in Baltimore. A second incarnation of Joy America, which served more accessible Latin fusion fare, shuttered in 2006.

Now the lights come back on for Mr. Rain’s Fun House, which picks up the mantle of unconventionality with a vengeance. The chef is the self-taught Bill Buszinski, who, with wife Maria, ran Crownsville’s whimsical Sputnik Café. The look is two parts Pee-wee’s Playhouse, one part mid-period Fellini. Despite the condos that plundered the restaurant’s harbor view, this is still one of the city’s most striking places to eat, with a Day-Glo retro-space-age aesthetic that offers a simpatico extension of AVAM’s creative fervor.

The menu, needless to say, is fun. Some of Buszinski’s culinary hybrids are inspired: the breadbasket holds addictive little ovenfresh rounds of dough that taste like the missing link between pretzels and beignets. Crisp-

fried lumpia, a spring roll filled with minced chicken and shrimp, offer one of several reminders of Maria’s Filipino roots (there’s Filipino-style fried chicken, too), while Asian, Latin, Afro-Caribbean, and Middle-Eastern accents mingle indiscriminately. Take, for example, a bouillabaisse that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike bouillabaisse: Instead of the tomatoey-saffron French stuff, it’s a rich coconut-milk broth, full of head-on shrimp, mussels, and chunks of pheasant sausage; on the bottom, a springy tangle of udon noodles. A much-touted all-American “Hog Roast” proves more troublesome—one recent iteration of this multi-meat tour of domestic pork products offered dryish boar sausage, puckeringly salty house-made tasso, and chewy slices of “woodfire barbecue” that bore little hint of smoke. Oversalting also rendered sides of fresh greens and slaw almost inedible. Still, it’s hard to have a bad time here, especially with cheerful servers in Nudie-style westernwear plying you with inventive cocktails from the “elixir” menu.

Mr. Rain is all over the place, but why expect anything else at an institution that celebrates creativity over logic? (Lunch Tues–Fri, dinner Tues–Sun, brunch Sat and Sun. 800 Key Hwy.; 443-524-7379; www.mrrainsfunhouse.com.)

reviewed

eat / drink

Mr. Rain’s Fun House

—David Dudley

Maisy’s Some locations feel so snakebit it’s tempting to assume that the parade of optimistic restaurateurs will eventually just give up, making way for a Chipotle or a chain drugstore.

The Charles Street space that until recently housed Copra, warmed by cherry paneling and a wood-burning oven in the back, is worth protecting from that fate. Matt Helme, once the bar manager at Copra, has gamely stepped up to the plate, renaming the place Maisy’s (after his young daughter) and designing the kind of menu that few can find fault with. Since it opened last summer, the restaurant has cycled through several chefs, but there’s a good chance few noticed: The menu remains a familiar-looking line-up of soups, salads, and entrees, and nothing costs more than $20 (unless you’re splurging on a $23.95 pair of crab cakes). It’s a far superior take on the stuff you might otherwise find at Applebee’s, and that’s pretty much the point.

Maisy’s would like to be an easy lunch spot or the neighborly dinner option when you don’t feel like cooking (minus the convenient mall parking).

In true comfort-food style, fried options abound: The calamari fritti are breaded in blue cornmeal and served with tomato sauce;

a pair of crunchy egg rolls is filled with braised, chili-spiked duck and drizzled in hoisin sauce. An onion tart is less successful, the onions more sharp than sweet, the pastry thick and chewy rather than light and flaky. Pizza—thin-crust pies from the brick oven—is a better bet, layered with strips of Angus steak and blue cheese crumbles or tomato sauce and fresh mozzarella. A panko-crusted snapper proves to be insanely salty, although the roasted potatoes and sauteed vegetables on the side have a pleasant buttery glaze.

Desserts are oversized and oversweet: Bread pudding, easily half a loaf’s worth, is infused with ginger and orange and drizzled in sweet hard sauce, while the chocolate cake is dense but unremarkable. Maisy’s secret power is its complete inoffensiveness: Even the wines are friendly, at $20 per bottle. Period.

(Lunch and dinner daily. 313 N. Charles St.; 443-220-0150; www.maisysbaltimore.com.)

—Martha Thomas

Roll with it: Duck egg rolls at Maisy’s

photo by Tyler Fitzpatrick

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Cordially Yours

In search of an infusion of information about homemade liqueurs

photo by Kelly Wise

By Clinton Macsherry

M

y dearly missed in-laws made a pretty abstemious couple. Mr. Joe, my wife’s dad, enjoyed semi-annual whiskey sours in his day, I’m told. By the time I knew him, he’d settled on Coors Light, consumed at a clip of one or two per weekend. I never saw my mother-in-law, Miss Josephine, drink more than a juice glass of red wine, except once: at her house during an “after-party” on the night of my wedding. Most of us were beyond the point where another drink would make much difference when Miss Josephine proposed a nightcap. A little something homemade, she said. From southern Italy via rural Pennsylvania, she worked magic in the kitchen, but I hadn’t suspected that moonshine fell within the family repertoire. “It’s Aunt Theresa’s strega,” my bride whispered, trepidation creeping into her voice for the first time all day.

