The organization that produces Artscape and other major civic events is gaining 11 new board members this month as part of a strategy for addressing concerns about its governance and flawed performance during the tenure of former CEO Donna Drew Sawyer.
With fewer than five months to go before Artscape 2024 in early August, representatives for the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts (BOPA) this month provided to City Council members a “draft list” containing the names of 12 people who have been identified to serve on a “2024-2025 Interim Board of Directors,” starting with a board meeting this week.
The names were submitted as part of the BOPA board’s effort to secure $581,334 in funds that were previously withheld until council members were satisfied that the organization has sufficiently addressed concerns voiced by Mayor Brandon Scott and council members related to its governance and operations.
After receiving the draft list of names, the council’s Ways and Means Committee voted 4 to 0 on March 18 to give a favorable recommendation to Council Bill 24-0488, which calls for providing a Supplementary General Fund Operating Appropriation of $581,334 to help cover BOPA’s operations in April, May and June – key planning months for Artscape. The full council passed the bill on second reader on March 18 and it’s expected to come up for final approval on April 8.
“Our colleagues at BOPA did follow through on their commitment to share a draft list of [the] proposed interim board that will serve over the next year, and we certainly appreciate BOPA following through on their commitment,” Ways and Means Committee chair Eric Costello said at the full council meeting on March 18.
Council president Nick Mosby recognized current BOPA CEO Rachel Graham, who was in the council chambers on March 18, and called for a round of applause for her. Graham, whose first day was March 15, will report to the interim board. “The council looks forward to working with you, particularly as we go into the next budget session,” Mosby said. “Thank you so much, Madame CEO.”
Interim board
BOPA is an independent organization that has a contract with the city and receives taxpayer funds to serve as Baltimore’s events producer, arts council and film office. Its contract with the city is set to expire on June 30 and has not been renewed. The naming of a new interim board is a sign that it’s working to convince city leaders not to sever ties with the agency at the end of June. Graham said talks with city officials about a contract extension are ongoing.
As of Jan. 1, 2024, BOPA’s board had dwindled to five members as a result of resignations and term expirations. Departing members included former Enoch Pratt Free Library President and CEO Heidi Daniel; developer Michael Shecter; vice chair Franklin McNeil, Jr.; treasurer Jack Lewin and former chairs Brian Davis Lyles and Anana Kambon, who led the search committee that recommended Sawyer. Staff departures have included Jocquelyn Downs, senior director of programming and the arts council; Brian Wentz, chief financial officer, and Lauren Green Bolling, director of marketing and communications.
The interim board includes two members from its previous board – acting chair 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 draft list of new members includes: Lady Brion, executive director of Baltimore’s Black Arts District and a member of the city’s Public Art Commission; Derrick Chase, 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 an endurance athlete who enjoys boxing and road cycling; and Adam Holofcener, executive director of Maryland Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts.
Also, Ellen Janes, executive director of the Central Baltimore Partnership; April Lewis, Director of Community + Culture at Open Works; Robyn Murphy, CEO of JRM Consultancy; Sarah Scott, a lawyer with Venable LLP; Angela Wells-Sims, a principal with Durant Bailey Group LLC, and Lu Zhang, executive director of A Blade of Grass and former deputy director of The Contemporary museum in Baltimore.
The interim members will each serve one-year terms. Votes to authorize the supplemental appropriation of $581,334 came from Ways and Means Committee members Ryan Dorsey, Sharon Green Middleton, Robert Stokes Jr., and Costello, with Kristerfer Burnett and Danielle McCray absent.
Strained relationship
The relationship between city leaders and BOPA became strained in recent years by a series of flubs and missteps under Sawyer, who was named CEO in 2018, during the term of former Mayor Catherine Pugh. A Bolton Hill resident in her mid-70s, she resigned on January 10, 2023 after Scott said he lost confidence in her ability to lead the agency.
One of the issues that strained the relationship was BOPA’s failure to put on events for which the city allocated funds, including in-person Artscape festivals in 2020, 2021 and 2022; the Baltimore Book Festival in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, and Light City Baltimore, which was last held in 2019 as part of the defunct Brilliant Baltimore, a mash-up of Light City Baltimore and the Baltimore Book Festival.
Initially, Sawyer blamed the COVID-19 pandemic and public health guidelines that prohibited large gatherings for the cancellation of events that BOPA was paid to produce. But as COVID vaccines were introduced and other cities brought back large-scale gatherings, BOPA was slow to do so in Baltimore.
In April 2022, after Scott announced that Artscape would return that year as a way to provide some “normalcy in the city” after COVID lockdowns and closings, Sawyer contradicted him the next day by having BOPA issue a statement saying her agency needed more time for planning and would only be offering a “preview” of the 2023 festival. Then after months of planning, while Sawyer still headed the agency, BOPA posted on social media that Artscape 2023 would be held on the same weekend as Rosh Hashanah and the dates had to be changed after objections from Baltimore’s Jewish community. BOPA subsequently announced performer Kelly Rowland as a headliner for the new dates but she didn’t appear.
