After months of uncertainty and confusion, Baltimore is about to learn the future of Artscape.
Mayor Brandon Scott and Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts CEO Donna Drew Sawyer have scheduled a news conference for 1 p.m. Thursday to address one of the city’s most closely guarded secrets: the dates, location and other details for the 2023 version of Artscape, for many years the biggest festival on the city’s calendar, drawing 350,000 people over three days.
After going three years without its signature outdoor event, BOPA has promised to bring Artscape back in 2023, but not necessarily at the same time of year or in the same way people might remember it. Beyond that, BOPA hasn’t released many details, and that’s what Thursday’s announcement is about.
“Please join us as we make our official Artscape announcement with all the confirmed details, including dates and locations,” reads a media advisory that went out last week.
Here is what is known:
Sawyer has already made it clear that the festival will no longer be held in middle of July because she doesn’t want to ask vendors, visitors, and her own staff to spend hours outside in the heat of summer.
She has indicated that she’d like to shift the event to September, when classes are back in session and temperatures are cooler. Last month, BOPA posted a message on the Artscape.org website that the dates would be Sept. 13 to 17, but later retracted that after people complained that it would conflict with the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah in 2023, which runs Sept. 15 to 17 next year.
Greater Baltimore has one of the largest concentrations of Jewish residents in the United States, and Rosh Hoshanah is one of Judaism’s holiest days.
Sawyer said in July that she briefed Scott on BOPA’s plans for Artscape 2023. James Bentley, a spokesman for Scott, said in an email message that Scott never approved plans to hold Artscape at the same time as Rosh Hashanah.
The Artscape website currently offers no information at all about dates, just a message saying: “OUR NEW SITE LAUNCHES OCTOBER 20, 2022. GET READY!”
Sawyer also has said Artscape 2023 will primarily be held where it has always been, in Bolton Hill and Midtown, but its boundaries may change slightly to include more of the Station North Arts and Entertainment District and other areas not previously part of the festival.
The location of BOPA’s announcement with Scott is the SNF Parkway Theatre at 5 W. North Ave. in Station North, a sign that area could be part of Artscape’s footprint.
The earlier message on the Artscape.org site indicated that the revamped festival would be spread over five days, a change from the usual three. It’s now unclear how many days it will be.
Also unclear is how BOPA will be able to put on the 2023 festival, after Sawyer laid off the agency’s entire festival staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has since hired a new Director of Live Events and Public Engagement, Carlos-deShaun Brown, but many of the BOPA employees with experience in planning and staging Artscape are no longer with the agency.
Fundraising for the festival is another question mark, since organizers rely on a combination of public and private funds and need to start raising money and lining up resources well in advance of the event. Also, last December, Sawyer and BOPA colleagues Kirk Shannon-Butts and Tonya Miller traveled to the Art Basel Miami Beach convention in search of ideas for making Artscape more of a world-class event. The 2023 version will be the first chance to see what they may have gleaned in Florida.
A fresh start
In some respects, Thursday’s announcement is a chance for BOPA to make a fresh start after a series of missteps that have cast doubt on Sawyer’s leadership. Just about every aspect of the agency has been touched by controversy in the past six months.
In April, BOPA contradicted Scott after he said Artscape would be back “bigger and better” than ever in 2022. One day after Scott announced Artscape’s return, BOPA officials said Artscape instead would return in 2023 and the agency would offer the public a preview in September 2022 – an event that one city council member dubbed “Artscape Lite.” BOPA never fulfilled its promise to have a public preview in September; Thursday’s announcement is a press conference not intended for the general public.
In June, Sawyer had two contentious budget hearings with the Ways and Means Committee of the City Council, with chairman Eric Costello urging her not to move Artscape out of his district. Other council members complained about lack of communication from the agency; lack of events and activities outside downtown and midtown; and lack of established artists on its board. One of the biggest questions was: What did BOPA do with the public funds allotted for Artscape in 2020, 2021, 2022, since it didn’t put on festivals in 2021 and 2022 and only had a virtual festival in 2020. The council withheld $196,000 from BOPA’s fiscal 2023 budget until the agency provides answers to council members’ questions.
Also in June, Sawyer told City Council members that BOPA likely won’t have The Baltimore Book Festival around Baltimore’s Inner Harbor anymore under her tenure. She said it might be held in various neighborhoods throughout the city instead, possibly in combination with city libraries and book stores.
In August, Baltimore’s Film Office, a division of BOPA, was involved in an incident in which producers of the Lady of the Lake television series briefly halted production in the 200 block of Park Avenue. Security workers alleged that individuals threatened violence and extortion against the production, but police later said those reports did not appear to be accurate. The producers subsequently resumed filming elsewhere, but only after trade and mainstream publications ran stories about the temporary shutdown. There have also been reports that the production company failed to obtain building permits before altering storefronts along Park Avenue as required by law, since the 200 block is part of a city historic district where any changes to building exteriors need prior city approval.
In September came the scheduling gaffe in which BOPA floated the idea of mounting Artscape 2023 at the same time as Rosh Hashanah 2023. “A huge error,” tweeted City Council member Odette Ramos. The Artscape dates were retracted around Sept. 25, the start of Rosh Hashanah this year.
This month, police cleared a group of people protesting the conditions of homeless Baltimoreans to make way for the Sunday Farmers’ Market under the Jones Falls Expressway, another activity affiliated with BOPA.
‘No confidence‘
These and other incidents have led some observers on social media to question Sawyer’s competence as BOPA’s leader.
“The director [of] BOPA gets a no confidence vote from me,” said local interior designer Stuart Michael, a nonstop booster of Baltimore in general but a sharp critic of Sawyer, on Facebook. “Doesn’t seem to be able to get her act together.”
Sawyer declined Baltimore Fishbowl’s request for an interview; a spokesperson said in an email message that she was unavailable.
Sawyer has said she wants BOPA to put less emphasis on staging festivals and find other ways to elevate the arts in Baltimore. But Scott has been a strong advocate of festivals such as Maryland Fleet Week and Baltimore Flyover, AFRAM in Druid Hill Park, and a new festival called Charm City Live that was held on War Memorial Plaza in September without BOPA’s involvement.
Since BOPA has postponed events such as Artscape and Light City in recent years, other organizations have stepped up to fill in the void, including the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore with its monthly Baltimore by Baltimore festivals at the harbor’s edge. Scott has been a champion of that series, too.
After the lockdowns of COVID, “we want all of our festivals to come back this year,” Scott said in April. “Not just Artscape, but AFRAM. We want to bring all of these things back, to get us back to some normalcy in the city.”
