Artscape 2024 will take place in essentially the same area as it did last year – Baltimore’s Mount Royal Cultural District and the Station North Arts District.
The Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts (BOPA) has raised $135,000 from private sources so far to produce the event on Aug. 2 to 4.
City officials have decided not to automatically renew BOPA’s multi-year contract to serve as the city’s events producer, arts council and film office, but they are willing to talk about a possible future contract that reflects the vision and objectives of the current mayoral administration. The existing contract, negotiated during the term of former Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, will expire June 30.
Those are a few of the takeaways from Wednesday’s quarterly meeting of the BOPA board of directors, which welcomed 11 members of its “2024-2025 interim board,” with each member serving a one-year term.
It was also the first board meeting for Rachel Graham, who became CEO on March 15 and shared some of her goals as she takes charge of the BOPA staff.
BOPA is an independent organization that is nearing the end of a five-year contract to serve the city of Baltimore. The new members were installed to replace board members who have resigned or left as a result of term expirations. They join two members who were previously on the board and will also serve one-year terms: Andrew Chaveas, an architect with Brailsford & Dunlavey, Inc., and Jeffrey Kent, a visual artist who heads Jeffrey Kent Studio and is curator-in-residence at The Peale.
The new interim members include: Lady Brion, executive director of Baltimore’s Black Arts District, international spoken word artist, poetry coach, activist, educator and member of the city’s Public Art Commission; Derrick Chase, educator, author, producer, activist and founder and CEO of Stand Up Baltimore, a movement that “aligns organizations and resources to improve the quality of life in Baltimore;” Andy Cook, executive director of Made in Baltimore, a division of the Baltimore Development Corporation; Tonya Miller Hall, senior advisor of Arts and Culture in the Mayor’s Office; and Adam Holofcener, executive director of Maryland Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts and a practicing musician and sound artist.
Also, Ellen Janes, executive director of the Central Baltimore Partnership; April Lewis, artist, organizer, curator and Director of Community + Culture at Open Works; Robyn Murphy, CEO of JRM Consultancy and a former television host, reporter and anchor; Sarah Scott, a lawyer with Venable LLP; Angela Wells-Sims, a principal with Durant Bailey Group LLC; and Lu Zhang, multidisciplinary artist, researcher, organizer, executive director of A Blade of Grass and former deputy director of The Contemporary museum in Baltimore.
The same 13 people are now members of a sister board of directors for the Baltimore Festival of the Arts Inc. (BFAI), an organization that oversees operations of the Baltimore Farmers Market, Artscape and other activities. That board started with Chaveas and Kent and installed 11 additional members in a separate meeting that took place immediately after the BOPA board meeting.
Most of the directors attended the two meetings in person on Wednesday. Zhang and Wells-Sims joined by phone. Brion and Holofcener were absent.
“This interim board is truly representative of the depth and breadth of talent and insight Baltimore City has to offer,” Graham said. “It is the result of deep thought and consideration of both the need for guidance on improved governance for the organization and our responsibility to incorporate the views and perspectives of the arts and culture community as we chart a course ahead. I look forward to working with them.”
Kent said he’s grateful to Chaveas for the commitment he’s made to BOPA. “I’m happy that Andrew jumped on board and has taken the leadership role that he has. We would not have made it this far” without him, Kent said.
No automatic renewal
During the BOPA board meeting, Graham said city officials have given notice that “there will not be not be an automatic renewal of our contract” to serve the city when the existing contract expires on June 30.
Graham told the board that she had a meeting scheduled to talk with city officials about how BOPA might work with the city after June 30 but it had to be rescheduled in light of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse on Tuesday.
Instead of automatically extending the existing contract, city officials want to discuss the scope of BOPA’s work for the city, how it’s staffed to carry out that work and the time frame for any new service period, as part of drafting any new contract, she told the board.
“They let us know that the same terms…were not going to be automatically renewed and they wanted to take another look at it,” she said. They want to know “what we do, what does it cost, how do we pay for it, does it make money?”
Graham explained after the meeting that BOPA’s last contract was negotiated for a five-year period that began in 2019 with terms approved by then-Mayor Young. After Scott became mayor in December of 2020, she said, he brought in a “completely different set of players” at City Hall, and BOPA’s leadership has changed as well.
Five years ago, “it was a different administration with a different CEO, and so now is an opportunity to have fresh eyes to look at it with and go back and have a conversation” about moving forward, she said. “They want to revisit the contract with me at the table and the leadership that’s currently at City Hall.”
Graham said she’s now scheduled to meet with Deputy Mayor for Community and Economic Development Justin Williams and Miller Hall on April 9 to talk about the current administration’s objectives regarding the arts community and funding for cultural initiatives in Baltimore, and how BOPA might work with the city under a new contract. Asked about the length of a new contract, she said she would want to “take advisement from our leadership as to what that looks like.”
One change from five years ago is that the Mayor’s Office now produces more events without BOPA’s involvement, such as the Charm City Live Music & Arts Festival that Scott launched in 2022. In 2023, it put on the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade when BOPA didn’t do so. It works with a different producer to hold the annual AFRAM festival, which has surpassed Artscape as Baltimore’s most-attended festival.
