An article about Baltimore's art community in Saturday's Today section incorrectly identified artist Donald Baechler.
The Sun regrets the errors.
When Grace Hartigan started teaching painting at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in the 1960s she'd often give her students three words of advice: New York City. That is, go to New York, where careers are made, where art is shown, purchased and also spoken.
In the next two decades Manhattan rents soared, SoHo became chic, sprouting boutiques where artists once squeaked by in low-rent lofts. It's been years since Ms. Hartigan urged students to move to New York.
"I don't say that anymore," says Ms. Hartigan, an artist of international renown who paints in a grand studio above a drugstore in Fells Point. "What I say is 'Stay here, like me.' Stay here where studios are cheap, and there's not only Maryland Art Place, there's Studio 33 and there's opportunities to exhibit and to possibly sell your work."
L Sure, Baltimore: good baseball city, seafood city, art city.
Art city? Bawlamer?
By at least one measure, yes, says Ms. Hartigan, who moved to Baltimore in 1960 from New York when she married a Johns Hopkins University scientist. "What makes an art city is artists," she says.
And Baltimore has plenty of them. Nobody's counted, but people who work in the local art world say Baltimore has more than its share of painters, sculptors, printmakers and art photographers for a city of 700,000. They move to Baltimore from all over the country to study at the Maryland Institute, counted by U.S. News & World Report this year among the country's top four visual art colleges.
The institute -- which has graduated such luminaries as Jeff Koons, David Baechler and Baltimore native Morris Louis -- graduates 250 students every year with bachelor's and master's degrees in fine arts. Diplomas in hand, they step out of the white stone building on Mount Royal Avenue into a city that represents a mixed blessing.
For artists scratching out an existence, Baltimore is a bargain. It's well-stocked with relatively inexpensive apartments, depending on how much risk of crime you're willing to tolerate. Its old warehouses, defunct mills and vacant foundries make good, cheap studios. Its community of artists can give each other moral if not financial support. Baltimore has city-funded Studio 33 Art Center and Maryland Art Place, both nonprofit galleries specializing in showing local artists.
But the city is short on commercial galleries and well-heeled collectors willing to take a risk on unproven, local talent. It's close enough to New York to lose collectors' dollars to galleries there, but far enough from New York to make it difficult for Baltimore artists to make Manhattan connections, much less get New York dealers to come see their work.
"It's like you're on Mars," says Baltimore painter Lois Borgenicht, whose mother owns a gallery in Arts Mecca: 57th Street in Manhattan. Ms. Borgenicht used to work at the gallery and had a studio loft in Manhattan before moving to Baltimore six years ago when her husband was hired by Hopkins' School of Medicine as a researcher. She left New York, she says, "kicking and screaming," but has since gotten more sanguine about it.
"It's a great place for me to work," she says. Baltimore gallery owners, she says, have done a good job of promoting art in town, but "the one thing I miss is crowded galleries and museums. . . . In New York, people would run into a gallery the day after a review appears, clutching the newspaper."
'Less diversion'
Lots of artists, not much of an art crowd. That's life in Crabtown, Art City. Fine, says Trace Miller, a 39-year-old painter who moved to Baltimore from Pennsylvania in 1980.
"There's less diversion here. In a way, it makes it easier to get down to work. . . . If I were in New York and working I would always feel like I was being pulled" away from the studio.
He works full-time as an artist in a little industrial complex in Woodberry where the studio floor shakes when they start up the big cotton looms in the building. The new place costs $300 a month and has plenty of light. He's been there a year, ever since he moved from Federal Street and Guilford Avenue after he was held up at gunpoint while heading into the studio early one morning.
He'd like to move to New York someday, but at this stage of his career, Baltimore suits him. It's "a very, very good city to develop" in as an artist. "It's affordable . . . New York is no longer where you have to be. It's just too hard to make it there, to manage the day-to-day."
Sculptor John Ferguson works in one end of an unheated old foundry in Clipper Industrial Park where the wind whistles through shattered windows. He pays his rent by doing maintenance for the landlord. Once railroad engines were built there. Now, Mr. Ferguson, 55, goes there to shape hunks of steel or brass into graceful, soaring sculptures that may stand 10, 12 feet high.
Years ago Mr. Ferguson gave up trying to find a New York gallery to represent him. As far as he can tell, that hasn't hurt his artistic career.
