Early last spring, Doreen Bolger sat in a Charles Street restaurant with Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Gallery, and talked business. Bolger, recently appointed head of the Baltimore Museum of Art, was new to the city, but the two directors had been friends for years.
Their conversation turned to an interesting exhibition of ancient Syrian objects organized by the Worcester (Mass.) Art Museum and titled "Antioch: The Lost Roman City." Trouble was, Worcester had offered the show to the BMA - and, separately, to the Walters.
Bigger trouble was, both Baltimore institutions wanted it.
But by the time coffee was served, a decision had been reached: The Walters would abandon its bid for the show, and the BMA would open the exhibition on its own in the fall of 2001.
The agreement is auspicious for the city's cultural future. Cooperation between the directors of Baltimore's two most prominent museums is one of the signs - both large and small - of a change in how the city's museums view each other. If they used to be, at best, oblivious to each other's needs or, at worst, genteel competitors, they are now more frequently acting as allies.
As government support for the arts dwindles and competition for corporate support intensifies, museums nationwide are increasingly joining forces, working with the corporate community and partnering with tourism boards. "Collaboration and cooperation are in the air in the same way that banks are joining forces in mergers," says Vikan. "It has to do with how you reanalyze and reassess what competition means, what your market means, where your opportunities lie."
Baltimore is a city of some 40 museums. You can wander through the BMA, with its renowned collection of post-impressionist works; examine the Walters' medieval and Renaissance treasures; spend an afternoon at the American Visionary Art Museum, filled with works by self-taught artists. You can choose from a smorgasbord of smaller institutions offering everything from a history of sewer systems to portraits.
In the next three years, two more museums will join the diverse community: Port Discovery, a children's museum that will open in December; and the Maryland Museum of African American History and Culture, slated to open in fall 2001.
Despite its wealth of museums, the city lacks a single collection or institution that consistently merits national attention and draws significant out-of-town crowds.
Maybe Baltimore's blockbuster will be the sum of its parts.
Cooperative efforts have taken a variety of forms. For example:
n In 1996, a dozen downtown institutions formed the nonprofit Mount Vernon Cultural Association with the goal of increasing the number of visitors to the 17-block area surrounding Baltimore's Washington Monument. Its members include the Basilica of the Assumption, Center Stage, the Maryland Historical Society and the Walters.
n The Baltimore Museum of Industry, the American Visionary Art Museum and the Little Havana restaurant are among a group of Key Highway institutions publicizing attractions on the south side of the Inner Harbor. They jointly have published a brochure and sponsored summer evenings of extended hours called "Key Wednesdays," and are planning a day of shopping and festivities for December.
n The Walters Art Gallery last spring invited other organizations to develop programming that could be tied to a future museum exhibition. Called "The Invisible Made Visible: Angels in the Vatican," the show opens at the Walters in December and will include more than 100 paintings, sculptures and tapestries from the Vatican museums.
So far, plans include a Baltimore Symphony Orchestra concert featuring "angelic" music; a menu of angel-hair pasta and angel-food cake offered by Truffles restaurant on Chase Street; and a photography contest and show sponsored by the Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church.
The city's museums are facing an unofficial deadline for demonstrating teamwork: In May 2000, the Association of American Museums will hold its annual convention here, guaranteeing the city's cultural institutions a large and influential audience of museum administrators and corporate supporters of the arts. Says Kathy Dwyer Southern, the executive director of Port Discovery: "This is a great opportunity for all of us to show off."
Philadelphia's success
At Philadelphia's Four Seasons Hotel, Jean-Marie Lacroix leans back against an upholstered bench. His waiters bustle about, whisking imaginary crumbs from starched white tablecloths. "When I think Delacroix," he says, pursing his lips and gazing upward, "I think passion. Meat. Game. Spices. Maybe figs."
His comments about the 19th-century French painter's works are easily explained. As the hotel's executive chef, he is planning a new menu to complement an exhibition of 70 paintings and 40 works on paper opening Sept. 15 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The show, titled "Delacroix: The Late Work," will be seen in only two cities - Paris and Philadelphia.
