From Melbourne to Jerusalem, Baltimore's arts scene made headlines worldwide more than once in 2014. But tourism boosters might have preferred that local artists and performers and media professionals make a different kind of splash.
From a missing Renoir painting that returned to Baltimore six decades after it was stolen to a feature on National Geographic that dubbed the city "the heroin capital of America" to the blockbuster podcast "Serial" that dissected a 1999 murder, it seems that nearly every time the arts made national or international news, crime scene tape was involved.
And that's not including the two videos posted by TMZ Sports that touched off a widespread debate about domestic violence. The tapes show former Baltimore Ravens quarterback Ray Rice slugging his fiancee and dragging her limp body from a casino elevator.
Of course, police procedurals don't tell the entire story. The past year also was chock-full of developments on the local arts scene that provided Baltimore with bona fide bragging rights.
They included the development of an ambitious new film center, a proposal to build what might be the world's largest art park, national honors for local authors Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Sheri Booker, and milestone anniversaries for the Baltimore Museum of Arts, the Charles and Senator theatres and the Lyric Opera House.
Even if these events didn't go viral, they indicate the underlying vitality not just of the local arts scene but of the city in which they're located.
For that matter, so do the controversies, which help define a little more clearly the values and the standards to which we aspire as a people.
So, break out the beverage of your choice, raise your glass, and let's offer a toast to tomorrow.
TV/Media
Seemingly confirming a Gallup poll that found that half of the residents in Maryland wanted to leave the state, Comedy Central talk-show host Stephen Colbert made Baltimore the punchline of a segment on the effects of global warming during his May 14 broadcast.
"The entire country would become an uninhabitable wasteland — not just Baltimore," Colbert said, displaying an image of boarded-up rowhouses.
Ba-dup-bup.
Perhaps the most severe blow to the city's image came in August, when the National Geographic channel aired "Drugs, Inc.: The High Wire." The reality-TV production described Baltimore as "the heroin capital of America" and featured drug dealers in balaclavas pointing guns at the cameras. That segment touched off a public furor.
Then in October, the weekly public radio show "This American Life" launched "Serial," a 12-part podcast series about the murder of high school student Hae Min Lee, who went missing in 1999. Her body was found a few weeks later in Leakin Park. The serial, which was hosted and produced by former Sun reporter Sarah Koenig, became the most popular podcast in history, averaging more than 1.5 million listeners a week.
Longtime morning news anchor Don Scott signed off for the final time in July after 40 years at WJZ. After the announcement of Scott's departure broke, fans implored the 64-year-old broadcaster to reconsider. He declined, saying he was eager to move on to the next phase of his life.
In a development worthy of the machinations of the fictitious politician Frank Underwood, the state battled to ensure that "House of Cards," Netflix' drama starring Kevin Spacey, continued to film in Maryland. The show's producers sought $15 million in tax incentives but ended up with $11.5 million.
But there are rumblings that season 3 could be the final season for "House of Cards" — and most likely HBO's political comedy, "Veep" — to be filmed in Maryland. Earlier this month, state analysts urged lawmakers to scrap Maryland's film tax credit after a report found that taxpayers are getting just a 10-cent return for every dollar spent.
There's more — much more — to come. The Dec. 2 recommendation by the state Department of Legislative Services merely was the opening salvo in what is likely to become a passionate public debate presided over by a new governor.
Visual Arts
The Baltimore Museum of Art might never have been in the public eye more often than it was last year.
In January, when a federal court judge in Virginia ordered that a tiny Renoir painting of the River Seine be returned to the Baltimore museum from which the artwork had been stolen in 1951, the news made headlines worldwide. The museum was battling an ownership claim by a Virginia woman, Marcia "Martha" Fuqua, who said she bought the 1879 artwork, "Paysage Bord du Seine," at a flea market without knowing its true value.
On March 27, the FBI announced that no one would be charged either with the original theft or with possessing stolen property.
Three days later, the little Renoir went on public display for the first time in more than six decades.
The museum made news again in November when its 100th anniversary coincided with the reopening the American wing after a $7.9 million renovation. The New York Times took notice of the restoration, which included throwing open the museum's long-closed historic entrance.
Across town, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture found itself in the cross hairs after Helena Hicks, an icon of Baltimore's early civil rights movement, was denied entrance. The dispute between Hicks and the museum's executive director, A. Skipp Sanders, arose over whether to include Eddie Conway — a former Black Panther leader and convicted murderer — in a panel discussion on which both had been invited to participate.
Attendees to the event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became disturbed when they saw guards escorting the 4-foot-10 octogenarian into the museum's parking lot.
Sanders later said he'd ordered that Hicks be barred from the premises because in previous telephone conversations with museum staffers, she had been "aggressive," "disparaging" and "even a bit threatening."
But not all of the sparks occurred inside museum walls.
Artist Richard Best announced in August that he's spearheading a project to convert a three-acre vacant lot under the Jones Falls Expressway into the largest art park in the world. Though still in the fundraising stage, early plans by a committee, which includes a developer, college administrators and city officials, call for an 18,000 square-foot skate park, more than 60,000 square feet of paintable surfaces, stages for performances and more than an acre of green space.
Pop Music
Up-and-coming rapper Young Moose found himself in jail — and forced to skip a gig that might have been his big break — when he became enmeshed in a nationwide debate about whether police can use song lyrics as evidence of crimes.
