The Contemporary Museum has been an art institution in Baltimore for the past 21 years. After a twelve-year stretch in the Home Mutual Life building, the Contemporary returned to its location-hopping roots with temporary shows at various buildings around the city.
For reasons still not entirely clear, Contemporary’s board of trustees voted unanimously to suspend operations, a move that entails cancelling the last week of Baltimore Liste, a month long program of an ever-shifting art exhibit and an opening every Friday with performances.
As it happens, I was a part of what ended up being the last Liste perfomance on May 18 as part of the Wham City Comedy Tour. We were certainly pretty rag-tag — we had virtually no props or sets, we didn’t even have projections as we originally intended — but I didn’t think it was bad enough to bring down a decades-old museum.
Just want to say thanks to Sue Spaid and the Contemporary Museum in general for letting all of us — including a thirty-something man in a giant egg costume deliver off-color one-liners — perform at one of the city’s many historic, vacant buildings (namely, the bank at 1 E. Baltimore St.) And thanks for the monochromatic snack spread.