Businesses all over the city have linked the exhibit to promotions, discounts and events of all sorts. There are hotel packages including a night's accommodations for two, breakfast, parking, city bus passes and two tickets to the Delacroix show. Ticket holders are being offered discounts at restaurants, lingerie boutiques, theaters, gift shops, galleries, trolley car lines and nightclubs. Shoppers with Delacroix tickets who visit Saks Fifth Avenue in nearby suburban Bala Cynwyd will receive a complimentary facial and makeover dubbed "The Artful Face."
These businesses are following a profitable precedent.
In 1996, the Philadelphia Art Museum worked with the city's convention and tourist bureau to promote the city as a vacation destination during the museum's exhibition of works by post-impressionist painter Paul Cezanne. The effort set a national standard for marketing fine art.
During the exhibit's 15-week run, more than 777,500 visitors streamed through the museum - 20 percent more visitors than the museum usually gets in a whole year. About 29,000 hotel packages were sold. Visitorship at the nearby Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which presented a related exhibit, tripled. Overall, the estimated economic impact on the city was $86 million.
"Collaborations are the No. 1 thing going these days," says Sandra Horrocks, vice president for marketing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. "Sponsors and foundations who support the arts want their money to have a larger effect, a broader, ripple effect. And through collaborations, you reach more people, get more for your money, and have a far larger effect."
A national effort
There's little doubt that the success of the Cezanne exhibition attracted national attention - but other factors also have contributed to the growing awareness among arts and business leaders of the potential drawing power of cultural events.
In 1995, the annual White House Conference on Travel and Tourism for the first time included a daylong session on cultural tourism, followed by a series of regional meetings held throughout the country that were designed to forge partnerships between the tourism industry and the cultural community.
"There was a lot of work done all over the country to cultivate planning between tourism and travel boards and museums," says Pat Williams, vice president at the American Association of Museums. "And you can see the results: an increasing interest in collaborations and doing things together.
As news of successful exhibitions has spread, the business community has taken note. In a 1996 survey, conducted by the Travel Industry Association of Washington, one-third of adults living in the United States (about 65 million people) said they took a trip in the past year that included visiting a historic site or museum, or attending a festival.
The Greater Baltimore Alliance, an economic development group that works to attract new businesses, began last fall to examine how corporate communities in other cities support their cultural institutions.
The reason? Companies list a lively cultural community as among their top priorities when considering relocation, says Lois Yates of the alliance. "As we go into the next century, the quality-of-life issue becomes one of the most important factors for businesses [looking for cities in which to locate]. And a city's cultural life is a part of that."
Last spring, a show at the Walters that focused on the later works of Claude Monet attracted 170,000 visitors. The museum worked with the Baltimore Area Visitors Center to develop hotel packages tied to the Monet show that included a night's stay, breakfast, parking and two museum tickets. Seventeen Baltimore hotels participated; 264 hotel packages were sold.
Overall, visitors to the Walters during the nine-week exhibition spent an estimated $13.5 million in restaurants, hotels and shops, according to a survey conducted by the museum.
Local personalities are playing a role, too. In 1994, Vikan - assistant director and curator of medieval art at the Walters - became its director. A year later, Dennis Fiori, formerly director of the Concord Museum in Massachusetts, was appointed director of the Maryland Historical Society. When Bolger left her position as head of the RISD Museum in Providence, R.I., last year to become director of the BMA, it was like a final piece in a puzzle, completing a turnover in cultural leadership and setting the scene for change.
"Before, not all of those institutions were really willing to pull together, but now you have relatively new senior leadership at almost all of these institutions," says Timothy Armbruster, president of the Baltimore Community Foundation, a grant-making institution that is a member of the Mount Vernon Cultural Association.
"When the leaders get together now they don't bring a lot of baggage or turf battles or issues from the past. There's a predisposition to cooperate."
Pub Date: 8/30/98