Baltimore Arts

Readers turned to his essays on Baltimore's restaurants with their morning coffee in the 1970s - often before reading the main news. A decade later, his learned criticism forged interest in Baltimore's artistic community and drew audiences to little-known studios and galleries. Newspaper patrons recognized that the familiar byline, John Dorsey, and what he had to say could irritate, chide or praise. They also knew his prose was readable, clear and full of precise opinions. Mr. Dorsey died yesterday of Lou Gehrig's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, from which he had suffered for nearly four years.

Standing at the corner of Maryland and North avenues, Megan Hildebrandt trained her tiny video camera on the passing pedestrians. "I'm trying to make you feel safe and secure," she spouted yesterday in a mildly creepy way. "You're under my watchful gaze. I'm on every street corner." Her outfit completed the project: The 23-year-old performance artist wore a helmet with a blinking blue light, an oversized "Believe" sticker and a Baltimore police shield. Hildebrandt's turn as the human embodiment of the city Police Department's surveillance cameras was part of the fifth annual Transmodern Festival - the Baltimore art community's showcase of experimental theater, nontraditional creations and performance installations.

An explosion, a beloved theater saved from foreclosure, a felon redeemed - yes, a year on the Baltimore arts and entertainment scene might have the makings for a great movie. Here's a sample of what made 2007 so dramatic: New arrivals included Marin Alsop as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the summer's Paetec Jazz Festival, Single Carrot Theatre and the Landmark Theatres multiplex in Harbor East. The Virgin Festival and Free Fall Baltimore made happy returns. Our best and most telegenic shone on reality TV: Lakisha Jones on American Idol, Julienne Irwin on America's Got Talent and Christian Siriano on Project Runway.

It's 10 o'clock on a Thursday morning, and already all the artists are hard at work. Jeffrey Kent is finishing some last-minute business before heading to Chicago for an opening; Amy Sherald is catching up on correspondence. And Don Griffin, a tall, bearded man in a rakish tan fedora who looks like a slender version of the actor Morgan Freeman, is tweaking the installation of his whimsical, abstract, mixed-media painting and sculpture in the studio's cavernous, 20,000-square-foot exhibition space.

NEW YORK - As noontime strollers swarm Rockefeller Plaza on a late summer weekday, they crane their necks skyward to take full measure of Jonathan Borofsky's new 100-foot sculpture, Walking to the Sky. Workers from the plaza's surrounding skyscrapers, eating lunch on circular benches, gaze at it, while tourists speaking multiple languages contort themselves to photograph the towering structure, a gently arcing stainless-steel pole upon which seven fiberglass...

Hit by falling art sales and a sluggish economy, a once-thriving Baltimore gallery and frame shop that made its reputation promoting local artists and cultivating new collectors for their works will close in December after nearly 16 years in business. The Gomez Gallery, 3600 Clipper Mill Road in Hampden, which during the 1990s helped establish the careers of such artists as Connie Imboden, Soledad Salame, Nancy Scheinman, Joan Erbe and Deborah Donelson, will go out of business after its final exhibition of Imboden's photographs ends Dec. 15. Walter Gomez, the Venezuela-born artist-entrepreneur who founded the gallery in 1988 with business partner Gary Knight, and who has run it as sole proprietor since 1992, said sales in recent years were down 40 percent from their high in the booming art market of the 1990s.

Is there such a thing as a Baltimore aesthetic? The idea of a uniquely local style of art-making has been kicking around since at least 1996, when it became the subject of the inaugural issue of Link, Baltimore's homegrown journal of the arts. In that issue, editor Peter Walsh decried the "cultural imperialism" of New York and celebrated locally produced art as a potentially powerful "site of resistance" to the "homogenous anonymity" of the media-driven mainstream. His essay ended with a stirring call to "end the cultural blood-sucking of the art capitals and put the nourishment back in the provinces."

Students with and without disabilities will enjoy a day of art projects, circus performers, trained animals and other activities today at the annual Baltimore County Public Schools Very Special Arts Festival. This year, the festival's theme is "Let your spirit shine: Do your pART." The festival uses art to bring together students of all ages and abilities from schools throughout the county. "Kids without disabilities that volunteered were so happy and so engaged, they talked about it all year," said Sara Egorin-Hooper, chairwoman of the Very Special Arts Committee.

Anthony Leon Horka, a retired director of fiscal management and services for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, died of heart failure Tuesday at Keswick Multi-Care Center in Roland Park. He was 87. A resident of Northwood since 1953, Mr. Horka was born in Baltimore and grew up in Curtis Bay. He was a graduate of St. Charles Seminary in Catonsville and attended Peabody Conservatory of Music, where he earned a certificate to teach voice in 1938. He directed a number of church choirs in greater Baltimore.

For some Baltimore art lovers, it's like being first in line at the mall when stores open the day after Thanksgiving. The line had already formed to the right by 6 p.m., when the doors opened to the Conference Center at Sheppard Pratt for the opening night reception of ArtWeek 2001, Baltimore Choral Arts Society's benefit art sale and exhibit. That meant first crack at buying pieces by more than 30 artists. Within minutes "Sold" stickers started popping up on various paintings, photographs and sculptures.