The story
20th century
In February 1904, the Great Baltimore Fire destroyed much of the central part of the Baltimore's downtown business district. In response, the municipal government established a city-wide congress to develop a master plan for the city's recovery and future growth and development. The congress, headed by Dr. A. R. L. Dohme, decided that a major deficiency of the city was the lack of an art museum. This decision led to the formation of an 18-person Committee on the Art Museum, with art dealer and industrialist Henry H. Wiegand as chairman. Ten years later, on November 16, 1914, the museum was officially incorporated. Along with Minneapolis and Cleveland, Baltimore's museum was "modeled after two prominent 1870s predecessors, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston". According to a booklet published at the time of incorporation, it was stated that Baltimore lagged behind other cities "in regard to matters of aesthetic interest."
Still without a permanent site, the fledgling museum was founded with but a single painting, William Sergeant Kendall's Mischief, which was donated by Dr. Dohme himself. As the museum's founders were confident that more art would eventually be acquired, the nearby Peabody Institute agreed to hold the collection for a time until a permanent home was established. The committee began planning a permanent home for the museum's holdings.
By 1915, the group had decided to permanently house the museum in the Wyman Park area, west of the Peabody Heights neighborhood, later renamed Charles Village. In 1916, a building was purchased on the southwest corner of North Charles and West Biddle Streets as a possible location for the museum. Although an architect was employed to remodel it, it was never occupied. By 1917, the group had received a promise from Johns Hopkins University for the land further south of the new Georgian Revival architecture-Federal styled campus they were in the process of moving to. This prospective plot was near the old Homewood Mansion of 1800 and the later Italianate style Wyman Villa mansion of William Wyman, a Johns Hopkins University donor and trustee. The group subsequently left the downtown site at North Howard Street and West Centre, which they had occupied since 1876.
Prior to moving to its permanent home in 1929, however, the museum was temporarily moved in July 1922 to the former home of their prime benefactor and foundress, Mary Elizabeth Garrett, at 101 West Monument Street, on the southwest corner with Cathedral Street facing West Mount Vernon Place and the Washington Monument. Garrett, a philanthropist who also further endowed the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, was the only daughter of John Work Garrett, the Civil War-era President of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad who supported then President Abraham Lincoln, and was a scion of the Robert Garrett banking firm in the city.
In 1923, the museum's inaugural exhibition opened there with attendance topping 6,775 during its first
week. The house was offered by Miss M. Cary as a home for the "collections" and a meeting place for the board of trustees. The old Garrett mansion was acquired in 1925 by the group of art enthusiasts who bought the property for the purpose of keeping the museum intact. Despite having limited space, the museum offered accommodations to art associations and a hall for meetings.
At Wyman Park, architect John Russell Pope was engaged to design the museum's permanent home. With his years of study in Europe, Pope is considered to be the main examplar of the classical revival style that proved so popular with traditional American architects. He is credited with a number of major buildings along the American east coast and abroad, including the National Archives Building in Washington, New York's American Museum of Natural History, and the Tate Gallery Sculpture Hall in London. His distinct brand of classicism, both serene and monolithic, was perhaps the perfect choice for such an ambitious project.
The cornerstone was laid on October 20, 1927, facing the future Art Museum Drive running diagonally from North Charles Street. The systems engineering for the building's original design was completed by Henry Adams, noted local mechanical engineer. The building consists of three floors and includes several rooms that were reconstructed and/or replicated from six local Maryland historic houses before their loss or razing.
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The building phase was marked by controversy over its location, cost, and the quality of workmanship, but on April 19, 1929, it opened on schedule without much fanfare. The first visitors were greeted by Rodin's The Thinker in the Sculpture Court, and most of the objects on display were lent by Baltimore and Maryland collectors. An average of 584 visitors attended the museum each day during its first two months.
By the 1930s, the public reception was such that director Roland McKinney, in a letter to board chairman Henry Treide, noted, "People seem to feel that the Museum belongs to them and show that they are sincerely proud of it and its activities." However, these people were mostly upper-crust, privileged, and white, a fact noted in a 1937 Carnegie Corporation report. "[Baltimore] cultural institutions (outside of the library and the schools) have appealed to, been intended for, and been supported by a pretty small minority... they need to be opened up, for the viewpoint of the entire community and its needs", it concluded. Local artists were feeling slighted, as well. "We, the living, resent being left to work in a vacuum of indifference and neglect while so much of the dead past is exhausted [by the BMA]," the president of the Artists' Union of Baltimore complained to The Evening Sun in 1937. The writer of the letter was Morris Louis, whose work, decades later, would be in the BMA's contemporary collection. Treide responded with an extensive community outreach survey and, in 1939, presented the city's first exhibition of African-American art. The show drew over 12,000 visitors in two weeks.