Strega, meaning “witch,” is the brand name of an Italian liqueur whose fancy bottle bears no resemblance to the one that soon appeared. A red banner atop the label read “Flammable—Handle with Care.”

Below that: “Grain Alcohol, 190 Proof” and more dire warnings. But I noticed its greengold color and appealing herbal scent. The first savory-bittersweet sip carried hints of basil and rosemary. The alcohol originally inside had been emptied, diluted, flavored, aged, and poured back into the bottle (and others). Aunt Theresa was in failing health, and this would be the last of it. “It’ll be good for your digestion,” Miss Josephine advised—correctly, as usual.

By some older definitions, the homemade strega would be classified a cordial because its infusion of flavoring occurred after production of the base spirit. A liqueur, in contrast, would have fruits, nuts, herbs, or spices introduced during distillation. Modern usage treats the terms interchangeably, but the distinction bears noting by do-ityourselfers—you can concoct cordials (in the old sense) using basic ingredients and equipment no more sophisticated than strainers and Mason jars. Given its flavor neutrality, I’d lean toward pure grain spirit for a base, but it’s nothing to fool around with and may prove tough to find. (Legislation prohibiting its sale in Maryland was pending at press time; due to health concerns, it’s already banned in most neighboring states.) Vodka and white brandy, which don’t require dilution, make acceptable substitutes.

Nino Germano, chef-proprietor of La Scala Ristorante in Little Italy, learned how to make the lemon cordial limoncello on a trip to his native Sicily ten years ago. “I have friends there who make it,” he says. “I picked it up pretty easily—it’s a simple recipe.” For limoncello and other citrus-based cordials, essential oil from the fruit’s rind rather than juice or pulp serves as the flavoring agent. Germano first soaks the rinds of ten thick-skinned lemons in a half-liter of grain alcohol for two weeks. (Recipes involving other fruits, such as macerated strawberries or plums, typically call for steeping at least twice as long.) Germano makes a half-liter of simple syrup, boiling equal parts sugar and water until the sugar dissolves, and allows that mixture to cool. He then strains the rinds from the lemon-infused alcohol and adds it to the syrup. “Let it rest for a day or two,” he says, “and you’ve got limoncello.” Germano’s mother makes variations with mandarin oranges and cream, and a customer makes a “grapefruit-cello” that Germano calls “really, really good.”

Citing liquor regulations, Germano doesn’t serve his homemade limoncello to restaurant patrons, but he poured me a sample from a bottle stashed in his home freezer. Opaque pale yellow, it smelled like a dry martini with a fresh lemon twist. The candied citrus flavor carried a quinine tang.

It went down way too smoothly. I silently toasted Miss Josephine, who passed away in January. Nearly ten years after my wedding night, I found the empty strega bottle while I was clearing out her kitchen. Now it’s in mine, making me ponder ways to fill it. ■ w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 1 0

w i n e & s p i r i t s

eat / drink

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Potluck + Slideshow = Slideluck Potshow

Bring a creative potluck dish to share. Mingle & explore 3 floors of loft galleries. Then feast your eyes on a vibrant, multimedia slideshow of works by emerging and acclaimed Baltimore-area & international photographers, photojournalists & artists. SLPS is a 501(c)(3) art nonprofit that brings people together around food and art in more than 40 cities worldwide. Join us for Baltimore’s first SLPS.

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tHe feed

photo by Vladimir Blinov | Dreamstime.com

eat / drink

This Month in Eating Compiled by Martha Thomas

GERMAN-AMERIC AN FESTIVAL

MAY 2

Blob’s Park, the German dance hall in Jessup that narrowly escaped demolition in 2008, dishes up bratwurst, sour beef, schnitzel—and, of course, beer—for the annual gathering of the Association of German American Societies, an umbrella organization that includes the German Society of Maryland.

The open-to-the-public event includes live dance music from the Continentals and a performance by the Alpine Dancers. 2 p.m.–8 p.m. $8; $5 students, children younger than 12 free.

Blob’s Park 8024 Max Blobs Park Rd. Jessup 301-559-1944 www.agas.us

EASY SUMMER DESSERTS CL ASS

MAY 4

In springtime, a dessert maker’s fancy turns to fruit. The fruit buckle, butter cake, cobbler, and parfait recipes that pastry chef Mary Lynn Allen will share at her Kaleidoscope class employ a range of warm-weather fruits, from early spring rhubarb to August peaches. She’ll even offer suggestions for cooking outdoors. “People are really impressed when you brush a piece of pound cake with simple syrup and throw it on the grill,” she says. 6:30 p.m.–9:30 p.m. $60 plus $20 materials fee (payable to instructor).

Roland Park Country School 5204 Roland Ave. 410-323-5500 ext. 3045 www.rpcs.org

WINE IN THE WOODS

MAY 15–16

When Wine in the Woods started eighteen years ago, it was just ten local wineries under a canopy of trees, known as Symphony Woods, across from the Columbia Mall. This year, more than 25,000 folks will show up to sample the wares of thirty-two Maryland wine makers and restaurants (Serafi no’s, Greystone Grille, and others). Also promised are roving entertainment, demonstrations, and food vendors selling fudge, popcorn, and all sorts of take-home treats. Noon–6 p.m. $30/$25 in advance, $15/$10 designated driver, $5 ages 4–20, children younger than 3 free.