In addition, the Scott administration has created its own Office of Arts & Culture and given Miller Hall a cabinet-level position. That office recently announced plans to commission artists to paint portraits of five Baltimore mayors for display in City Hall, with a budget of $20,000 per portrait. Working with the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore, it also launched a competition and selected 10 individuals or groups to create artwork to cover electrical boxes along Pratt Street as part of the mayor’s Downtown RISE initiative.
Other organizations have begun organizing events as well, including the Baltimore by Baltimore festivals produced by the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore. Some of this activity was started to fill the void left when BOPA failed to organize events it was paid to produce during the tenure of former CEO Donna Drew Sawyer.
BOPA funding
The Baltimore City Council has no role in negotiating the terms of a city contract with BOPA or hiring BOPA’s CEO, but it does have a say in the amount of funding the organization receives every year from the city. It typically receives about $2.6 million.
Last June the council withheld 75 percent of the funds BOPA requested for fiscal 2024, or about $1.7 million, until the board addressed concerns that Scott and council members had about its governance structure and flawed operations under Sawyer, who resigned in January of 2023 after the mayor said he lost confidence in her ability to lead the agency.
Since then, the council has restored all of the funds BOPA requested for fiscal 2024 except $581,334. Adding new interim board members was part of BOPA’s strategy for addressing the council’s concerns and securing the rest of the money that was withheld. The council is expected to meet on April 8 to take a final vote on whether to restore $581,334 to help fund BOPA’s operations in April, May and June – key planning months for Artscape and other events.
Graham came to BOPA from the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, where she was director of external relations. She now leads a staff of 40, including 23 full-time employees.
Graham told the board that one of her priorities is filling key vacancies on the staff, including a chief of staff position and a marketing director position. She said she’s also looking to bring back a “permanent, full-time, dedicated arts council director” following the departure of Jocquelyn Downs, who was director of the Baltimore City Arts Council for many years but moved out of the state in 2023.
At present, Graham said, Christopher Brooks is “carrying two jobs on his shoulders” – director of the arts council and director of Artscape. “We want to have a dedicated person” to lead the arts council, she said. “We are the arts council for the city of Baltimore and we want to have a director of that arts council.”
Graham said she also wants to work with the board “as we take a very fresh look at the strategic plan” commissioned by Sawyer to help guide BOPA’s operations but never released to the public. “The strategic plan process started two and half years ago,” she said. “I will be very honest and say that it did not include a lot of staff involvement.”
In other updates:
Artscape’s footprint: Graham and Brooks said Artscape 2024 will be held in the same areas as it was last year, the Mount Royal Cultural District and the Station North Arts District. They didn’t go into specifics about the festival’s boundaries, but Graham said that she is excited about preliminary plans she has seen.
One change is that the Central Baltimore Partnership is planning to move an outdoor events space known as the Ynot Lot from the northwest corner of Charles Street and North Avenue to the southwest corner of Maryland and North avenues, where a former bank building is being demolished.
Fundraising: Director of development Sarah Gibbons said BOPA has raised $135,000 in private funds for Artscape 2024 and the city appropriates about $98,000 a year for festivals, including Artscape. “We are about 22 percent of our way to our fundraising goal” for Artscape 2024, she said.
Films: Graham said no full-length motion pictures are being filmed in Baltimore at present, but BOPA’s film office is working with producers of short films. Baltimore-based filmmaker John Waters has been working with Village Roadshow Pictures to make a new movie of his 2022 novel “Liarmouth: A Feel Bad Romance” and has said it will be filmed in Baltimore if he gets the green light for it. BOPA representatives say they’re aware of the project.
Terms of service: Chaveas said the board members’ one-year terms started this week and will end with the March board meeting in 2025. He previously has said that board members will be invited to stay on the board after one year or they can step down. He said the idea of a starting with a one-year interim board was suggested by a consultant that worked with BOPA’s governance task force.
Executive committee: Board members voted to appoint three members to an executive committee. They include: Chaveas as interim chair; Wells-Sims as interim treasurer; and Lewis as interim secretary. Brion was nominated to serve as interim vice chair, but the other members said that since she was not present, they would wait to see if she accepted the role before making it official.
BOPA committees: In addition to its stewardship, fiduciary, and ambassadorial responsibilities, the interim board is tasked with reviewing the organization’s governance structure and function as was well as providing recommendations to update and improve its bylaws. To fulfill their mission, board members approved the formation of three committees but did not name committee chairs. The committees are: a bylaw and governance review committee; a mission and community partnership committee, and a finance and development committee. Only BOPA board members may serve on those committees.
The board also talked about creating a separate advisory committee that would be made up of “non-voting members” not on the board. Members decided to ask the governance review committee to come up with suggestions for how an advisory committee might be formed, who might serve on it, and how members might be recruited.
The next meetings of the BOPA and BFAI boards are scheduled for June 26, less than a week before BOPA’s contract with the city is due to expire. Graham said any new contract between BOPA and the city must be approved by Baltimore’s Board of Estimates before it can take effect.
Artscape will not be in Station North (an arts and entertainment district marketing designation for part of the neighborhoods of Charles North and Greenmount West), Artscape will be in Charles North. You guys get it wrong every time: Station North is not a neighborhood.