The One World Cafe has one big advantage for artists over museums like the Louvre and the Walters Art Gallery: You don't have to be dead to have your work shown there.
You don't even have to be a great artist. Not in the burgeoning coffeehouse culture in Baltimore, where cafe art and cafe artists have become a vibrant part of the local art scene.
Artists, who have complained for generations about the lack of gallery space in Baltimore, now find themselves with more and more wall space to cover. New artists learn they don't have to make a reputation before showing their work. Older professionals find cafes congenial places to display -- and sell -- their work between shows in more traditional settings.
"It's a big circuit, it really is," says Luis Fabara, one of the owners of the One World Cafe. "The Daily Grind, Margaret's Cafe, Bohemian Cafe, Adrian's Book Cafe, they have art there, Gypsy's Cafe, Sector 8, Spike and Charlie's, Funk's Democratic Coffee Spot . . .
"And it's just going to get bigger," he says. "There's still room for more coffeehouses."
Mr. Fabara likes the work he puts on his walls to be "unique."
"Color!" exclaims Mr. Fabara, who's young and lean, with eyes, hair, beard and mustache as dark as his richest espresso. "I look for a lot of color."
Which works out just fine for Arlene DiMenna, a painter who's having her first show anywhere at the One World Cafe.
Her work is big, bright and full of voluptuous purples and violets, sensuous pinks, aerial blues and deep, rich reds, greens and yellows.
"Her work gives a bold feel to the place," Luis Fabara says, "right when you walk in."
The One World's decor is basically bare brick and natural wood. Mrs. DiMenna's sensual oil paintings float on its walls like orchids on a terra-cotta-colored cliff.
"I love color," says Mrs. DiMenna, who fits neatly into Baltimore's cafe art scene. She's a youthful, buoyant 45. She started painting just four years ago and is beginning to feel confident in her work and her vision.
She's not quite typical. Cafe artists generally tend to be younger, still in school, or recent graduates. But plenty of mature, established artists show their work in cafes.
Cafes and coffeehouses have a long, if not quite reputable, place in art history. Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Modigliani, most of the Impressionists, post-Impressionists, Cubists, Constructivists, Expressionists and Abstract-Expressionists, pre- and post-Modernists hung out in cafes, painted them and their denizens, showed their works in them and paid their bar bills with paintings when times were tough.
The longest-running cafe art showplace here is probably Louie's Book Store Cafe. Owner Jimmy Rouse has been showing paintings since he opened in 1981. He's a fine painter who actually opened the place with the idea of giving artists a place to make a living and walls to hang their work on.
Nouveau coffeehouse proprietors might think Louie's more bistro than cafe because he sells meals, booze and books as well as coffee, but Jimmy Rouse remembers when he had one of the only working espresso machines in town.
"The attraction for me was always to have art on the walls," Mr. Rouse says. "I knew tons of people who were working very hard on their art and were very serious about it, very good and very talented."
Filling the gap
Baltimore's always been a good, cheap place for artists to live, he says. Unfortunately, the down side is that there is no market. Cafes and coffeehouses help fill the gap. Louie's has always had fairly lively sales from its shows.
"Most people I show are out of school, out in the real world, working very hard on their art while they're trying to hold some other job to make a living," Mr. Rouse says. "These are the people who don't get to show anywhere else."
Nieves Saah, a Basque artist who now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Oswalo Mesa, from Cuba, who's been a manager and bartender at Louie's for about seven years, are among his most successful artists. And painters and printmakers like Ruth Channing, Greg Fletcher and Lawrence Hurst have become regulars on his walls.
But the dean of cafe artists has to be Charlie Newton, who first started showing his work in coffeehouses when the Beat Generation was a lifestyle, not a history lesson. He's just had his 33rd annual show at the Waterfront Restaurant in Fells Point.
Still wearing dark glasses that look as though they came from Jack Kerouac's glove compartment, Charlie Newton has painted in San Francisco and Florida and Northern Ireland. He's recorded Baltimore's streetscape, waterfront and tavern and cafe life for nearly 40 years.
His realistic urban scenes hung in San Francisco coffee shops and the hallowed City Lights book store when the beats were turning into the hippies in the early '60s. The roll call of joints he has shown in here resounds like litany for a lost generation or two: Martick's Lower Tyson Street cafe, the Stereo Den, No Fish Today, the Roosevelt Hotel, the Congress Hotel, Turkey Joe's.
Mr. Newton has made his living as an artist and has never really been represented by a gallery. He stills loves cafes -- and bars. Work from his 33rd show remains on the walls at the Waterfront, which is more restaurant than cafe. And he shows paintings and prints regularly in Fells Point at the Whistling Oyster and the Dead End cafe, a long and dedicated art venue.
"The resurrection of the coffeehouse scene is a boon to the artist," Mr. Newton says. "The whole system of hanging in cafes and coffeehouses and taverns really works because both parties get something out of it.
"The cafe gets publicity and the artist gets space," he says, succinctly.
And cafe owners operating on a shoestring get original artworks free to decorate their walls.
"Who hangs around a gallery more than 15 minutes?" he asks. "In cafes, people sit around and look at the art all night long."
Jimmy Rouse says that's pretty much the way it works. His customers often look at a painting all through a show, grow fond of it and buy it when the show's coming down.
A better deal
And where galleries often ask a 40 percent to 50 percent commission, cafes and coffeehouses don't take any more than 10 percent to 20 percent. That's to cover costs, owners say -- mostly insurance, although Mike Key, who owns the Daily Grind on Thames Street with his brother, David, says they've been sued by an artist, perhaps overwhelmed by ingratitude.
For Arlene DiMenna, seeing her paintings hanging at the One World Cafe is simply lovely. "I think my work looks beautiful in this place," she says.
But it's also a little scary.
"It's a very vulnerable place to be -- up on the wall," Mrs. DiMenna says. "I've been like a closet artist. It's been a big emotional process coming out to show my work. It's like putting your heart and soul up there on the wall. People are going to love it or hate it.
"But I'm at a point in my life where I can't let my fears stand in my way," she says. "I had to do it or I'd always say, 'Why didn't I try?' "