Symphony Woods 5950 Symphony Woods Rd. Columbia 410-313-4700 www.wineinthewoods.com

R AW VEGAN DINNER

MAY 22

Daniela Troia says she likes to eat “clean and healthy.” It’s a style expressed at the monthly raw, vegan prix fi xe dinners she prepares at Zia’s, the Towson café down the street from her family’s eponymous Italian restaurant. The menu for each four-course meal draws on local and seasonal foods; past dishes have included cauliflower croquettes with cashew cheese and chocolate ganache brownies with cacao chip ice cream (and it’s fi ne to BYOB). “If I eat 100 percent raw, the next morning I wake up feeling amazing,” Troia says. The dinners routinely sell out, so Troia is considering two seatings; call to confi rm times. $39.

Zia’s 13 Allegheny Ave. Towson 410-296-0799 www.ziascafe.com

BALTIMORE HERB FESTIVAL

MAY 29

It’s official: Dill is the herb of honor at this year’s Herb Festival. The fern-like member of the parsley family adds a grassy flavor to summer salads and cold soups. At the twenty-third annual festival, you can learn how to grow the spindly herb, sample it in foods, and even purchase it in the form of hand lotion, tea, and condiments. There are also plenty of non-dill eats onsite, as well as live music and steam train rides for kids. 10 a.m.–3 p.m. $5; children younger than 12 free.

Leakin Park 1900 Eagle Dr. www.baltimoreherbfestival.com

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MAY EVENTS There’s always something interesting going on at the Walters!

For more information on these and other events, visit www.thewalters.org.

CONCERT

The Beau Soir Ensemble Sunday, May 2, 1:30–2 p.m., Free LECTURE

Exotic Contact: Aztec Wildlife Imagery Sunday, May 2, 2 p.m., Free LUNCH & LEARN

Intricate Connections: Cloisonné Connoisseurship Thursday, May 6, 12:15–1:15 p.m., Free FIRST FRIDAYS AT THE WALTERS

¡Salsa! ¡Salsa! ¡Salsa!

Friday, May 7, 5:30–8:30 p.m., Free MOTHER’S DAY EVENT

Chanoyu, The Japanese Way of Tea, presented by Masako Soyu Miyahara Sunday, May 9, 2 p.m., Free CONCERT

Musical Traditions: Around the World in 45 Minutes Sunday, May 23, 1 p.m., Members free, non-members $6 TALK AND BOOK SIGNING

The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West Sunday, May 23, 2 p.m., Free

T he Wa lTer s a rT M use u M 600 N. Charles St., Baltimore MD 410-547-9000, www.thewalters.org

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setlist Mz Streamz and Gail Marten

theater Blackbird

film The Maryland Film Festival

the scene This month’s cultural highlights

Past Imperfect

Two new books offer a harsh look back on a Baltimore divided. by michael corbin illustration by mark arsenault

I

“ t was not a story to pass on,” writes Toni Morrison in Beloved, her novel of history, memory, and the burdens of the past. “So they forgot her. Like an unpleasant dream.”

Two new important books of Baltimore history provide a necessary passing-on of a largely forgotten or ignored part of the city’s past, even as it continues to haunt the present. And while those books— Howell Baum’s Brown in Baltimore: School Desegregation and the Limits of Liberalism (Cornell University Press) and Antero Pietila’s Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City (Ivan R. Dee)—present themselves as mere histories, they are more than this. The books are moral briefs, bills of ethical particulars, an arraignment of past unpleasantness that will demand of the reader a judgment of what we are now and what we can possibly become.

The themes, subjects, and events described in these two volumes have been explored elsewhere, and in apocryphal form they are part of the folk-knowledge of Baltimore. But both books’ singularly detailed narratives make the case that Baltimore is unique in the larger American story. They share an understanding of how race, class, and ethnicity define who we are and determine what we’ve done to each other.

Baum, an urban studies professor at the University of Maryland, has written the fi rst book-length history of the failed attempt at integrating Baltimore City public schools after the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education. The lack of a comprehensive look at this episode until now would seem to support Baum’s primary argument about the city: Baltimore’s status as a border city and the liberalism of its political leadership, black and white, has served to effectively erase, repress, and deny any meaningful discussion of race. In that absence, the language of individual rights and “free choice” led inexorably to the resegregation of city schools.

While Baltimore escaped the violence that other American cities saw after Brown, Baum is after a more subtle failure of the body politic. He writes that “[i]gnorance about race is both culturally normal

art / culture

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®

You’d be Psycho not to see it!

June 1-13 • Hippodrome Theatre

410.547.SEAT • BroadwayAcrossAmerica.com • Groups (15+) Call 443.703.2401 Due to the nature of live entertainment; dates, times, performers and prices are subject to change. No refunds or exchanges. All patrons, regardless of age, must have a ticket. Tickets are subject to service charges and handling fees.

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and normative” in our country. “It makes possible the familiar institutional and personal offenses against black Americans, but it also hinders well-meaning reformers from grasping racial discrimination firmly enough to attack it realistically.”

