The Artscape Festival shows how proud Baltimore is of itself

Visit Baltimore. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter.

Baltimore is a real place. As much as the city values ​​visitors, it doesn’t exist for tourists. It exists for residents.

Those who know the jokes. Those who have also seen “The Wire.” Those who remember the shameful slanders that Donald Trump made about their city as president.

If that’s your opinion of Bmore, go somewhere else.

They know there’s work to be done here, and they know they’re the ones doing the work, not strangers. But work has never intimidated Baltimore.

It’s not Shangri-La, but it’s a great city. And it always has been.

And the people of Baltimore are proud of it.

That pride shines every year during Artscape, the city’s outdoor arts festival, one of the largest free outdoor arts festivals in the country. Artscape celebrated its 40th anniversary.^th Anniversary from August 2nd to 4th with four music stages, hundreds of artists selling their work, food vendors, comedy, improvisation, roller skating, a film program and art exhibitions that span several city blocks.

Baltimore is a wonderful city of row houses, historic churches and corner bars. Artscape offers an introduction to many of these neighborhoods: Mount Vernon, Bolton Hill, Charles North and the Station North Arts District.

While Artscape is over for 2024, Baltimore’s vibrant arts scene remains open year-round.

Henri Matisse and Esther Krinitz

The Baltimore Museum of Art is the pinnacle of the city’s cultural community. It is the best art museum in America and offers free admission (except for the National Gallery and Smithsonian museums in Washington, DC).

The highlight of the collection is around 1,200 works by Henri Matisse – paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and illustrated books. About half of these came to the museum in 1949 as a gift from the visionary collector sisters Claribel and Etta Cone from Baltimore. They were attracted to Matisse during a visit to Paris in the early 20th century.^th century and eventually became good friends with him.

The other half of the BMA’s Matisse collections were later acquired to duplicate Cone’s donation. Many of the pieces come directly from the artist’s family. All together, this makes up what is probably the largest collection of Matisse artworks in the world. Baltimore was thus as important a pilgrimage site for Matisse as Paris or Nice in France.

Not even Matisse, however, can match the raw emotion and depth of humanity expressed by Esther Krinitz at the American Visionary Art Museum, adjacent to Federal Hill in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Dramatic hand-embroidered images recall her experiences as a Jewish girl in Poland during the Nazi invasion and ensuing genocide.

Krinitz (1927–2001) lovingly portrays the idyllic rural village where she was born. The arrival of the Nazis. Their cruelty. She and her younger sister posed as Catholics to escape persecution. Those who were not so lucky.

Everything shared with vivid details and colors.

Krinitz created the images while working as a seamstress in her Frederick, MD, women’s clothing store. She was 50 when the project began in 1977, and wasn’t sure what would become of it. It became 36 intricate needlework and fabric collages that leave the viewer utterly exhausted by the highs and lows, the drama, the sacrifice and the barbarism revealed in her memories.

The American Visionary Art Museum has expanded Krinitz’s series with additional striking artworks that relate to historical and current genocides.

The museum’s Gonzo Shop sells original artworks by artists featured in the collection and seemingly everything else.

Baltimore: City of Artists

Derrick Adams (born 1970) is from Baltimore. Amy Sherald (born 1973) attended the Maryland Institute College of Art there in the early 2000s. MICA acts as the lungs of Baltimore’s visual arts scene. The icon of abstract expressionism, Grace Hartigan (1922-2008), taught there for 40 years.

Both Adams and Sherald are among the country’s most sought-after contemporary artists. Adams popularized the genres of “Black Joy” and “Black Leisure.” Sherald created the official portrait of Michelle Obama and the portrait of Breonna Taylor that appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine.

In July, a retrospective of Joyce J. Scott (born 1948) from Baltimore ended at the BMA. The Great Migration brought Elizabeth Talford Scott (1916-2011) to the city. An exhibition of her textile art can be seen at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture until September 30, 2024.

On September 28, a pop-up show featuring 100 black Baltimore artists, “Creatively Black Baltimore,” takes over the former space of Ripley’s Believe it or Not in the Inner Harbor’s Light Street Pavilion between the American Visionary Art Museum and the National Aquarium. Admission is free. Tamara Payne’s maximalist spatial installation “Dear Black Girls–Love Letters to My Sisters,” which combines vibrant, African-inspired fabric patterns, text, and photography, is meant to be seen and viewed. It is a joyful, empowering, and uplifting project.

