New Museum

When a visitor descends into the depths of the Great Blacks in Wax Museum to take a look at its exhibit on lynching, the first sound often is silence.Then follow words like: "Oh, my God."Here is the lynching of Hayes and Mary Turner, re-created with life-size figures and oversized horror. Billie Holiday sings "Strange Fruit," a song about lynching, softly in the background.On a sweltering August day, in an East Baltimore neighborhood better known for decrepitude and drug-selling than tourism, a sea of children in the matching T-shirts of summer camp come from as far as New Jersey and New York to see searing images like these at Great Blacks in Wax.Now, with a large new Maryland African-American History museum planned for the heart of Baltimore's tourist district, the founders of the first black wax museum in the country are wondering just what their future will hold.

Late this month, Baltimore will begin an ambitious plan to attract more visitors to the waterfront. The plan, called the National Historic Seaport of Baltimore, involves linking sites by water taxi. Visitors will be able to see all of them for a single, discounted rate.While the undertaking is intended to help define the harbor's future, it could be haunted by a nagging question from Baltimore's recent past: Why do some museums succeed and others fail?The question is relevant because one linchpin of the Historic Seaport will be a new museum near Fells Point devoted to African-American maritime and shipbuilding history.

Museum article was dismaying to black communityWe in Annapolis community and many African-Americans throughout Maryland were crushed to see inaccurate and misleading facts in the article concerning the African-American Museum to be built in Baltimore.We have always stated that we welcome a sister museum, however, not at the expense of the Banneker-Douglass Museum in Annapolis.For the record:Banneker-Douglass is a statewide museum with an extremely high tourist population in historic Annapolis.

Baltimore's new museum for children is not just a new museum for children.When Port Discovery opens Tuesday with a ribbon-cutting and a parade led by the Ravens marching band, it will be charged with two missions:To be a cheeky, Disney-infused "edu-tainment" center where children have a blast as they learn and dream.To be a $32 million high-voltage jump-start for the city's economically troubled east side.Port Discovery, one of the largest children's museums in the country, is promoted as the cutting-edge brainchild of an unprecedented partnership between Disney Imagineering and educators.

Our future calls for education standardsI am very disappointed to hear that President Clinton will not motivate states to adopt education standards. The future competitiveness of our society depends increasingly on families led by highly-specialized, high-tech and mobile workers.When they move, children in these families should not be forced to suffer education setbacks because the public schools near the parent's new and old employers have radically different standards and curricula. And parents should be able to easily access comparative information about the performance of public schools in regions to which they are considering moving.

AS DIRECTORS of the padlocked Baltimore City Life Museums try to figure out whether their institution has a future, design work will soon commence on an African-American museum just one block south, at President and Pratt streets. But while architects are preparing for the September start of their design assignment -- which is estimated to cost $1.3 million and take 14 months -- we think the state-financed African-American Museum should consider reusing parts of the City Life complex.This is likely to be a controversial suggestion.

THE OPENING of the Morton K. Blaustein Center transforms the City Life Museums -- including the Carroll Mansion, 1840 House and Center for Urban Archaeology -- into a single outstanding attraction near the Inner Harbor and the soon-to-be Port Discovery Children's Museum.This is a major experience, costing substantial admission and requiring substantial time. It will inspire comparison to similar venues like the Museum of the City of New York, the City of London Museum and the Carnavalet in Paris.

The Babe Ruth Museum is planning a major expansion inside the historic Camden Station at Oriole Park that will feature exhibits on the history of baseball in Baltimore and will be home to a hall of fame for the Babe Ruth League for young players.Michael Gibbons, executive director of the Babe Ruth Museum, said the new museum -- which has yet to be named -- will resemble the inside of a ballpark and will feature memorabilia from all of Baltimore's former ball yards, dating back to the 1870s.

From the writhing, expressive sculptures of Bessie Harvey to Thomas Jordan's exquisite creatures fashioned from leaves and thorns, a new world of art makes its debut in Baltimore today. The American Visionary Art Museum opens its doors to the public at 10 a.m. with an inaugural exhibit, "Tree of Life," that's symbolic of the new museum: ambitious and exhilarating, if not quite thoroughly defined.The brainchild of its founder and president, Baltimorean Rebecca Hoffberger, AVAM is the only major museum devoted to visionary art in the United States.

At the end of most years, one can look back on the local art scene with some satisfaction. In addition to the outstanding shows to be remembered, there's usually the opening of a new museum building or of a local gallery, or some other advance to be noted. That's true this year, too. But it's also true that in 1995 the major pluses were balanced to an unusual degree, unfortunately, by major minuses.A grand opening. On the plus side, the opening on Nov. 24 of the American Visionary Art Museum at the Inner Harbor gave Baltimore a significant new museum, a great step for the city.