Those well-meaning but unrealistic reformers include such characters as the late civic leader Walter Sondheim, then president of the Baltimore school board. Sondheim felt that Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP lawyer who pressed the board to desegregate Baltimore Polytechnic in 1952, “antagonized the board, daring members to take positions that they in fact already held,” Baum writes. But Marshall knew that the board’s liberal sympathies predisposed them to let a few blacks into Poly’s prestigious “A” course, while maintaining the larger belief in separate but equal: “He admonished them to admit the black youth to Poly at once, concluding with a threat to open all schools to blacks immediately.” Marshall knew that Sondheim’s liberalism had its limits.

Ironically, those liberal reformers also included the black middle class, who, according to Baum, saw themselves as “an educated elite who had the ability and responsibility to guide the black community” and therefore supported the policy of voluntary “free choice” desegregation to realize their own ambitions. William Donald Schaefer is also an object lesson for Baum: As Baltimore City Council president in the late 1960s, Schaefer argued against reviewing Baltimore’s free choice desegregation policy “because doing so would require talking about race.”

The peacefulness of this desegregation process has often been attributed to the good-faith efforts of liberal reformers such as Sondheim. Yet Baum succeeds in explaining why these efforts nevertheless went on to facilitate the creation of one of the most segregated school systems in America. In Not In My Neighborhood, on the other hand, former Baltimore Sun reporter Antero Pietila argues that the policy failures of a flawed ideology were not the problem. While the lens through which he looks at the city is housing and residential segregation, in his analysis, what shaped Baltimore was simply bigotry.

There is no other book about Baltimore like Not in My Neighborhood, which chronicles the city’s housing history from the 1880s to the 21st century. This is an extraordinary indictment of Baltimore’s past.

Pietila explores in detail the entanglements, bamboozlements, and prejudices of the real estate game, and he doesn’t shy from naming names: Philanthropic eminences Joseph Meyerhoff, Morris Goldseker, and James Rouse are charged with enriching themselves by exploiting and perpetuating systematic housing discrimination. Pietila also shows Dr. William H. Welch, first dean of the Johns

Hopkins School of Medicine, and Dr. Lewellys F. Barker, chief physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital, directing research on eugenics in the early 20th century. “So important is the role of eugenics,” Pietila writes, “that much of what follows in this book has some obvious or indirect connection to the movement’s legacy.”

Part of that legacy is how the federal, state, and local government promulgated what amounted to a system of apartheid in Baltimore through “restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, and predatory lending.” Pietila describes how the Roland Park Co. created a kind of North Baltimore über alles of racially pure neighborhoods with its sister communities of Homeland and Guilford. Not in My Neighborhood is full of stories involving the exclusion of blacks and Jews, but here also are blacks hustling other blacks, Jews hustling other Jews, and whites hustling everybody in a complex perversion of what we like to think of as the American creed.

The books are beneficially read together.

Baum works hard to argue the inadequacy of the political thinking bequeathed to us by John Locke and John Stuart Mill, but his text is heavy with bloodless academic prose, and he gives little time to the deeper psychological and emotional attachments citizens make to their prejudices. Importantly, he also lets few students speak about their experiences. Pietila, on the other hand, begins with the presumption of bigotry and does not linger over alternative narratives of a society evolving—fitfully—toward greater equality.

But, like a good newspaperman, he can tell a story, and the book’s drive makes his moral indictment all the more powerful.

Today, segregated public education is just a fact of life for most Baltimoreans. We might bemoan boarded-up houses, but many of us feign innocence as to why they are empty and the story of the lives their abandonment hides. Every social studies teacher in the Baltimore metropolitan area—public, private, and parochial—would be well served by these two books, for they reveal hard truths about the kids in their classrooms and why they live where they do.

Baltimore, moving forward, could dismiss this past. But there is wisdom here.

Toni Morrison’s literary forebear William Faulkner—who also wrote of history’s burdens—offers a provocation for facing the ghosts of our collective memory. “The past is never dead,” he wrote. “It’s not even past.” ■ —Michael Corbin wrote about race and baseball in the April Urbanite.

On the air: Brown in Baltimore author Howell Baum talks about desegregation on The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on May 12.

art/culture setlist

Mz Streamz It’s Alive milkcrate records (www.milkcratenyc.com)

Nineteen-year-old femcee Mz Streamz is billed as “B-More’s Club Princess”—she regularly out-raps all comers in freestyle battles on 92Q—and her debut release, It’s Alive, aggressively backs up the claim. Produced by Aaron LaCrate and Debonair Samir, the thirty-track mix CD is an unrelenting stream of swagger and chutzpah. Rapping and singing through a grab bag of genres, she blends piercing personality, irreverent lyrics, and beats that ebb and flow. “Girls Next Door,” a dogmatic declaration of Mz Steamz’s prurient prowess, has Brit-pop phenom Lily Allen chiming in on a typically profane chorus (“But you were fucking that girl next door”). The result is a gutter medley with hefty hook that will have you feeling like a ghetto superstar—even if you’re cruising in a minivan.