Payne is a graduate of MICA and attended the Baltimore School for the Arts High School in the late 80s, along with Jada Pinkett Smith and Tupac Shakur.

In the Inner Harbor, Crust by Mack makes fresh pastries and memories daily on the second floor of Harbor Place. The black-owned, family-owned bakery’s #Bmore Crab Pie stuffs three kinds of juicy crab into a flaky buttermilk crust. One of many highlights. Check out the Our Baltimore Mural across the street.

Mount Vernon Neighborhood

Explore Baltimore and use Hotel Revival as your base. This stylishly renovated historic building is ideally located in the Mount Vernon neighborhood, 100 meters from Baltimore’s Washington Monument, which is almost 60 years older than DC’s.

The 15^th The rooftop restaurant and bar offer impressive views of the city. Don’t forget to put a coin in the jukebox on the ground floor one evening and use the coin return process, it’s a must do.

Hotel Revival is two blocks from the Maryland Center for History and Culture, three blocks from the artist-run gallery, studio and performance space Current Space, and four blocks from the Eubie Blake Cultural Center. Across the street is Baltimore’s other major art museum, the Walters Art Museum. Admission to Walters, like the BMA, is free, and it specializes in antiquities, with outstanding examples from Egypt and Rome, as well as the Middle and Far East. The free Charm City Circulator Purple Line picks up and drops off visitors at the Washington Monument, bringing them almost to the front doors of the BMA, two miles away.

Directly across from the hotel, on the other side of the Washington Monument, you can visit the impressive George Peabody Library. No fee is required for stunning Instagram photos.

Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood is a must-see for anyone exploring on foot. Architecture fans will be amazed by the stately mansions and towering cathedrals. Foodies will be delighted by The Hemland, which has been serving Afghan food for over 30 years. In most parts of America, you can’t even get access to Afghan food, let alone food this good.

The neighborhood also has a Nepalese and an Ethiopian restaurant, as well as a Greek and a satisfying $15 lunch buffet at the Indian restaurant Akbar across from Hemland on Charles Street. The European bakery, bistro and cafe Roggenart offers breakfast delights with sensible dishes – pepperoni and mozzarella croissant, bacon and Gruyère strudel – and unreasonable dishes – the Crookie, a croissant filled and topped with chocolate chip cookie dough.

Restaurant prices in Bmore are consistently cheaper than in other major American cities, which, combined with free museums, makes the city a bargain-hunter destination.

Anyone who grew up with Michael Jordan will love browsing the nostalgic sportswear at Retro Effex (1015 B North Charles). Fantasy from Hollywood’s Golden Age comes to life at the Owl Bar in the Belvedere Hotel, where celebrity guests include F. Scott Fitzgerald – who lived in Baltimore for a time (Zelda was hospitalized there) – Lauren Bacall and JFK.

All are within half a mile of Hotel Revival.

Enjoy the corner bar culture at Mt. Royal Tavern and Club Charles, both a mile from the hotel toward MICA and popular with artists. Graffiti Ally is nearby on Maryland Ave. and W. 19^th ½ Street is worth a look. Nippy’s Cafe can be found another half mile down Maryland Avenue. Not even the locals have fully discovered this small, year-old, black-owned soul food and seafood restaurant yet.

Another Black-owned restaurant specializing in comfort food is less than a mile from Hotel Revival in the opposite direction. Sunny Side Cafe in Baltimore’s famous Lexington Market serves a “Hawt Hun-nay” fried chicken breakfast sandwich that’s worth traveling a long way for. Replace the bun with a roll and delight in how it decomposes into a squishy, ​​gooey pile of crispy, cheesy, gooey, honey-buttermilk deliciousness that your hands can’t grasp and your mouths can’t believe. Edgar Allen Poe’s gravesite is nearby, as is the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower, which hosts open artist studios on Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Overlook Baltimore at your own expense. The city welcomes visitors but sheds no tears for those who pass by, an attitude that perfectly describes Baltimore native Kondwani Fidel, who came of age there in the 1990s and 2000s. His words are found in “City of Artists: Baltimore,” published this year. The beautiful book alternates between candid, insightful essays about the city by contemporary writers who live there and reproductions of works by contemporary artists with local roots.

About his house, which could also serve as a metaphor for the city, Fidel writes: “If there are people who are happy after visiting my house, then I am happy. If not, then it doesn’t matter.”