Baltimore Museum

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.

It is burnished aluminum. It is Andy Warhol. It is all cool interiors and dramatic geometry. It is the New Wing for Modern Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Two years of construction and nearly a decade of planning have resulted in the museum's latest expansion -- 35,000 square feet cut into 16 galleries for modern art. Butting against the limestone exterior of the museum's Cone Wing, the new wing provides visitors with a visual break that takes them...

It is not often that literature fuses with the swagger of hip-hop and the hilarity of stand-up comedy. The Baltimore Literary Death Match, which comes to the Baltimore Museum of Art on Saturday, celebrates these qualities in fiction, poetry and everything in between, transforming literature into edgy performance art. Co-created in 2006 by Todd Zuniga, founding editor of fiction-poetry-comics magazine Opium, Literary Death Match features...

Dolls indeed.Dolls dolls dolls dolls dolls dolls dolls.There are great big dolls and little teeny dolls, white dolls and black dolls, commercial dolls and homemade dolls, people dolls and animal dolls, English and Russian and Native American and Amish and Mexican and Ukrainian and Italian and German dolls, just about every kind of doll you can think of, but all of them are fabric dolls."

Embedded in the white ash floor at the threshold to Baltimore's New Wing for Modern Art, a tombstone-shaped granite slab bears a three-word inscription: "DEAF DUMB BLIND"More than any other element, that simple steppingstone by artist Bruce Nauman sums up the essence of the zigzagging metal building that has been taking shape for the past two years on the grounds of the Baltimore Museum of Art.A companion to a well-known Nauman neon sculpture on the opposite...

Monet is proving to be a magnet for the Baltimore Museum of Art.Sometime soon, perhaps as early as this week, the BMA will sell the 111,001st ticket to its current exhibit of 32 works by the French Impressionist master, thereby assuring that the museum will break its eight-year-old attendance record for a single show.More than 100,000 tickets have been sold to the exhibit, which is on loan from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and is about one-third of the way into its three-month run. Another 50,000 tickets, each timed for a specific time of entry, must be sold out of about 100,000 remaining time slots to cover the show's costs, according to museum director Arnold L. Lehman.

Baltimore Museum of Art officials were thrilled last week to win a $1.18 million grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. The money is to be used to increase the museum's efforts to reach out to urban families, particularly African-American residents of Baltimore's federal empowerment zones.One wonders, though, just what the museum proposes to offer the city's troubled inner-city youth that presumably will draw them through its doors in significant numbers.Yes, there are plans for an "art shuttle" to transport neighborhood kids to the museum, and to offer workshops for parents and grandparents to create art with their children.

At first glance, they might look like nothing more than the old papers Granddad stuck up in the attic, the dusty boxes about his business that no one ever took the trouble to throw out. But to the people at the Baltimore Museum of Industry, they look like treasures.For, along with the tools and machines and boats and planes that make up the visible parts of this museum's collection, has come an assortment of archival material that reveals volumes about the business and labor of this city.

Planners of the country's first museum devoted to "visionary art" are hoping for a $3 million donation from the wealthy owners of a British cosmetics chain to enable them to begin building the $7.5 million project at the foot of Federal Hill.Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, president of the American Visionary Art Museum, told Baltimore's Planning Commission yesterday that Gordon and Anita Roddick, founders of the Body Shop cosmetics chain, may give $3 million to help build the museum in and around the old Trolley Works building at Key Highway and Covington Street.