—Maren Tarro

Gail Marten

In Love … Again jazz palette (www.gailmarten.com)

A honey-voiced veteran of many a hotel lounge, Columbia’s Gail Marten has been plying the Great American Songbook in Baltimore/D.C. outposts of traditional live jazz for three decades. Her latest recording, the self-released In Love … Again, is as elegant and refreshing as an expertly made Negroni. Working for the first time with pianist/arranger Larry Willis, Marten takes a leisurely stroll through fourteen songs of love, including the self-penned “Reinventing Me,” a bouncy ode to romantic self-improvement, surgical and otherwise. But the dominant motif here is rueful mediations on loves lost and lessons learned, delivered in Marten’s assured, smoky voice and ornamented tastefully with Willis’s piano work. Such chestnuts as Hoagy Carmichael/Johnny Mercer’s “Skylark” or the Hal David/Burt Bacharach tune “Alfie” receive spare, affecting readings; this may be familiar territory, but Marten inhabits the material with a haunting, lived-in quality.

—David Dudley w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 1 0

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Howard Community College

Horowitz Visual and Performing Arts Center “On the Verge or the Geography of Yearning” presented by Rep Stage in Smith Theatre April 14 – May 2 “Angels in America” presented by The Student Arts Collective in the Studio Theatre April 29 – May 16

The Beethoven Piano Sonata Series featuring Anne Koscielny presented in Smith Theatre and Monteabaro Recital Hall through June 2010 “Picturing America 19301960” on loan from the BMA presented in The Rouse Company Foundation Art Gallery and Art Department Gallery May 24 – July 16

Horowitz Center Box Office 410-772-4900 www.howardcc.edu/horowitzcenter

Where can you pick up Urbanite for free?

Wegmans in Hunt Valley 122 Shawan Rd. Hunt Valley, MD 21030 Safeway in Howard County 10000 Baltimore National Pike, Ellicott City, MD Mars at Padonia Village 15 E. Padonia Rd. Lutherville, MD 21093 Safeway in Canton 2610 Boston St. Baltimore, MD 21224

21043

Visit www.urbanitebaltimore.com for a complete list of locations

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art/culture

photo by John Miskimon

t He at er

Blackbird, which opens at Everyman Theatre Bad Romance this month, was purposely scheduled for the Blackbird at Everyman Theatre, May 12–June 13 final slot of the season—the one that doesn’t accommodate school groups. The material, says production manager Kyle Prue, is just too edgy. “We didn’t want to show this play to high school kids.”

Blackbird deals with a heavy social (and legal) taboo: the relationship between a young girl named Una and Ray, a much older man. But Scottish playwright David Harrower doesn’t allow audiences to smugly observe, convinced of their grasp of right and wrong. Both sides of the contentious issue are presented in so humane—or twisted—a manner that what is generally understood to be wrong may start to look acceptable under certain conditions.

It’s a two-hander, in which the adult Una (played by company member Megan Anderson, Prue’s wife) confronts Ray (the Chicago-based David Parkes) about their long-ago relationship. Anderson’s roles with Everyman have ranged from a troubled genius mathematician in Proof to the wicked Abigail in The Crucible. (She’ll be familiar to Wire fans; she played Mayor Tommy Carcetti’s wife, Jen.) Anderson describes We get along sometimes: Megan Anderson and David her current character as “broken,” a woman Parkes play feuding ex-lovers in Blackbird. whose premature sexuality “has scrambled the pieces of her life.”

film

Star-Studded

The Maryland Film Festival, May 6–9

photo by Errol Webber

Prize pic: The Oscar-winning documentary Music by Prudence is one of the movies slated for this year’s Maryland Film Festival.

Like school principals who proudly point at a newspaper headline when an alumnus hits the big time, Jed Dietz is basking in the success of some recent graduates of the Maryland Film Festival. Actress Greta Gerwig, a familiar face from several past festivals (including 2007, when she played the title role in Hannah Takes the Stairs), is starring with Ben Stiller in Greenberg, a Noah Baumbach fi lm that’s gotten some great press. And there’s no denying the historic success of The Hurt Locker, the closing night selection of the 2009 festival that earned six Oscars this year.

It made many an indie fi lm-lover view the Academy Awards in a whole new light.

One film slated for the 2010 festival has already won an Oscar: Music by Prudence, a documentary co-produced by Patrick Wright, chair of the video and film arts department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. The screening at MICA’s Brown Center will include appearances by both Wright and the film’s director, Roger Ross Williams, who might get to give the speech he started at the Academy Awards before he was Kanyed at the podium by former co-producer Elinor Burkett.

So what else at the 2010 festival might be boast-worthy next year? Dietz has a few suggestions. There’s Dogtooth, a feature from Greece that won an award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and was one of the most

Says Prue, “This is one of the most exciting plays we’ve ever done. It brings up a subject we don’t like to talk about and makes us realize that maybe the answers aren’t easy.” The spare script is not unlike Caryl Churchill’s A Number, produced at Everyman in 2006, in which Prue played a young man who finds he has been cloned—or is himself a clone. Like that play, Blackbird depends on clipped, rhythmic dialogue. “There’s a staccato to the speech that looks like poetry on the page,” Prue says, but in delivery brings naturalism to situations that are anything but natural.

Playwright Harrower has acknowledged that the Blackbird script lacks lots of basic punctuation. “I found that I couldn’t do full stops, because they were too adamant, too finishing,” he told the New York Times in 2007, the year the play premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club with Jeff Daniels and Alison Pill. The writing, he said, “kind of mirrors the uncertainty of people circling around each other.”

