Contemporary Museum

It seems like the work of angry Luddites: Twenty-seven cell phones have been strung up from the Contemporary Museum's ceiling. The phones aren't dead, though - their tiny screens are bright and flickering with videos of a woman's flesh: snippets of her knees, feet, lips. It's hard to know what the woman herself, the French artist Beatrice Valentine Amrhein, is saying about the phones that make up her multimedia sculpture. Are they technological intruders? Or natural extensions of her own body?

With a shout and a flourish, workmen held high by a crane wrestle a red-black-and-yellow banner into place. Now it's official: The organization that for 10 years has promoted itself as a "museum without walls" has walls of its own -- in an insurance building at 100 W. Centre St.In letters that can be read from two blocks away, the sign announces more than the opening today of the Contemporary Museum. It marks the newest addition to the Mount Vernon neighborhood, a midtown district that includes the Maryland Historical Society, the Walters Art Gallery and the Peabody Institute, and that gradually is coalescing into a cultural nucleus for the city.

Two Inner Harbor office buildings, a permanent home for the Contemporary Museum and two major additions to the Johns Hopkins medical campus are among the architecturally significant building projects that will open in central Maryland this fall.Ribbon-cuttings and dedications in the next four months will mark the openings of a wide range of buildings that have been taking shape over the past several years, including works by such notable designers as Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, Robert A. M. Stern Architects and Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership.

This year's season includes a number of major museum shows that promise to be as beautiful as they are thought-provoking.An important event locally will be the opening of The Contemporary Museum's new permanent exhibition space at 100 W. Centre St. The first show, starting Sept. 25, is "Impact: Revealing Sources for Contemporary Art," a major survey of the seminal artists of the last 30 years, including Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Robert Gober, Hans Haacke, Ann Hamilton and Bruce Nauman.

The Contemporary Museum opens its season today with a new show in a new venue, both of which mark the museum's evolution from a traveling road show to a permanent institution with its own building.The new show, "Impact: Revealing Sources for Contemporary Art," is a thoughtful essay on the question of what is art. The new space, at 100 W. Centre St., houses a 3,300-square-foot exhibition space with white walls and high ceilings that would be the envy of any SoHo gallery in New York.It's an impressive setting for the nearly 50 works of art by 27 internationally renowned artists, chosen for the broad influence they have exerted on the contemporary art scene.

The Contemporary Museum opens its new permanent facility at 100 W. Centre St. on Saturday with the exhibition "Impact: Revealing Sources of Contemporary Art," a survey of leading artists of the last 40 years who have had a major influence on today's artists. The show will coincide with lectures and symposiums examining some of the issues raised by the works in the exhibition.The Contemporary Museum will be at 100 W. Centre St. Hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.

From little baseball games do mighty cultural exchanges grow.Charm City's newfound buddy-buddy relationship with Fidel Castro's Cuba continues next week, as five representatives from Baltimore arts organizations leave Sunday for Havana to share things cultural with their Caribbean counterparts. The group will be attending the First International Culture and Development Congress, being held under the auspices of UNESCO and UNICEF.Those traveling to Cuba are Steven Baxter, dean of the Peabody Conservatory; Dennis Fiori, director of the Maryland Historical Society; Leslie King-Hammond, dean of graduate studies at the Maryland Institute, College of Art; Ted Rouse, chairman of the board of the American Visionary Arts Museum; and Steve Ziger, chairman of the board of the Contemporary Museum.

In conjunction with its current contemporary photography exhibit, "Mysterious Voyages: Exploring the Subject of Photography," the Contemporary Museum has scheduled a group of lectures and panel discussions. This Sunday at 4 p.m., photographer Andres Serrano, represented in the show by the work shown here, will discuss the themes and issues of his present and past work. On April 15, Gary Sangster, director of the Contemporary Museum and curator of "Mysterious Voyages," will lecture on the new photographic styles and strategies seen in the exhibit.

The Contemporary Museum has found a home in the right place, with the right space and under the right circumstances, according to its director, Gary Sangster. "It met all the conditions were looking for," he said yesterday in talking about the museum's plans.Since its debut in 1989, the Contemporary has been Maryland's "museum without walls," staging exhibitions in various locations around the region. Beginning in January, it will rent half of the first floor of the Home Mutual building at Centre Street and Park Avenue -- 3,500 square feet of space.

Nine years after it was established as Maryland's roving "museum without walls," the Contemporary Museum has found a permanent home -- with help from the Maryland Historical Society.Leaders of the two cultural institutions announced yesterday that they will work jointly to convert the Home Mutual building at 104 W. Centre St. into Baltimore's newest arts center.The first level will contain exhibit space and offices for the Contemporary Museum. The upper two floors and basement will become a state-of-the-art collections management facility and administrative offices for the historical society, which is one block west.