Sawyer also ran afoul of elected officials when she signed an application to trademark the name ‘Artscape’ without the city’s approval. She had to cancel a ceremony to mark the restoration of artist Linda DePalma’s Redwood Arch public sculpture because her agency failed to obtain permits to temporarily close Redwood Street for the gathering. Her last straw was announcing that she didn’t plan to put on the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade in 2023 – another decision that drew widespread objections and forced the Mayor’s Office to hold the parade without BOPA.
Layoffs and lack of follow-through
In terms of governance and management of the organization, Sawyer frequently came to board meetings unprepared, apologizing that she had been “under the weather” and didn’t have time to prepare the reports she was expected to give and promising to send an email message after the meeting. She laid off much of the staff during the COVID pandemic, but moved the agency into newly-refurbished offices at 7 St. Paul St.
Sawyer commissioned a strategic plan to guide BOPA’s operations, boasting that she was the first BOPA CEO to do so, but then never released the plan. She proposed to rename the organization Create Baltimore and commissioned a mural for her new office with that as the theme but never moved ahead with the idea. During a 2022 press conference at the Parkway Theatre about the return of Artscape, she posed for photos with the mayor but then vanished from the building before the event was over.
BOPA’s board came in for criticism as well, largely for going along with Sawyer’s actions. In a budget hearing, City Council members noted that BOPA’s board hadn’t posted the minutes of its meetings online in a timely fashion, as non-profit organizations are required by law to do. For some committee meetings, the board was unable to produce any minutes at all. Council member Dorsey said for more than a year that he’d like to see more artists on BOPA’s board and Sawyer promised to add them but never did.
After Sawyer resigned, three members of BOPA’s executive committee approved a severance package equal to half her annual pay — $83,232. They later told council members that they did so during a phone call and without bringing the matter to a public meeting of the full board, which could have addressed the subject in a closed session because it involved a personnel issue.
After a tense budget hearing in June of 2023 – more than five months after Sawyer’s departure and roughly one year before its contract with the city was due to expire — Scott and two council members threatened to cut ties with the independent agency unless its relationship with city leaders improved.
“While we have remained hopeful and given BOPA’s Board of Directors an opportunity to improve its operations and gain the trust of City leadership and residents,” they said in a joint statement, “it became clear we should assess alternative options.”
Last puzzle piece
In a public hearing with the council’s Ways and Means Committee on March 12, acting chair Chaveas listed some of the ways that BOPA has worked over the past year to gain trust with the Mayor’s Office and City Council members.
He noted that Artscape returned last September and the agency announced plans for the Baltimore Book Festival to resume after a four-year hiatus on Sept. 27 to 29 of 2024. He said BOPA has distributed more than $500,000 in grants to local artists and has had dozens of art exhibitions around the city, at locations such as the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower; the Top of the World gallery and School 33 Art Center. He thanked interim CEO Todd Yuhanick, whose final day was March 15, for his efforts to bring back events and otherwise improve relationships with city leaders during “a rather trying time for the organization,” and said the board is excited about working with Graham.
Chaveas said the “last piece of BOPA’s puzzle” for regaining trust with city leaders is addressing concerns about the board’s governance, and that’s where the interim members will play an important role. He said BOPA’s governance task force worked with an outside consultant to identity the interim members and the draft list includes the names of individuals who have been identified to serve so far.
Chaveas said prospective candidates weren’t required to be artists to serve on the board. He said they were chosen in part for their ability to bring expertise in fields where their expertise will be needed, including the law and finance. He said the interim board will be asked after it begins meeting to decide whether future board members must be city residents.
“For the next year, we are putting together an interim board of approximately 11 to 13 members,” he said. “We have reached out to the arts council from the mayor’s office and City Council for recommendations for people to include. Really we are saying: we have one year. We have one year to kind of look at everything and kind of reconstruct the governance, to get it right.” After that, “these board members would be welcome to continue on…once that year is up,” or they could step down if they only had one year to devote to the board, he said.
Chaveas told the Ways and Means committee that board members will be asked to look at the board’s bylaws and governance structure and think about “lessons learned and what hasn’t worked in the past and, frankly, what’s led to some of the conflict and friction that we’ve had” in the past.
He said after the meeting that the board will have a chance to modify its existing bylaws if necessary. “What we need to do, and what the recommendation of the governance committee is,” he said, is “to review them and then modify them, really to understand, if we are receiving money from the city as a quasi-governmental agency, how should our bylaws better reflect that agreement?”
Other tasks for the board, Chaveas told the Ways and Means committee, will be to understand its relationship with city officials – “having conversations about how we can work together to support the desires of the city” – and to develop “strategic relationships” with residents of Baltimore’s different communities. He said the expanded BOPA board will supplement its quarterly board meetings with “frequent committee meetings” that will focus on specific issues and objectives, and a board retreat is planned for April.
BOPA’s public relations consultant, Amy Burke Friedman, owner and CEO of Profiles, said in an email message that the new members will be introduced and officially join the board at its quarterly meeting on March 27.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article reported that 10 new members were being added to BOPA’s board. The actual number is 11 new members.