—Martha Thomas For tickets, call 410-753-2208 or go to www.everymantheatre.org.

passionately recommended fi lms for this year’s festival. And there’s the documentarystyle Bass Ackwards, the fictional story of a man fi lming his journey from the West Coast back east to move in with his parents.

There are plenty of real documentaries, too, including 12th & Delaware, by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing of Boys of Baraka and Jesus Camp fame. The fi lm provides an intimate cinema verité look inside an abortion clinic and the anti-abortion pregnancy-care center across the street. “I can’t say enough about this fi lm. It’s completely revelatory,” Dietz says.

As usual, the festival offers workshops for local fi lmmakers during the day on topics such as using electronic media and social networking tools to promote fi lms. Space is limited, so call the festival office at 410-7528083 to reserve a spot.

—Anne Haddad Screenings take place at the Charles Theatre, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the University of Baltimore; for the full festival lineup, go to www.mdfilmfest.com. To follow Anne Haddad as she blogs about the festival, go to www. urbanitebaltimore.com. w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 1 0

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BARTÓK & BATTLE BEETHOVEN & BRAHMS RACHMANINOFF SYMPHONY NO. 2

THREE ROMANTICS

May 1 – Off the Cuff

May 13 & 14

Marin Alsop describes the small notes and the overall concept of this hit symphony with mesmerizing melodies, passionate musical outbursts and lovingly quite interludes. How did Rachmaninoff do it?

Presenting Sponsor: PNC Foundation

MARIN ALSOP

Juanjo Mena leads three great works from the passionate 19th century: Strauss’ Don Juan, Brahms’ Symphony No. 3 and Schumann’s Piano Concerto featuring Canadian pianist Louis Lortie.

Media Sponsor: WYPR 88.1 FM

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD:

AN EVENING WITH KATHLEEN BATTLE

May 29

KATHLEEN BATTLE

Superstar Kathleen Battle sings in a new program celebrating the roots of African-American music and freedom via the Underground Railroad. Featuring favorite spirituals and hymns, this evening of enchanting music is filled with history.

Thursday Wine Nights

BARBER, BARTÓK & BEETHOVEN

Taste flights of fine wines and samplings of cheeses before your concert on May 13 and June 3! Join us at 6:30 in the lobby for great deals and great company.

June 3, 4 & 6

Renowned pianist André Watts returns with Beethoven’s greatest piano concerto, and Marin Alsop leads performances of Barber’s achingly beautiful Adagio for Strings and a unique work of folk rhythms by Bartók.

Presenting Sponsor: M&T Bank

LOUIS LORTIE

No reservations required, minimal charges apply.

ANDRÉ WATTS Media sponsor:

BSOmusic.org | 410.783.8000

B A LT I M O R E S Y M P H O N Y O R C H E S T R A

T H E S C E N E : M AY CLASSICAL MUSIC

JAZZ

It’s all about strings at the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra’s concert on May 2 at Goucher College, 1021 Dulaney Valley Road.

Violinists Xiang Gao, Su Xu, and Courtney Chang perform pieces for violin by Haydn, Vivaldi, and others. WBJC’s Jonathan Palevsky leads a pre-concert discussion.

(410-685-4050; www.thebco.org)

On May 9, jazz singer Ethel Ennis is the Mother’s Day special guest for a performance by the Larry Willis Trio at the Eubie Blake Cultural Center, 847 North Howard Street. Take a minute to check out the exhibition Memories of Ethel’s Place, the local jazz club that Ennis ran in the 1980s.

For tickets, call 410-922-0752 or e-mail mikebinskyjazz@mindspring.com.

In Underground Railroad: An Evening with Kathleen Battle, the superstar soprano performs a program of spirituals and hymns, accompanied by the Morgan State University Choir, at the Music Center at Strathmore (5301 Tuckerman Lane, Bethesda) on May 27 and the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall (1212 Cathedral St.) on May 29. (410-783-8000; www.bsomusic.org)

art/culture June 5. (1427 Light St.; 410-396-4641; www. school33.org) After a successful fall 2009 debut, Axis Alley is back, transforming vacant lots and backyards of empty buildings along the 2100 block of North Calvert Street into a canvas for painting, installation, and other art. The exhibit opens with a reception/walkthrough on May 9 and will remain up indefinitely. (http://axisalley.wordpress.com)

THEATER

At Fells Point Corner Theatre: On the heels of Christopher Durang’s comedy The Marriage of Bette and Boo, running through May 2, is R.C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End, the 1928 story of four days in the life of a British Army infantry company during World War I. May 7–June 6. (251 S. Ann St.; 410276-7837; www.fpct.org)

At Minás Gallery is Christine Sajecki: Covers, accompanied by microfiction by Joseph Young. The paintings were inspired by Sajecki’s experiences in the American South, where the former Creative Alliance resident artist earned her BFA in painting. Through May 16. (815 W. 36th St.; 410-732-4258; www.minasgalleryandboutique.com)

