"...the simple fact that (at least in Baltimore) everyone’s an artist." -- John Barry, "Staging Ground", Baltimore City Paper, Dec 26 2012
Sure, I live in the suburbs, not in the city proper. But culturally, I'm a Baltimorean, or a Baltimoron, going back several generations in all directions. My accent may be duller than my grandparents', flattened out by growing up around TV, but bits of East Baltimore are still evident in my speech. There are photos in the family album of my brother and me as kids sitting on the cannons at Fort McHenry. (I'm sure that's a crime but trust that the statute of limitations has passed.) I can't hear the National Anthem, even an instrumental version, without putting in a loud "O!", at least inside my head. (And if you don't like it, tough; Baltimore gave the nation that song after we saved the country from the British in 1814, so if we want to add a little flourish to it, I say it's our civic right.) And though I'm not much of a sports fan, deep in my heart I still believe that that Baltimore Orioles are morally superior to any other major league baseball team.
For most of my life, loving Baltimore has been more of a faith-based proposition than anything grounded in reality. There's no doubt that it's a city with problems. It remains one of the nation's most murderous cities (fifth highest murder rate by 2011 data), "The City That Bleeds". Deep racial segregation is still a matter of course. City schools are failing. The city government is noted for is ineffectiveness and corruption. The economy still hasn't recovered from the collapse of manufacturing jobs.
But these days...there's something happening here. And not just in the art scene, as vibrant as that is -- ranging from the American Visionary Art Museum to the Creative Alliance to the venues popping up like mushrooms in the Station North district to Gallery 788 to dozens of underground warehouse venues, organized like cells in a resistance movement; from the Classical Revolution to the psychedelic techno-tribalism of Telesma to the innovative beat-boxing hip hop of Shodekeh to the Baltimore Rock Opera Society; from the Theatre Project to the Single Carrot. And this is by no means a complete list, just some examples of the cool stuff I've seen in the past few months.
What's making Baltimore the place to be is that the DIY, decentralized tactics of our art scene have been adopted by groups working for political and social change. From the Free Farm to the B-Note to Red Emma's and the Free School to Evolver Baltimore -- and this is by no means a complete list -- great things are afoot here.
In my more optimistic moments, I feel that the tagline of web magazine What Weekly, "Documenting the Baltimore Renaissance", is not an idle statement. Baltimore could be to the Twenty-Teens what San Francisco was to the 1960s, a center of a new movement in the arts of living. In a town where everyone is an artist, there are many possibilities. Selah.
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