History is often a word that people associate with textbooks and professors speaking in monotones. But with the Naval Academy Museum's complete renovation and redesign, the history of the U.S. Navy has become something real and vibrant to academy visitors and midshipmen. The museum reopened two weeks ago after undergoing an $11.6 million head-to-toe makeover. "We completely gutted this building," said Scott Harmon, the museum director. The only things left standing at one point, he said, were "the outside walls and the concrete floors."

GETTYSBURG -- Two days after the last shots of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War were fired here, a 16-year-old neighborhood boy named John H. Rosensteel walked onto the battlefield to help bury the dead. There he found the body of a Confederate soldier, a boy about his own age, and picked up a rifle lying near him. The rifle was the first item in what would become the largest private collection of Gettysburg relics, as well as a family legacy. Since that day in July 1863, Rosensteel's descendants have acquired and preserved tens of thousands of battle artifacts and shared them with the public.

A new museum of Islamic art and culture will open in December in downtown Baltimore as part of an effort by Maryland Muslims to promote greater understanding of their religion in the aftermath of attacks such as this month's bombing of the London subway. Plans for the museum, to be called the American Museum of Islamic Arts, will be announced during a launch today of a new Islamic community center inside a former bank building at 240 N. Howard St. Mayor Martin O'Malley is expected to be on hand for the 1:45 p.m. ceremony.

Despite his excitement over the new Sports Legends at Camden Yards, museum director Mike Gibbons has no fears that the original Babe Ruth Birthplace & Museum at Emory and Pratt streets will become a forgotten child. "We are returning it to its original theme of being the Babe Ruth shrine," Gibbons said. "Babe Ruth is America's No. 1 sports icon. That won't go away. Babe is the real deal." Gibbons has started a campaign to raise $750,000 to restore the 7,800-square-foot birthplace and make it compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. He obtained $250,000 from the state during the last legislative session, but needs another $250,000 to begin the project.

FOR ANYONE encountering the Holocaust, the black-and-white photographs of ghettos, concentration camps and crematoriums stand out. For those who didn't live through the war, it's the images - more than history books - that have conveyed the story of the systematic destruction of European Jewry. But as these photographs have been displayed again and again, a sense of immediacy has been lost. Jews in the Krakow ghetto awaiting deportation, emaciated survivors in a camp barracks, smoke spewing into the skies over Auschwitz - these photos you have seen, this tableau you recognize.

The National Museum of the American Indian, whose opening this week is expected to draw the largest number of Indians ever to visit the nation's capital, was positioned to face the rising sun, in accordance with Native American traditions. The museum also faces the U.S. Capitol, which is not in accordance with anything at all. In that old building, less than a block away, as recently as the 1950s - some might argue even later - laws were still being passed to strip Indians of their land and suppress their culture, the same culture that the new, government-supported museum has been built to preserve.

Born in 1946, John Waters has lived much of his life in Baltimore, site of most of his films. He wrote and directed his first movie, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, in 1964 while he was still in high school. By the time he was 27, he had put out eight films, including Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974) and was a considerable camp celebrity -- dubbed by William Burroughs as "The Pope of Trash." He is still making films, productive for 40 years. The latest, A Dirty Shame, will be released this summer.

William Fell, the English colonist who gave his name to the Fells Point waterfront, was no admiral, not even a captain, perhaps not much of a seaman at all. "I don't think they themselves -[the Fells] - were masters of any vessels," says Lesley Humphreys, the exhibit coordinator at the new Fells Point Maritime Museum that opens today on Thames Street. "They built the ships, but I don't think they sailed them." Even how many ships they built is problematic, says Geoffrey Footner, a maritime historian who lives on Fell Street.

WASHINGTON - The words carved deeply into the marble of the terrace before the entrance proclaim the grand old Carnegie Library on Mount Vernon Square to be "A UNIVERSITY FOR THE PEOPLE." These days they should perhaps read A MUSEUM OF THE PEOPLE. The 100-year-old Beaux Arts building on the square where New York and Massachusetts avenues intersect has just reopened as the City Museum of Washington, D.C., of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. It sits among the glittering edifices of the new Washington Convention Center like a dowager at a brassy musical.

For decades, a carved wooden eagle was the centerpiece of the extensive maritime collection on display at the Maryland Historical Society's Mount Vernon campus. It came from the stern of the Hornet, a Revolutionary War-era frigate led by a Baltimore native, Commodore Joshua Barney. Starting next month, the eagle and other nautical artifacts will sail to a new museum designed to tell the story of Baltimore's maritime heritage, right where it all began. The Fells Point Maritime Museum will open June 21 inside a former trolley barn at 1724 Thames St. in Fells Point.