VISUAL ART

On May 22, the first Baltimore Slideluck Potshow event takes place in the H&H Arts Building. Held in cities all over the world, the event exhibits the work of undiscovered and established artists alike in a slideshow preceded by a potluck dinner. Urbanite is a sponsor of this event. For more information, e-mail baltimore@slideluckpotshow. com. (http://network.slideluckpotshow.com/ events/slps-baltimore)

OPERA

The Figaro Project presents its first big production, a concert adaptation of the composer’s The Marriage of Figaro. Past and present Peabody students sing in Italian, with English narration (there will be no supertitles). May 16 at First English Lutheran Church, 3807 North Charles Street. (www.thefigaroproject.com) ROCK OPERA

Rhymes with Opera is a new collective of young Peabody alums with the tagline “new opera in unexpected places.” They present the world premiere of noise-rock opera Book of Gazes on May 15 at the Copy Cat Theatre, 1511 Guilford Avenue. Local experimental hip-hop quartet Soul Cannon also performs a set. (www.rhymeswithopera.org)

The Baltimore Museum of Art’s exhibit Cézanne and American Modernism is about the 19th-century French painter’s influence on—you guessed it—American modernist art. The show closes on May 23; the closing party on May 21, Cézanne Fast Forward, explores the master’s effect on the digital age, with kinetic art, video installations, and more. (10 Art Museum Dr.; 443-573-1700; www.artbma.org)

LITERARY

At School 33 is the group show Are You of the Body? (a line from an episode of Star Trek), featuring paintings, drawings, and sculpture whose “scale and breadth speak to a very physical process,” according to exhibitions coordinator René Treviño. Through

On May 8, the Literary Cabaret takes over the Gspot Audio/Visual Playground.

The night includes flash readings of fiction and poetry by local writers and live music from Victoria Vox and Greg Holden. (www. tannertoys.com)

On May 2, Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Clinton Tapes, speaks about his life and writing as part of the Uncommon Voices series at the Bolton Street Synagogue. (212 W. Cold Spring Lane; 410-235-5354; www.boltonstreet.org) On May 26, Laura Wexler, Antero Pietila (see Urbanite, Feb. ’10, and p. 69), and Tim Kreider (see Urbanite, Aug. ’08) read from their work in the inaugural event of the new nonfiction New Mercury Reading Series, organized by Urbanite contributors Deborah Rudacille and John Barry. The series takes place at Jordan Faye Contemporary, 1401 Light Street. For more information, call 443-955-1547.

FILM

As a (free!) complement to the Maryland Film Festival (see p. 73), the Metro Gallery hosts Videopolis, a showcase of innovative films, video installations, and performers who utilize moving images in some way.

May 6–8. (1700 N. Charles St.; http://the metrogallery.net) SPECTACLE

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a humanpowered art-contraption made out of scrap metal and streamers and painted bright orange. The American Visionary Art Museum’s annual Kinetic Sculpture Race causes otherwise-sane people to propel handmade amphibious vehicles through 15 miles of mud, sand, and water in the hopes of winning such prizes as the Mediocre Award and the Golden Dinosaur. May 1. (www.kineticbaltimore.com)

Students in Maryland Institute College of Art’s Exhibition Development Seminar have worked with the Contemporary Museum to put together Bearing Witness, a citywide, mid-career survey of the work of Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry. Since 1998, the Brooklyn-based husband and wife team has explored issues of social justice, history, and multiculturalism through interactive sculpture, self-portraiture (including the pictured stills, from their video Cut), public projects, and other media. The Contemporary is the primary venue for the exhibition; other cultural venues around town, including the Walters Art Museum and Maryland Art Place, host site-specific installations. May 8–July 31. (410-225-2300; www.mica.edu/ mccallumtarry) Compiled by Marianne K. Amoss courtesy of Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry

TH ANNUAL In memory of St. Jude patient, Nicky Mailliard, RA Sushi will donate all proceeds from the week-long sale of select menu items to help fund cancer research and treatment.

NICKYS WEEK

MAY 30TH – JUNE 5TH RA EXTENDS THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS FOR THEIR GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THIS FUNDRAISER: RED BULL

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So...

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THE HEARING AND SPEECH AGENCY: Where parents come to find out exactly what those personal listening devices are doing to their teen or 20-something’s hearing health.

Call for an evaluation: 410-318-6780.

MOVIE

FEST

HASA is a proud sponsor of the Summer, 2010

Village of Cross Keys Movie Fest

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isit HASA’s outreach center at the Village of Cross Keys during the month of June for free screenings, information and cool giveaways.

Details at www.hasa.org.

THE HEARING AND SPEECH AGENCY www.hasa.org w w w. u r b a n i t e b a l t i m o re . c o m m a y 1 0

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Will the Internet ever really replace paper?

Since 1880, The Woman’s Industrial Exchange has provided opportunities for local craft artists to refine, market, and sell their handmade goods to supplement their income.

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State of the Arts continued from page 35 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 mdzoo_brew_r1.qxp:Layout 1

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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 longstalled 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

4:48 PM

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.

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Art School Confidential continued from page 43 anything and it is called art. The argument you hear most now is, ‘Art is what the artist says it is.’” He recalls discussing with a MICA professor whether a demonstrator with a picket sign in front of the White House constitutes art: “That faculty member said, ‘If that person says that he or she is an artist, then that is art.’” Despite that anything-goes philosophy, Witham says, “I was assured to find that most of the art here is what it was [in the 1970s]: learning to draw, learning to paint, learning materials, learning sculpture, learning art history.”

