Baltimore Museum

Walk into the show of Romare Bearden's prints at th Baltimore Museum of Art and you are surrounded by a symphony of visual melodies. These works are rich and deep, a full orchestra playing flat out, and they envelop you with beauty.Bearden was an African-American whose work addresses the black experience in America, but its implications are much wider than that; he ranged history, mythology and the history of art, from the Trojan War and the Bible to Dutch genre painting, collage and cubism, to create images that speak to the effort to find a commonality of heritage and values in a polyglot world.

Some house-warming party. The Baltimore Museum of Art shimmered in flowery splendor at the Cone Gala, celebrating the reopening of the Cone Collection. A gargantuan pair of dazzling floral creations at the BMA's front door was only the first hint of what was waiting inside. In the museum's front hall, massive spheres of flowers swung above while 600 guests swirled below. Even before dinner, partygoers satiated themselves on a visual buffet. There were tours of the newly renovated Cone Wing and its world-famous collection of art by Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin, van Gogh and others.

The Baltimore Museum of Art is having a blockbuster show without paying full price for one.If the show of works by Claude Monet that opens today and runs for three months proves as popular as expected, the museum will accrue the benefits that ordinarily come from a blockbuster (heightened profile, increased membership and so on), and get them at a fraction of what a blockbuster usually costs.As a result, the museum hopes to do what it has never really done before, make money on an exhibition.

The Baltimore Museum of Industry, a rising Inner Harbor attraction where attendance has increased over the past two years, is losing its leader. Executive Director Paul Cypher will resign tomorrow to begin work as a consultant for two nonprofit organizations in Rochester, N.Y. "This is for family reasons," said Cypher, who has led the museum since December 2002. "I'm from Rochester, and my wife and I realized that we really miss living near our parents and siblings." Cypher, 38, is leaving less than five months after the museum's finance director, Samuel T. Mercer, was arrested on charges of stealing more than $323,000 from the museum.

If you think a museum is always a place of quiet contemplation, you weren't at the Baltimore Museum of Art's Annual Meeting and Reception. The decibel level (and the excitement level) in the BMA's Atrium Court resembled something more along the lines of a high-school pep rally. The reason wasn't just the official kickoff of the museum's $65 million philanthropic campaign, but the announcement that $40 million has already been raised. BMA board chair Stiles T. Colwill was walking on air. "This is a huge bonus, not just for the museum, but for Baltimore and the whole region," he said.

History settled long ago into a comfortable residency at Baltimore's Peale Museum.The Federal-style Holliday Street building, just north of City Hall, indeed feels like the oldest building constructed as a museum in the Western Hemisphere.It's one of Baltimore's glories, a cabinet of curiosities full of oddments and surprises, every day and Sunday-only objects, the rare and the common, always reflecting the city's history.The Peale Museum's latest offering is a new show entitled "Mermaids, Mummies & Mastodons: The Evolution of the American Museum."

People may come to the Baltimore Museum of Art to see the work of many internationally renowned artists, but a recent gathering there was to celebrate local talent. Six area artists, all finalists in the Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize competition, had work on display in a BMA exhibition. That work was the focus of attention for several hundred guests who wandered the galleries, many chatting with the artists themselves. Meanwhile, the museum's Fox Court was jammed with folks, enjoying music, drinks and hors d'oeuvres.

IT WAS AN AFFAIR befitting a queen! Limos deposited formally dressed guests at a marquee entrance, where a red carpet, complete with palace guards, led the way into the Baltimore Museum of Art.After 10 years of planning, "A Grand Design: The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum" was beginning its run. Opening-nighters, 600 people at $600 each, enjoyed a tour, cocktails and dinner -- the largest seated dinner ever held at the museum. Guests were greeted by Tony Deering, chairman of the BMA; Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, chairman of the Victoria and Albert Museum; major sponsors Carl Pascarella, president and CEO of Visa USA, and Vance Coffman, CEO and vice chairman of Lockheed Martin; Alan Borg, director of the V&A Museum; and Arnold Lehman, former BMA director and now director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, who came back for the opening of the show he had spent 10 years putting together.

Any important city builds on its history, preserving distinguished architecture but recycling other land as aesthetics and economics demand. But it also needs properties like the one at 1415 Key Highway, which serves past and present in equal measure. Overlooking the harbor toward Fells Point, the tract once bore an oyster and produce cannery, a vinegar distillery and a shipbuilder. Now it's a shrine to the companies, workers and hardware that made Baltimore great, and a wedding and bar mitzvah venue on weekends.

For the Contemporary Museum , which abruptly announced last month that it was suspending operations, the challenge going forward may be implicit in its name: How does it stay contemporary? The museum began exhibiting cutting-edge art in Baltimore 23 years ago, helping to create an appetite for nontraditional works. Now it hopes to reinvent itself in an increasingly crowded cultural landscape. "Things have changed from those days," said Rebecca Hoffberger, whose opening in 1995 of the American Visionary Art Museum on Key Highway is one such change.