Art World

This year's Big Show at the Creative Alliance reflects the community-based art group's wide-ranging grass-roots appeal locally, as well as the prevailing mood in the larger art world outside Baltimore. There are about 175 works in the show in all styles and media, and if there's anything like the much-ballyhooed "Baltimore style" of art-making, this should be the place to find it. What one in fact finds in The Big Show, however, is something very much like the determined pluralism to be found virtually everywhere else in the art world these days.

All summer long, even on the hottest days, a gentleman in a tuxedo stands on the Ocean City boardwalk. Locals and vacationers scurry over to find out what he's up to. The man is Joe Kro-Art, owner of Ocean Gallery, and if he's not playing boardwalk emcee, he's possibly watching a bicycle plunge from the rooftop of his old, hodge-podgy building. Of all the screaming attractions along the bustling Boardwalk, few have managed to sustain a vibrant and thriving business for as long as the outrageous, half-century-old gallery.

LONDON --This is where old industry collides with new art, where machinery gives way to Monet and power yields to Picasso. This is Tate Modern, an art world giant made of brick and topped by a smokestack. Housed in a converted power plant, hugging the Thames River's south bank opposite St. Paul's Cathedral, Tate Modern has been hailed as a museum masterpiece of design and art. Bold and awe-inspiring, it grabs a nickname as hip as some of the art on display: "The Cathedral of Cool." Thursday, Queen Elizabeth II will preside at Tate Modern's official opening, 38 years after she dedicated the building when it took life as the Bankside Power Station.

One of the ironies of the art world is that for all its important holdings the Baltimore Museum of Art is laying off 14 people in order to balance its budget (" Baltimore Museum of Art lays off 14," April 9). Yet right over the city line, in Towson, the federal government is funding the construction of a new museum to house a collection of unknown value - the artifacts of the Ridgley family of Hampton. To make matters worse, the site chosen for the building is in an area of running streams and granite deposits.

A recent trip to New York suggests that the contemporary art world is in love with photographs, whether they're scanned from a computer, painted with a brush or made the old-fashioned way with a camera. Mine was admittedly a hurried sample - a couple of big museum exhibits, plus the annual Armory Show, also known as the International Fair of New Art, and a smattering of galleries. But I couldn't help noticing the ubiquity of photographic imagery in the most ambitious venues. The Museum of Modern Art, for instance, is mounting a major retrospective of the German-born painter Gerhard Richter, whose work alternates between abstract expressionist-style gestural painting and figurative canvases based on photographs.

Between 1910 and 1950, America underwent profound and irreversible changes. We fought in two world wars and went through the worst depression in our history. We experienced an immense growth in industry. We saw the coming of the automobile, movies, radio and television. And we witnessed a huge migration from rural to urban America in response to industrialization, the Depression and World War II.Not surprisingly, art in this country underwent similar upheaval. In 1910, America was an outpost of the art world; its center was Paris, where Matisse and Picasso caught the eye of forward-looking collectors such as Gertrude Stein and Baltimore's Cone sisters.

The looming concrete exterior that frames the Walters Art Museum contrasts grimly with the delicate Monets and other Impressionist art displayed inside. No one would call this bleak surface art. But today, artist Dennis Adams and athlete Kalvin Evans are planning to stage an adventurous and ephemeral artistic event on that stark wall with the aim of turning the museum in Baltimore's Mount Vernon neighborhood inside out. The Centre Street museum's facade has been transformed into a rock-climbing surface with orange grips molded from some of the museum's artifacts.

All summer long, even on the hottest days, a gentleman in a tuxedo stands on the Ocean City boardwalk. Locals and vacationers scurry over to find out what he's up to. The man is Joe Kro-Art, owner of Ocean Gallery, and if he's not playing boardwalk emcee, he's possibly watching a bicycle plunge from the rooftop of his old, hodge-podgy building. Of all the screaming attractions along the bustling Boardwalk, few have managed to sustain a vibrant and thriving business for as long as the outrageous, half-century-old gallery.

New York -- For years critics have been complaining that the Whitney Biennial Exhibition of contemporary art is too sprawling and unfocused, that it looks as if it's organized by a committee because it is, and that it is too tied in with dealers, hot trends and art as a commodity.For the 1993 version of this always-controversial event, the Whitney's new director, David Ross, has changed all that. There was a curatorial team involved with this biennial, but it was under the direction of Whitney curator Elisabeth Sussman, and that shows.

STOCKBRIDGE, Mass. - Ye denizens of uber-cool galleries and art happenings, admit it - you like Norman Rockwell.It's OK. Rockwell is no longer a guilty pleasure of the art world.Yes, critics used to insist that we, if not exactly scorn him, at least dismiss his genial, sentimental art. "Normal Norman," as art critic Robert Hughes snidely dubbed him, was devalued even by the artist himself, who deflected charges against him by saying he was an illustrator, not an artist.Nevertheless, through eight decades he has burrowed deep into the American psyche.