MICA seems to Witham to strike a balance between training students for lives as fine artists and preparing them for more functional professions: graphic design, illustration, and gallery-related work. “Being an artist is one of the more challenging ways to make a living. Art schools are trying to gear themselves to providing broader skills so that graduates can do any number of things

in the world, and that’s a little different from when I went to art school. It wasn’t an atmosphere of an art community, and it wasn’t an atmosphere of having mentors. You came in, you took your courses, and, in those days, you did a lot of work in class. What I find now is that there is a lot of time spent critiquing in class—you do your work at home.”

Witham witnessed that kind of mentoring and critiquing in Kenneth Martin’s weekly Sculptural Forms session. “I thought that this was a really good class [for Witham] to come observe,” teaching intern Huo says during a brief break after nearly two hours of nonstop “Tallest Tower” evaluation, “because this is a class in which students with no ‘making’ skills get to learn how to use technique and then how to move on to the more conceptual.”

“You almost don’t know he’s here,” Martin adds, describing Witham’s air of invisibility. “And yet when I meet him in the hallway

or run into him on campus, it’s very clear that he understands what we’re doing—he gets it—but he doesn’t impose himself [in class].”

Witham plans to maintain his vigil throughout this spring, after which he will “boil it down to a narrative with a limited number of people and a limited number of story lines,” he explains. “I have to get something that’s representative of what MICA really is—it’s a very interpretative thing for the writer. You can’t find the craziest character on campus and tell the story of MICA through that.” ■ —Contributing writer Michael Yockel wrote about reinventing the kids’ menu in the January Urbanite.

e c e i p r e t s a M y M t n i a W hen I P

Even if you don’t know a pottery wheel from a Pottery Barn, it’s not too late to express your artistic side. The Baltimore area is teeming with art classes for adults; here’s a sampling of current offerings.

B a lt i m o r e C i t y

Elsewhere

Learn the ins and outs of clay by hand and wheel at Baltimore Clayworks. (410-578-1919; www. baltimoreclayworks.org)

The Community Art Center at Towson University offers pottery and painting classes, as well as lectures and opportunities to study with established artists. (410-704-2351; http://towson.edu/cac/adult classes.asp)

The Creative Alliance at the Patterson provides models for a weekly “Life Drawing” class, plus open critique sessions. (410-276-1651; www.creative alliance.org) The Maryland Institute College of Art’s continuing studies program includes courses in drawing, jewelrymaking, ceramics, photography, and a variety of other media. (410-225-2219; www.mica.edu) The Schuler School of Fine Arts offers classes in sculpture, painting, and drawing that focus on the traditional techniques of the Old Masters. (410-6853568; www.schulerschool.com) Utrecht Art Supply in Mount Vernon hosts classes on caring for paintbrushes, painting with acrylics, and more. (410-727-7004; www.utrechtart.com)

The Community College of Baltimore County offers classes in a wide variety of media and for beginners through experts at its Catonsville, Dundalk, and Essex campuses. (443-840-4700; www.ccbcmd.edu) Howard Community College’s classes range from creating artwork to framing it. (410-772-4823; http:// coned.howardcc.edu) Courses at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore’s Park Heights (410-542-4900) and Owings Mills locations (410-356-5200) include ceramics, portrait drawing, and watercolor. (www. jcc.org)

The Mitchell School of Fine Arts near Mount Washington teaches painting and drawing in the tradition of the European masters to all skill levels.

(410-296-0077; www.mitchellartschool.com) The Painting Workshop, with locations in Mount Washington and Reisterstown, offers sessions on painting, photography, mosaic-making, and more; workshops are geared toward adults and kids, with separate and combined classes. (410-602-9799; www. thepaintingworkshop.com) Workshops and classes focusing on painting and sculpture are available at Timonium’s Zoll Studio of Fine Art. (410-296-0233; www.zollstudio.com) —Maren Tarro

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Sometimes—too often, actually—the most innocent and the most malevolent meet. These times can be the source of frightful nightmares or dark humor, but they can also be the catalyst for the creative process. Christopher LaVoie, a Baltimore artist whose work deals with such ironic juxtapositions, has created this object of Necco Wafer sweetness. As terrifying as the thought of brass knuckles is, the thought is countered by the associational color and the “smiley” face in the form itself.

In an e-mail, LaVoie describes what goes into his work in general: “My art is retelling a story in a way that connects materials from my past with a more present moment.” And, referring to Easter Knuckles, he states, “Easter eggs remind me of family, church, the Easter bunny at the mall, etc. ... That is what I grew up with. But the world I live in now is violent, not sweet. What I take into this new world is what I’ve seen, felt, and learned. And no matter how irrelevant it may seem, it is what I have. The end creation ends up being knuckles that are both sweet and violent, and a little unknown.”

It is that “unknown” part that plays with our subconscious and makes this work so unforgettable.

—Alex Castro

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Christopher LaVoie Easter Knuckles 2009 5 × 3 × .5 inches ground-up eggshells, Easter egg dye, binder www.christopherlavoie.net

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