Work Of Art

Downtown Baltimore has a new art gallery, but visitors can't buy any of its works. The art is on the walls of the Hilton Baltimore Convention Center Hotel that opens Friday. As part of its theme of celebrating Baltimore, the city-owned building is filled with contemporary paintings, prints, photographs, mosaics and other works by 31 artists who either live or work in the Baltimore area. The hotel contains more than 2,300 works in all, representing an investment of about $650,000. Four were site-specific pieces commissioned for prominent public spaces.

Next Saturday, the Baker family home will be full of light. On the first night of Hanukkah, the Bakers - Liz, Steve, and 7-year-old Matthew - will celebrate by lighting several menorahs in their home and in the Hampden studio where Steve Baker creates artwork, including menorahs, out of glass. "My son will light one," says Liz Baker. "I'll light one, and we'll walk down to my husband's studio, where Steve keeps menorahs in the window, and we'll light them as well. " Like many members of the Baltimore Jewish community, the Bakers have amassed a small collection of menorahs that's growing over time.

Abstract paintings line the newly polished floors of the gallery like players waiting for an assignment from their coach. At the moment, however, she has a lot on her mind. In preparation for the official opening of Goya Contemporary tomorrow, Martha Macks-Kahn is consulting with the architect and landlord as well as the art installer who will hang the works. She juggles calls from clients and artists as she presides over the finishing touches of her newly expanded gallery in Mill Center in Hampden.

Google, the giant Internet search engine, wants to put the world's great art museums and their artworks online. This week, the company announced the launch of its Google Art Project, which presents virtual tours of 17 of the world's most prominent museums using the "street view" technology developed for its online maps. Not only can site visitors stroll through the galleries of New York's Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum, London's National Gallery or the Uffizi in Florence, they can also call up high-resolution images that display selected works in such minute detail that every brush stroke, scrape mark and paint dab of the artist's hand leaps out at you. You'd need a magnifying glass to see the nuts and bolts of the painter's art so clearly on a work hung on the walls of a museum — if the guards let you get close enough to try. But, of course, they never would.

One day last spring, Glenn Blair thought he'd be making pictures, as usual, in his after-school art class. But when he showed up at the makeshift studio at Canton Middle School, the sixth-grader's eye fell not on easel and brushes but on a hat full of paper slips his teachers had prepared. "Life without love," read the note he pulled out, "is a tree without blossoms." That thought - a rough paraphrase of a line from the poet Kahlil Gibran - inspired an upbeat canvas. In sunny acrylic hues, Blair created the image of a man whose heart seems filled with blossoming trees.

In a famous 1966 essay entitled "Against Interpretation," the writer Susan Sontag complained that most art criticism "amounts to a philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone." She argued: "Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable." Since then, artists have adopted all kinds of strategies to avoid the burdens of the kind of criticism that seeks not only to explain works of art, but to explain them away.

Crystal Bowen is not an artist, but Saturdays find her handing out crayons, markers, paints and paper to a class of 14. This week, Bowen's students are making watercolor collages that will have them painting their work and then tearing it into pieces. When they glue the torn paper onto another sheet, it will create a colorful, three-dimensional work of art. These activities - painting, tearing and organizing bits of paper - are important skills for Bowen's students, who range in age from teen-agers to adults.

New York -- For years critics have been complaining that the Whitney Biennial Exhibition of contemporary art is too sprawling and unfocused, that it looks as if it's organized by a committee because it is, and that it is too tied in with dealers, hot trends and art as a commodity.For the 1993 version of this always-controversial event, the Whitney's new director, David Ross, has changed all that. There was a curatorial team involved with this biennial, but it was under the direction of Whitney curator Elisabeth Sussman, and that shows.

Constructed Images When: Tuesdays through Fridays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (Thursday evenings until 7), Saturdays and Sundays 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., through March 24.Where: Baltimore Museum of Art.Call: 396-7101.Photography in the postmodernist age has gained a new cliche called the created image, meaning that the thing called a photograph itself is only one part of the total work of art. Sometimes a scene is created and then photographed. Sometimes a photograph (which the artist may have taken or may have appropriated)

Looking at Henry Coe's paintings at Grimaldis the other day, I felt as if I were listening to two people having an argument about this art, with some merit on both sides. Let's call them Viewer A and Viewer B.A: When I look at Henry Coe's landscapes of rural Maryland, I think that's the way rural Maryland ought to look.B: And that, to me, is precisely what's wrong with them. They're too calculated.When you look at a work of art and say to yourself that's the way such and such ought to look, the statement you're really making is that the work of art looks artificial.