On the average day, Hugh Pocock burns just under half of the 8 pounds of food he eats and wastes the rest. The process of uncovering this specific bit of information about his own machinery may not be breakfast conversation. It involved meticulous weighing of all that went in his mouth and all that came out the other end for 63 days, calculating the difference and logging the findings. Pocock was not getting even with his wife for nagging him about leaving the seat up. Nor was he responding badly to potty-training his son. An artist and professor at Maryland Institute College of Art, he wanted to learn specifically what it takes to fuel his body and, more globally, explore man's relationship to the production of energy and the use and waste of natural resources.

Baltimore's Contemporary Museum at 100 W. Centre St. will be transformed into an environmental think tank and laboratory when the Futurefarmers art collective from San Francisco opens The Reverse Ark: In the Wake, an exhibit exploring the social, historical and environmental history of the city's mills and textile industry, running March 26 to Aug. 22. Using the concept of an "ark" as a place of preservation and exploration, Futurefarmers will work with...

The sight of people with thin, white cords dangling from earphones as they walk along city streets, plugged into their own little musical worlds, is nothing unusual. But over the next few weeks in the Mount Vernon district, some of these iPod-wired pedestrians are apt to stand out for the more leisurely nature of their gait, the attentiveness of their gaze on everything around them and, quite probably, the vivid expressions on their faces. They'll be the ones hanging onto every word, sound and image in Charm City Remix, a Baltimore-specific work that is part of a larger show called My Life in Fiction by innovative artist Kianga Ford that opens Saturday at - more accurately, inside and outside - the Contemporary Museum.

Last January, a nondescript room on a floor above the Contemporary Museum in the Mount Vernon district suddenly got real "descript" as a new organization gave Baltimore's cultural life an unexpected shot in the arm, a shot with a welcome sting. It came in a musical form, with the performance of works by such provocative composers as Frederic Rzewski and Louis Andriessen, not to mention Vinko Globokar, represented by a piece that called for a young man to pound his fists on his bare chest and head while emitting all manner of guttural noises (you had to be there)

The setting sun peeks through the large bay windows in the living room of Irene Hofmann's home in Owings Mills. Strewn across the black dining room table are tiny booklets of literature, or lifestyle tracts: a sort of collection of miniature place mats and the food for thought they provide. The brief words on the small folder paper are often satiric in nature, a twist on the Christian tracts that inspired them. Hofmann, the executive director of the Contemporary Museum, sorts through them with artists Lisa Anne Auerbach, who conceived the collection, and Fritz Haeg.

Last weekend's music scene in Baltimore afforded me some interesting deja vu sensations. On Friday night, I got to hear a live presentation of In C, Terry Riley's groundbreaking minimalist work from 1964, for the second time in a month. On Sunday afternoon, I heard some of Orff's Carmina Burana and the original orchestral/choral version of Borodin's Polovtsian Dances performed for the second time in a week, and music from Puccini's Madama Butterfly for the second time in less than 24 hours.

`The Immigrant' The lowdown -- The Immigrant, based on the true story of actor Mark Harelik's Russian grandparents, details the journey of two Jews who flee persecution in their homeland and arrive in the small, Christian community of Hamilton, Texas. The play explores the relationship between Christians and Jews, parents and children, and foreigners and natives. If you go -- Shows begin at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays, running tomorrow through June 8, at Fell's Point Corner Theatre, 251 S. Ann St. $17-$20.

Baltimore may not have the busiest new music scene in the country, but there's remarkable life in it - especially tonight, when, within the space of a few blocks, two intriguing concerts will be presented. The inaugural offering in the Mobtown Modern Music Series at the Contemporary Museum takes its cue from current events. As saxophonist Brian Sacawa, a co-curator of this venture, puts it: "We celebrate President Bush's final State of the Union address by presenting a political statement of our own."

Contemporary art, it is often said, seeks to provide the viewer with a meaningful experience rather than with something to look at. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the unnerving art of Joseph Grigely, whose works are on view at the Contemporary Museum, is notable for providing viewers with experiences of a particularly unsettling and perplexing sort. JOSEPH GRIGELY'S ST. CECILIA EXHIBITION / / Through Aug. 22 at the Contemporary Museum, 100 W. Centre St. 410-783-5720 or www.contemporary.

It seems like the work of angry Luddites: Twenty-seven cell phones have been strung up from the Contemporary Museum's ceiling. The phones aren't dead, though - their tiny screens are bright and flickering with videos of a woman's flesh: snippets of her knees, feet, lips. It's hard to know what the woman herself, the French artist Beatrice Valentine Amrhein, is saying about the phones that make up her multimedia sculpture. Are they technological intruders? Or natural extensions of her own body?