Artscape

ON THE SITE... Brian McKnight, Clutch to headline Artscape 2012 : R&B artist Brian McKnight, rockers Clutch and funksters the Rebirth Brass Band will headline this year's Artscape festival, set for July 20-22. O'Malley to stump in Wisconsin for Walker foe :  Gov. Martin O'Malley, continuing to build on his high national profile as head of the Democratic Governors Association, will travel to Wisconsin Thursday to campaign for the challenger in the effort to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

R&B artist Brian McKnight, rockers Clutch and funksters the Rebirth Brass Band will headline this year's Artscape festival, set for July 20-22. The performance lineup, along with other details of the three-day festival that attracts about 350,000 visitors each year, was announced Wednesday by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. McKnight, a 16-time Grammy nominee whose albums have sold millions of copies, will perform at 7:30 p.m. July 20. Clutch, whose four members hail from Germantown, has released nine albums, most recently 2009's "Strange Cousins from the West.

A half-dozen artists, ranging from a sculptor specializing in what he calls "tombstones for a cemetery that has turned carnival" to a photographer focusing on abandoned spaces and objects, have been announced as finalists for this year's $30,000 Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize. Finalists for the seventh annual prize, awarded to an artist living and working in the Greater Baltimore area, are: Lisa Dillin , a Silver Spring native raised in the Annapolis area whose interdisciplinary work stems from her interest in what organizers termed "the psychology of the contemporary individual contrasted with that of the primitive one. " She is on the adjunct faculty of the Corcoran College of Art + Design and American University inWashington, D.C. Jonathan Duff , who will be receiving his master's degree in fine arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art 's Mount Royal School of Art in May, is a 2008 graduate of the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minnesota whose sculptures and paintings have been exhibited throughout the Minneapolis area.

WESTMINSTER - The Baltimore Office of Promotion and The Arts has announced that Steve Pearson, an associate professor of art and art history at McDaniel College, and a Westminster resident, has been named among 24 semifinalists for the seventh annual Janet and Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize. The competition awards a $25,000 fellowship to assist in furthering the career of a visual artist or visual artist collaborators living and working in the Baltimore region. Pearson is a painter who has taught various art courses since 2004.

This summer, the Baltimore artist Robert McClintock can see one of his brightly colored original prints hanging in the prestigious Smithsonian Institution. He just can't get into Artscape. The 54-year-old McClintock is one of Baltimore's most popular — and populist — artists. Though his images of golden retrievers, local landmarks, firefighters and football players can be purchased for as little as $12, people buy enough of them to provide McClintock with gross annual sales that he describes as being in the high six figures.

Washington D.C. is getting its own Starscape. Called Fall Massive, the indoor electronic music festival, billed as DC's largest, is set for November 26 at RFK Stadium and boasts dozens of top DJs, including Moby, Diplo, Martin Solveig and Baltimore's own Scottie B. The one-day festival, which starts at 4 p.m. and ends at 2 a.m., is from Steez Promo and Ultraworld, the promoters behind Starscape, which just celebrated its 13th year....

Artist Gary Kachadourian loves homely things. He appreciates modest, utilitarian objects that don't call attention to themselves, objects that frequently are described as ugly but that are undeniably functional: Dumpsters, highway barriers, chain-link fences. His black-and-white renditions of these familiar sights, blown up to the size of life and on display through Oct. 2, immediately conveys viewers to a world of surfaces and conveys nostalgia for a Baltimore that never existed.

Imagine the crowds that attend Artscape and the city marathon. Add the throngs drawn by Barack Obama's pre-inaugural visit. Mix in a few ethnic festivals and a bunch of holiday parades, and you get a sense of the transportation tangle Baltimore faces when open-wheeled racing comes to town. The city's first venture into Indy car street racing — to run for three days beginning Friday — will tie up traffic for much of a week and disrupt transit patterns for at least five days when the Baltimore Grand Prix turns some of the busiest downtown thoroughfares into a racetrack.

Imagine a city in which the streets always ran smoothly, with no interruptions for special events. Boring! I get a lot of complaints about the traffic disruptions caused by one event or another taking place in Baltimore. If it's not Artscape or the Book Fair, it's an ethnic festival. If it's not the Baltimore Marathon, it's the Preakness. And then there's the Labor Day weekend Grand Prix , which will find me thousands of miles away in blissful — if coincidental — avoidance.

I also have to agree with a letter from Ed of Baltimore ( "Where's the art at Artscape" July 20). My wife and I have gone to the Artscape at least three other times and found it enjoyable. This time we were very disappointed with what we saw. We saw very little art and a lot of commercial setups. Why would I want to spend my time walking around and see everyday companies at this event? There was very little art, a lot of food vendors, and women's clothing, jewelry and other companies promoting their goods.