"I wish I had the money piled on this table that I made selling art work with Barbara Kornblatt," says Mr. Ferguson, referring to the owner of the B. R. Kornblatt Gallery, which moved from Baltimore to Washington the late 1970s, then closed entirely in 1989. He hasn't been represented by a gallery since then.
Instead, he's sold work through word of mouth, through people he meets. His pieces usually sell for $10,000 to $20,000 and have sold steadily for years, to local doctors, lawyers and business people. Still, Mr. Ferguson, who is married to an artist and has three children, cannot afford to quit his day job.
He works full-time in the maintenance shop at the institute, where he completed a master's degree in 1971 after moving to Baltimore from Chicago. He's not complaining.
"I like Baltimore," he says. "I like the fact that Baltimore is a citand yet it has a lot of Southern charm. It has a relaxed quality to it."
Life in the slower lane
There's less pressure, says Phyllis Audrey Wilson, 39, a sculptor who moved here from Westchester County, N.Y., to start a second career as an artist. She works a full-time job at the institute, a part-time teaching job and shares a $150-a-month studio near Fells Point with Nichole Gray, another artist from New York. She has found Baltimore "a friendlier atmosphere. You don't have such intense competition" among artists.
Life in Crabtown, Art City: easygoing, nothing like New York. Fewer distractions, easier to hole up and work. If you want to see all the art on view in town, you can probably do it in a day. One is not pulled away from the studio night after night by gallery openings or parties one must attend to meet the right people. There aren't so many of the right people here.
That's a problem, says Ms. Hartigan, who moved to Baltimore with her reputation already established as a result of her work with the Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s.
For the unknown Baltimore artist looking to establish a national or international name, however, New York is still the place to show and sell. Without connections, that leap is very tough to make.
Mr. Miller, for example, had his first one-man show in New York this winter, at the Kouros Gallery on the Upper East Side. It happened because of a happy combination of talent and connections. Mr. Miller's Baltimore dealer, Constantine Grimaldis, had put in a word for Mr. Miller with the owners of Kouros, whom he knows. The gallery sold six of 19 paintings, a good show for an unknown artist in New York, says Mr. Grimaldis.
Mr. Grimaldis has become known as the city's most prestigious art dealer partly because of his association with Ms. Hartigan, whom he represents in Baltimore. In the 1970s, she introduced Mr. Grimaldis to Abstract Expressionist masters Willem de Kooning and Elaine de Kooning, whom she'd known in New York. Mr. Grimaldis showed their work, and so was ushered into the upper echelon of the contemporary art scene.
A shortage of clout
What Baltimore lacks, says Ms. Hartigan, are several art dealers with enough clout in New York to get their artists shown there. Chicago, home to the nation's most prestigious art college, the Art Institute of Chicago, has that. It also "has a collecting audience that buys Chicago artists," says Ms. Hartigan. "My dealer has been to major collections there of Picasso, Matisse, de Kooning, so forth and so on, and they say 'Oh, this is one of our Chicago artists here,' hanging right along with the big names. I think maybe Baltimore will get to that, eventually."
In the mid-1980s, when Mr. Grimaldis, George Ciscle and George Dalsheimer all had galleries on North Charles Street, all showing emerging artists, it appeared that Baltimore "was really hot," and might sustain a vibrant commercial art market, says Ms. Hartigan.
The recession soon cooled things off. Mr. Ciscle closed his gallery in 1989, although he says that was because he grew tired of the business, not because he wasn't making money. Mr. Dalsheimer, who specialized in photography, says he closed in 1991 after 10 years because business was bad.
"There simply were not enough collectors in Baltimore" to sustain the business, says Mr. Dalsheimer, who is now retired. "I used to go out of town to sell."
Stephen Salny, who closed his Fells Point gallery last December because he was losing money, paints a gloomy picture of the local art market.
"I think this is a very poor city to sell art in," says Mr. Salny, who is now working in real estate. There's plenty of money around, he says, but "people don't buy art."
Not so, says Steven Scott, who says business at his gallery on North Charles Street has improved every year since he opened in 1988. He shows only established artists and says he has many out-of-town clients.
Mr. Grimaldis figures he makes about half his sales to collectors in Baltimore. Yes, much of the big local art money does pour into the New York market, he says. Yet he has survived here since 1977. When he opened his gallery he and Ms. Kornblatt had the Baltimore fine art market to themselves.
"It was a wasteland," says Mr. Grimaldis.
He has survived in business for 18 years as galleries have opened and closed. He's seen the reputation of the Maryland Institute improve, attracting ever more artists to toil, often happily, in the post-industrial art colony of Crabtown.