Cultural Arts

In celebration of Black History Month, the Montpelier Cultural Arts Center is showing "SSS... When the Iron Was Hot: African-American Iron Workers in Laurel/Muirkirk, 1730-1930." It's a cumbersome title, but it pretty well explains the show, which explores what life was like for African-American ironworkers in the period of slavery and after, at the Patuxent and Muirkirk Ironworks in Prince George's County. It also shows the iron-making process and the architectural structures associated with iron production.

The Pikesville community's hopes of converting the old Pikes Theater to a cultural arts center got a boost from a last-minute agreement under which the Baltimore County Revenue Authority will buy the building for $800,000.The price is a compromise between the $1 million asking price for the 1937-vintage movie house and the county's appraisal of about $650,000. Revenue Authority Director Kenneth F. Mills Jr. said the Economic Development Commission had given the authority $750,000 last year for the purchase.

Cultural arts don't deliver as big a bang for the buck as other public services, at least not in the minds of Anne Arundel County taxpayers."They either don't believe there are any cultural arts in Anne Arundel County or they think they are a waste of money," said Daniel Nataf, a social scientist at Anne Arundel Community College whose students surveyed 386 residents this month.The public opinion poll, released by the college yesterday, shows residents are happiest with the college's performance.

2 arts groups get state grantsThe Montpelier Cultural Arts Center and the Laurel Oratorio Society were among the arts organizations sharing $5.2 million in matching grants from the Maryland State Arts Council for fiscal 1994.Operated by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, the Montpelier Cultural Arts Center received a visual aid grant of $18,000.The arts center, on Route 197 at Muirkirk Road, now has magnifier sheets that may be checked out by the visually impaired to help them read exhibit descriptions and program notes.

Thanks to a $20,000 grant from the Marion and Henry Knott Foundation, St. Mary's-Govans Elementary and Middle School will create a performing arts center to provide music, dance, drama and visual arts instruction to students from pre-kindergarten to grade 8. The program, which will begin this fall, will be staffed and supervised by the Cultural Arts Institute. St. Mary's-Govans will be the only Baltimore elementary and middle school that incorporates the arts into its daily curriculum, says Deborah London, executive director of the Cultural Arts Institute.

Parents who opposed doubling the amount of time spent on reading in the sixth grade feared it would mean sacrificing the cultural arts programs in Anne Arundel County middle schools. And information starting to come out shows that some schools are being forced to remove courses from the curriculum because of low enrollment and teacher shuffling to get more reading teachers for the new super-size language arts block. "This is exactly what we forecasted," said Carolyn Horan, a Severna Park mother who started an organization to fight the changes this spring.

The recession may save the old Pikes Theater after all.The ambitious plan announced last year to demolish the 56-year-old art deco building and build a $4.5 million cultural arts center is gone -- replaced by a less expensive version that preserves much of the current building."

Hopes for a new cultural arts center or a restaurant in the closed Pikes Theatre now appear --ed, although Pikesville apparently has won the battle to have a new District Court building built there rather than in Owings Mills.The Pikes, built in 1937 and a fixture in the 900 block of Reisterstown Road, appears likely to be leased to the Postal Service.Attorney Charles Piven, representing the owners, told the county planning board last week he has a contract from the Post Office for the 6,700-square-foot building, which will be used for retail customer service.

CHILDREN AT Fulton Elementary School have spent the past month learning about balance, symmetry, colors and white space. Sounds like a typical art curriculum, except that no paints, pastels or markers were involved. Instead, these lucky pupils learned visual art concepts through a quite different medium: stained glass. Third-, fourth- and fifth-graders worked under the tutelage of glass artisan Mark Carson, a resident of Jessup and owner of Timeless Stained Glass Studio in Columbia. He teamed up with art teacher Jeff Dombek as part of the school's Artist in Residence program, organized through the PTA's Cultural Arts Committee.

As a former colony of France, now an independent nation whose official language is French, the West African nation of Senegal has long ties to Europe and one should not be surprised to see a European influence in its contemporary art.One does, in a current show of seven Senegalese artists at the Montpelier Cultural Arts Center. But the more successful of these artists use elements of what can be interpreted as European style in order to deal with deeper concerns. When style itself comes more to the fore, as it does with other artists here, the work comes off as less essential and more superficial.