The musician, whose birth name is Kevron Evans, was arrested in August, days before he was scheduled to open at the Baltimore arena for Louisiana rapper Lil Boosie. In the charging documents, Baltimore City Police Detective Daniel Hersl wrote that videos posted on YouTube include "raps about distributing narcotics, violence and using a firearm to commit violence."
The arrest followed a July 25 search of the family home, when detectives turned up 160 gel caps of heroin and drug paraphernalia.
It's just one of a series of similar cases nationwide. Police, civil libertarians and artists are trying to thrash out when creative works should be interpreted as a flight of the imagination, and when — if ever — they constitute a criminal confession.
Happily for fans of the synth-pop band "Future Islands," the group's date with fame met no such roadblocks. The trio made its network TV debut on March 3 performing the title track of the album, "Singles," on "The Late Show" on CBS. Their performance captivated the famously curmudgeonly David Letterman, who not only tried out a few of Sam Herring's dance moves, but referred to the performance in his monologue later in the week.
Film
Mr. DeMille, Baltimore is ready for its close-up.
2014 was the year that the renovation of the Parkway Theatre in the Station North Arts District and the development of a new center that could become a national incubator of technology in the arts made the move from a dream to blueprints.
The center — a coalition between the Maryland Film Festival, Johns Hopkins University and the Maryland Institute, College of Art — will be housed in two nearby structures totaling about $35 million. The project achieved two important milestones this year:
Organizers secured the bulk of the $17 million needed to renovate the historic Parkway Theatre at 5 W. North Ave. In addition, Hopkins hired the innovator and '80s pop star Thomas Dolby to help design the center and to teach students some of the computer techniques he pioneered.
The Station North neighborhood passed an audition of sorts in May when the Maryland Film Festival moved out of the Charles Theatre, where it had been located for the past 15 years, and into several venues near the Parkway.
The operators of the Charles, James "Buzz" Cusack and his daughter, Kathleen Cusack Lyon, said they could no longer afford to disrupt their regular programming to rent their five screens to the festival.
The area is in the midst of revitalization, but movie buffs apparently took the move in stride. Though ticket sales were down this year from the record set in 2013, they exceeded the amount sold in 2012.
In July, a new 15-screen Cinemark Theatre opened in Towson, bringing the total of movie screens inside the Beltway to 60, with an additional 10 screens in Station North and Hampden possible within the next two years.
Meanwhile, Baltimore's cinematic grand dames, the Art Deco Senator Theatre and the Beaux Arts Charles, celebrated their 75th anniversaries in 2014.
The Performing Arts
As they say of sports teams, 2014 was a building year for Baltimore's performing arts groups. But unlike football and baseball franchises, progress in the fortunes of local performing arts groups really was measured in bricks and mortar.
In September, the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company cut the ribbon on a new nearly $7 million theater in the former Mercantile Building in downtown Baltimore that was designed to be reminiscent of London's Globe Theater. The architect's decision to incorporate the richly decorated ceiling and ornate columns of the 1885 Romanesque Revival-style building has been praised by preservationists.
In August, the University of Maryland Baltimore County unveiled the stunning results of a decade-long $160 million building project. The new Performing Arts and Humanities Building boasts a sun-reflecting, stainless-steel-wrapped Concert Hall, glass-enclosed Dance Cube jutting from the structure, and a 100-seat black box theater.
In addition, local developer Winstead "Ted" Rouse plans to spend $7 million to convert three abandoned buildings in the 400 block of N. Howard St. into a mini theater corridor, with three performing spaces with their own marquees. Possible long term tenants include Annex Theater, EMP Collective, Acme Corp. and Stillpointe Theatre Initiative.
And finally, after years of maintaining a vagabond existence, Baltimore's Single Carrot Theatre moved in January into a permanent home inside a former auto repair and tire shop in the Remington neighborhood.
The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra also went on a building spree — though of a very different type.
In January, the symphony announced that a $1 million gift from Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker would enable it to double the number of students enrolled in OrchKids. The innovative program aims to achieve social change by putting musical instruments into the hands of schoolchildren living in impoverished neighborhoods.
The gift is expected to expand participating public schools from five to eight by 2019, and to increase enrollment from 750 students to 1,600.
Down the street from the Meyerhoff, the Lyric Opera House turned 120.
Books
After 18 years, the Baltimore Book Festival left the Mount Vernon neighborhood in September and relocated to the Inner Harbor, a move that later became permanent.
The Book Fest had been forced to pull up stakes to accommodate construction around the Washington Monument. But the new setup at several downtown sites allowed for expanded programming and additional exhibiting space. As a result, more than 100,000 people visited the 2014 festival, doubling previous years' attendance.
Baltimore crime novelist and former Sun reporter Laura Lippman made a point about social perceptions of female beauty in March when she posted a photo of herself without makeup on Facebook. Lippman intended her selfie to express solidarity with the actress Kim Novak, whose "frozen" appearance at the Academy Awards had been widely ridiculed.
Lippman's bare-faced photo took on a life of its own, inspiring a craze of similar snapshots – and newspaper articles worldwide that raised the equivalent of more than $13.1 million for cancer research in the United Kingdom, according to British newspapers.
A handful of Baltimore-area scribes carried off some top national prizes in 2014. In March, Columbia resident Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Americanah" won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction (beating, among other novels, "Someone" by Hopkins professor Alice McDermott.)
Sheri Booker's memoir, "Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner City Funeral Home" won an NAACP Image Award for outstanding literary work by a debut author in February, while Morgan State University professor MK Asante's "Buck" was a finalist in the biography category.