Arts In Baltimore

A panel discussion of how well Baltimore theaters serve art, artists and audiences is scheduled from 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday at the Cathedral Church of the Incarnation, 4 E. University Parkway.Participants include the moderator, actress Vivienne Shub; Philip Arnoult for Theatre Project; Denise Gantt and Linda Geeson for Center Stage; Donald Owens for Arena Players; J. Bruce Johnson for Vagabonds; Beverly Sokal for Fell's Point Corner Theatre; Vincent Lancisi for Everyman Theater and Tony Tsendias for Impossible Industrial Action Theater.

"I DO NOT doubt but the majesty & beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world," declared the poet Walt Whitman. "I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities, insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected refuse, than I have supposed."For Whitman, "each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a beauty," and "all that a person does or thinks is of consequence." As the writer Susan Sontag has noted, America's greatest poet saw "no contradiction between making art an instrument of identification with the community and aggrandizing the artist as a heroic, romantic, self-expressing ego."

Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and his Advisory Committee on Art and Culture have declared October Baltimore's Arts & Humanities Month to celebrate the city as the center of arts and culture for the metropolitan area.One of the many events taking place during the month will be the Howard Street Avenue of the Arts Festival, which will take place between North Avenue and Centre streets from 12 p.m. to 5: 30 p.m. Saturday. There will be music, dance performances, an arts and crafts market, street theater, children's activities and a walking tour of Howard Street.

It's the classic story of the understudy who gets a big break and becomes a star.For years, local theater lovers have talked about building a new performing arts center at some prestigious location near downtown -- the Inner Harbor shoreline, perhaps, or the Mount Royal cultural district. But the price tag was always too high. Now they've turned to a promising candidate waiting in the wings.The venerable Hippodrome Theater, a 1914 vaudeville house donated to the University of Maryland last year, isn't in the best part of town and doesn't have the same pizazz as some new showplace on the water.

Baltimore City has been chosen as the next school district to receive a comprehensive arts-education program from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the organization and city officials announced Monday. The program, "Any Given Child," will create a long-range arts education plan for Baltimore students in grades kindergarten through eight, and will be tailored specially for Baltimore city students by incorporating resources from city schools and other local arts organizations, according to a release.  The Kennedy Center will begin devising Baltimore's plan--which aims to have little administrative costs by partnering with renowned arts organizations and the local Arts Every Day program--with a comprehensive audit of arts education in city schools, which its consultants will conduct in the next six to nine months.

When film star Robert Redford was starting the Sundance Festival in Utah in the late 1970s, there were times when he felt like a barker outside a seedy nightclub. "Sundance was a rocky road, and there were a lot of near-fatalities along the way," Redford told about 1,000 arts administrators who gathered in Baltimore this weekend for the half-century summit of the advocacy group Americans for the Arts. "When the festival started, it was just me and two other people. We had one theater, and I'd stand by the front door and urge people to give us a try. I felt like a man who works in a strip joint saying, 'Why don't you come on in?

There are a couple of small, predictable joys that occur daily during my workweek - and probably yours. It's likely you haven't noticed them properly before, nor the subtle influence they have on your mood. Fortunately, I have penned this opinion piece to help you understand why, against all odds, you are happy in Baltimore. The first experience happens on my morning commute around 7:30; it's that initial glimpse of the Howard Street Bridge after emerging from the tunnel. There is something ridiculously uplifting about the sight of the massive, festive, green-and-yellow painted structure.

You can see the hand of the artist at work in the sculpture of Reuben Kramer, the marks of his tools, the mediation of his mind and the feeling in his heart.He formed his figures and his portrait heads from lumps of clay, pressed and prodded into place with his fingers, worked with knobs and scrapers and knives, and cast into bronze with the marks of his workmanship left undisguised, as a hallmark of his integrity."He had a distinctive technique," says Virginia North, librarian and archivist at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, the repository for a rich selection of Kramer's work, his notebooks, many drawings and several of his tools.

Native Berry Festival: Berries, barbecue and bands abound at the Native Berry Festival in Herring Run Park. The festival, which runs noon to 5 p.m. Saturday, features a berry dessert contest conducted by celebrity judges, live music starting at 1:30 p.m., and plenty of crafts, food and beverages. Cherries, blackberries, blueberries, elderberries, mulberries, strawberries and serviceberries will be available. The event is free and open to the public but the dessert contest requires a small donation.