Paul Weller is seated beside his work, colorful fused-glass art pieces that display his feel for texture and design. They're the kinds of pieces that would rival any church's stained glass and are a testament to the talents of a man born with physical and mental challenges. Weller hopes that his artwork can help others with similar challenges. Jean Weller has enrolled her son in an entrepreneurship program at Howard Community College to assist him in forming a nonprofit that offers financial assistance to help the disabled enroll in creative arts programs.

Abdi Farah enjoys being the sole survivor. When Bravo's "Work of Art" premiered June 9, two men and one woman with Baltimore connections were among the 14 artists competing for the show's grand prize of $100,000 and an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In the weeks since, however, Jaclyn Santos and John Parot, both of whom studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art , have packed their easels and gone home. With the contestants whittled down to three and the final competition set to air Wednesday, only Farah remains.

Stephanie and Jerry Weiss are such prolific world travelers — they even lived abroad for a time — that when it came time to consider a place to spend retirement, they were in a quandary. "We looked in Panama, Costa Rica, Italy, Holland, Florida [and] we couldn't make up our minds," said Stephanie Weiss, a 70-year old retired art teacher. "'For all of our looking, nothing fit the bill." It was soon after an extended stay in the historic international arts town of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, that the couple happened upon a spacious corner residence in the Charlestown retirement community, where Jerry Weiss, 80, a retired Protestant minister, had many friends who were also retired clergymen.

The men and women featured in Harrod Blank's Automorphosi s, driving cars that look straight out of some avant-garde artist's imagination, must be the happiest, quirkiest, most approachable bunch of exhibitionists ever. Several of them will be at Artscape this weekend to prove it. Blank's documentary, which gets a free screening at the American Visionary Art Museum today, features scores of art cars, automobiles adorned, adapted and otherwise added-to by artists holding to no rules but their own (and maybe just a few having to do with traffic safety)

Total creative freedom is a luxury that Derek Bellomo never took for granted - not the day he purchased a piece of land in southwest Baltimore County's historic Oella and not even when his dream was realized. A burnt-out house with the original fieldstone foundation wedged into a rugged hillside was all that remained on the 30-foot-by-140-foot property for which he paid $80,000 in March 2007. (Construction, design and furnishings would easily total four times that amount, according to Bellomo.

Downtown Baltimore has a new art gallery, but visitors can't buy any of its works. The art is on the walls of the Hilton Baltimore Convention Center Hotel that opens Friday. As part of its theme of celebrating Baltimore, the city-owned building is filled with contemporary paintings, prints, photographs, mosaics and other works by 31 artists who either live or work in the Baltimore area. The hotel contains more than 2,300 works in all, representing an investment of about $650,000. Four were site-specific pieces commissioned for prominent public spaces.

The Howard Street Bridge that crosses the Jones Falls Expressway is no Pont Neuf. Swaddled during a restoration project by a humongous tarp that billows and balloons in the breeze, the bridge does call to mind Pont Neuf Wrapped, a monumental work completed by environmental artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, in 1985. After a 10-year-struggle with Parisian bureaucracy, Christo and a large crew wrapped the Pont Neuf in shimmering gold fabric that temporarily revealed the 400-year-old bridge in a dazzling new way. Unlike in Paris, though, Baltimore authorities didn't question Howard Street Bridge Wrapped; they created it. It may not be as dramatic as its French counterpart, but for those driving south on the JFX, the draped bridge emerges as a mammoth work of accidental art. Moving with the wind, sometimes escaping its moorings, the tarp gives artistic license to the bridge, built in 1938.

Whenever I write about art, I get mail from the Serious Art Community informing me that I am a clueless idiot. So let me begin by stipulating that I am a clueless idiot. This is probably why I was unable to appreciate a work of art I viewed recently, titled: Chair. I saw Chair at Art Basel, a big art show held recently on Miami Beach. It attracted thousands of Serious Art People, who wear mostly black outfits and maintain serious expressions no matter what work of art they are viewing.

When most people finish using products like laundry detergent containers, tin cans, pie tins and greeting cards, they throw them in the garbage or in a recycling bin. But a group of eight local women covet trash that they can make into treasures. "I love the idea of taking something society had thrown out," said Sue Eyet, 54, who is one of the eight women. "It's nice to be able to bring out the beautiful, from what society thinks is ugly." They use garbage for the art they make as part of a group that formed about three years ago, called the Trashy Women.

Green seems to be the new "it" color in contemporary art. The Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize Finalists: Artscape at the BMA, a juried exhibit running Saturday-Aug. 3 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, reflects the growing interest in representing ecological issues. Though the competition, which annually awards $25,000 to a visual artist who works or lives in Maryland, Washington, Northern Virginia or southeastern Pennsylvania, doesn't specify a theme, many of the works by this year's finalists -- some of which will be created on site -- have a noticeable eco bent.