If the Station North Arts District is a frontier, Sherwin Mark is its frontiersman.
In 2005, when Mark opened the Load of Fun Gallery at 120 W. North Ave., the block was a grim place, with boarded-up buildings and needle-strewn alleys. While not all of those problems have been resolved, the area today is bursting with nightclubs, a popular pizzeria and galleries. Just try getting a parking space on a weekend night.
The 60-year-old Mark was in many ways a trailblazer. But his path is strewn with broken relationships and bitter feelings.
"The neighborhood, the artists and the surrounding businesses may or may not have benefited from my efforts and from the risks I've taken," Mark says. "But for me, Load of Fun has been and continues to be a disaster. I've been attacked a lot. I've been called a cultural criminal. People think you're making millions of dollars and exploiting them when you're spending every cent you've got on their behalf."
Even Mark's enemies would concede that he has accomplished amazing things in Station North. His efforts to improve the neighborhood have extended far beyond his property lines.
It is Mark who has been applying pressure to the owner of a vacant lot to develop his property. It was Mark who first lobbied Artscape to extend the boundaries of the country's largest free outdoor arts festival to Station North.
Currently, he is helping to put together Baltimore's first moderately priced, artist-only housing at 440 E. Oliver St. The 69-unit apartment building with an in-house art gallery is scheduled to open in December.
"He's done fabulous work," says Nancy Haragan, former longtime head of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance. "Sherwin could have just been a landlord, but instead he's an active, energetic participant in the art world. He has great ideas. His building keeps getting better and better. Every few months, there's something new. He and I don't always agree, but frequently we do."
Friend or enemy?
As a group, artists couldn't have a better friend than Mark. Individually, it can be a different story.
This year, Mark ousted Ric Royer, an actor he'd hired to oversee the black box LOF/t theater. Royer is talented and popular — he's now attending a Brown University graduate program on a full scholarship — and artists and administrators citywide lined up to take sides.
Another former employee, Suzannah Gerber, accused Mark of criminal assault in 2008, though charges were dropped before the case could come to trial.
But Charlie Duff, president of the Midtown Development Corp. and a longtime colleague and friend, describes Mark as "a genius" and "one of the most remarkable people I've ever met."
Mark was Duff's first choice to help him set up an artists community in the Oliver Street apartment building. But the various contretemps surrounding Mark temporarily gave the developer pause.
"I've been a dismayed bystander to all that," Duff says. "I wondered if Sherwin had weakened his relationships with the broader arts community and if all this might have made him less effective as part of the city arts team.
"I'm pleased to say that it hasn't. The key thing was that we get good people to run the building gallery, and boy, have we. Whatever has happened, I don't think it's been fatal."
In person, Mark is short, round and has a broad dome that emphasizes his oversize brain. He often dresses in khakis — a style originally worn on safaris by hunters tracking big game in his native South Africa, and appropriate to a man who finds himself in frequent skirmishes.
"Artists have always been my community," he says. "I will always fight for them, regardless of how [ticked] off they are at me."
Property and power
When Mark meets a potential tenant who could add value to Station North, he goes out of his way to negotiate favorable terms. For instance, he was eager to provide Single Carrot Theatre, a group of twentysomething performers, with their first permanent venue. Mark reasoned that a theater company was more likely than visual artists to increase foot traffic in the neighborhood at night.
"We moved in in January 2007, and Sherwin gave us the space at an extremely affordable rate," says J. Buck Jabaily, a founding member of the Carrots and the current executive director of the Cultural Alliance. "That was a huge step forward for us. Sherwin essentially subsidizes artists to work in his space. He could make a lot more money than he does. He intentionally charges less than the market rate."
People angry at Mark frequently say that his motives are mercenary. But it would be difficult to fake the zeal that he expresses for projects unlikely to benefit him personally. Once Mark has seized upon an idea, he will continue to press, and press hard, until the moment the coroner tags his big toe.
For instance, he has been urging the Baltimore Community Foundation and the Baker Memorial Fund to create a program to help artists buy their own homes.