Artist Mia Wiener embroiders provocative images on white linen because she's fascinated by the intimate nature of textiles and by the way that most people take them for granted. Emily C-D creates collages in her native Baltimore and also in Mexico from materials that other people throw away: discarded newspapers, bottle tops, string, and old pots and pans. And Ashley Minner crafts nearly life-size portraits of Baltimore's Native-American Lumbee community that revel in the beauty and strength of the people with whom she grew up. The women are part of the generation that will determine the form that the visual arts will take here in the future and are being highlighted in "Thirty: 30 Creative Minds Under 30," a group of 10 gallery talks sponsored by Maryland Art Place . The trio have been selected to present their artwork in the debut presentation on Wednesday; the remaining nine events will take place roughly once a month.

You usually head for a vending machine when you're craving a bag of chips or can of soda. But there's a one machine in Baltimore that dispenses objects such as a "Hankie Pankie," a heart-shaped engagement ring, a mini-Zombie or, for those in need of quick religious reassurance, a "Pocket Nun. " That's just some of the fare available — with a few crisp dollar bills — from the "Art-o-mat," part of a national project designed to bring fine...

Moving through the Baltimore Museum of Art 's exhibit of work by the 2011 Baker Artist Awards provides an experience akin to that in the film "Pleasantville. " You start in living color and, before you know it, you're swallowed up in a black-and-white world. That cool, if slightly unsettling, transformation is achieved by an installation called "Interior/Exterior" by Gary Kachadourian, who has filled nearly every square inch of a gallery in the museum. "I've only done corners of rooms before," the artist said.

One of Baltimore's most beautiful settings will be showing off its place in the art world this weekend. More than 50 painters will be exhibiting their work at the Cylburn Arboretum's "Celebration of Art. " While the work will certainly be varied, they'll all share a common theme. Every piece will depict a scene set within the grounds of the 19th-century North Baltimore estate, once home to a prominent Baltimore businessman, now a picturesque oasis of flora and fauna. "When folks visit Cylburn, they find a space that is so inviting," said Nancy Hill, the arboretum's education director.

Jaclyn Santos is hoping to erase some stereotypes about art during her stint on Bravo's "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist." Or at least a few stereotypes about artists. "I think it's a common misperception that artists aren't intelligent and couldn't do anything else," says the 26-year-old Pittsburgh native and Maryland Institute College of Art graduate, one of three people with Baltimore ties who will be fighting to become the next big art thing when "Work of Art" premieres June 9. "I could have done anything I wanted.

Joseph Sheppard has painted a president, sculpted a pope, written books on art and shown his work across the U.S. and Europe. But a new art gallery that opens Tuesday marks perhaps the greatest achievement of all for the Maryland-born artist: It will be the first time that a permanent gallery has opened in the state to house the works of a single living artist. "I think it's my best work," the 79-year-old Sheppard says. "If this happens at all, the artist is usually dead. This is quite unique."

"The Art Fair," by David Lipsky.Doubleday. 271 pages. $22.50.The novel's narrator, Richard Freely, is a precocious youngster who is shuttled between his artist mother in Manhattan and his writer father in Los Angeles. Their split was brought on by their mother's sudden arrival in the art world.Before she gained fame, their lives were idyllic, but as her work garned attention, the family life crumbled.If Lipsky's book reads so remarkably assured, perhaps it's because his story is drawn from real life: He is the son of painter Pat Lipsky Sutton.

Artist Mia Wiener embroiders provocative images on white linen because she's fascinated by the intimate nature of textiles and by the way that most people take them for granted. Emily C-D creates collages in her native Baltimore and also in Mexico from materials that other people throw away: discarded newspapers, bottle tops, string, and old pots and pans. And Ashley Minner crafts nearly life-size portraits of Baltimore's Native-American Lumbee community that revel in the beauty and strength of the people with whom she grew up. The women are part of the generation that will determine the form that the visual arts will take here in the future and are being highlighted in "Thirty: 30 Creative Minds Under 30," a group of 10 gallery talks sponsored by Maryland Art Place . The trio have been selected to present their artwork in the debut presentation on Wednesday; the remaining nine events will take place roughly once a month.

Before she passed away Saturday after a long illness, Grace Hartigan was adamant, even imperious about the arrangements for how she would be memorialized. And she will get her way, as Hartigan, a seminal figure in the U.S. art world and a longtime Baltimore resident, usually did. "There will be no memorial service. She said that her memorial should be more about her body of work than about her physical body. She's always felt that way," says Rex Stevens, chairman of the drawing and general fine arts department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. The 86-year-old painter will be cremated, he said.