Many of the objects lent to the museum when it opened were eventually donated to it. Among the donors who have shaped the museum's collection are Blanche Adler, Dr. Claribel Cone and Etta Cone, Jacob Epstein, Edward J. Gallagher, Jr., John W. and Robert Garrett, Mary Frick Jacobs, Ryda H. and Robert H. Levi, Saidie Adler May, Dorothy McIlvain Scott, Elsie C. Woodward, and Alan and Janet Wurtzburger. The growing collection is reflected in the three major expansions: the Saidie A. May Wing in 1950, the Woodward Wing in 1956, and the Cone Wing in 1957. These additions were all designed by local architects Wrenn, Lewis and Jencks to harmonize with the original Pope Building.
The museum's collection includes more than 95,000 objects, making it the largest art museum in Maryland. It is governed by a private board of trustees and receives funding from the City of Baltimore, Baltimore, Carroll, and Howard counties; the state of Maryland, various corporations and foundations, federal agencies; individual trustees, and private citizens.
21st century
The BMA welcomes more than 200,000 visitors annually. In addition to its art collection, it organizes and hosts traveling exhibitions and serves as a major arts center for the region through its programs.
Between 2012 and 2015, the BMA completed a $28 million renovation that improved galleries for contemporary, American, African, and Asian art collections; improved essential infrastructure, and created more visitor amenities.
The first phase of the BMA's renovation was completed in November 2012 with the reopening of the Contemporary Wing. In November 2014, after being closed for almost 30 years, the neoclassical Merrick Historic Entrance was reopened to the public to coincide with the museum's 100-year anniversary. The next phase encompassed the Dorothy McIlvain Scott American Wing, comprising the first and second floors of the BMA's original 1929 building designed by the acclaimed American architect John Russell Pope; the 1982 East Wing Lobby and Zamoiski East Entrance designed by Bower, Lewis & Thrower; and critically important upgrades to the museum's infrastructure. The architect for this phase of the renovation was the Baltimore-based architecture firm Ziger/Snead, with construction completed by The Whiting-Turner Contracting Company of Towson, Maryland. The project manager was Synthesis, Inc., of Columbia, Maryland. The BMA also greatly expanded galleries for its African and Asian art collections, which opened in April 2015. The culmination of the renovation was the opening of the new $4.5 million, 5,000 sq ft (460 m2) Patricia and Mark Joseph Education Center in October 2015.
The renovation was funded by the museum's philanthropic campaign, In a New Light: The Campaign for The Baltimore Museum of Art, which raised $80.7 million and added more than 4,000 artworks to the collection during the decade leading up to the BMA's 100th anniversary.
In 2018, the BMA announced its intention to sell seven works by artists already well-represented in the collection in order to acquire more contemporary works by women and artists of color. This initiative led to the addition of works by Mark Bradford, Isaac Julian, Wangechi Mutu, Amy Sherald, Carrie Mae Weems, Jack Whitten, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and other notable contemporary artists. In fall 2019, the museum transformed the East Lobby with a major new work by artist Mickalene Thomas as part of the Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker Biennial Commission. This endowment gift is the first named public art commission in the U.S. and includes a curatorial fellowship to help strengthen the diversity of the museum. The current Meyerhoff-Becker lobby commission by Mexican-American artist Raúl de Nieves debuted in November 2023.
In November 2019, it was announced that the Baltimore Museum of Art would only purchase works made by female artists in 2020. The decision was made in efforts to work towards "re-correcting the canon." Marking the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote, all twenty-two exhibitions in 2020 focused on women artists. A controversy arose in October, 2020, over the proposed sale of museum holdings to increase its endowment. Among the artworks slated for auction to raise an estimated $65 million was The Last Supper by Andy Warhol. The ensuing outcry resulted in cancellation of the sale. The Baltimore Sun said the museum was "... battered by more negative publicity than it has endured in recent memory", which led to criticism of the museum's leadership.
In 2020, John Waters promised to donate 372 pieces from his personal collection, on condition that the museum name an all-gender bathroom after him. The museum also named its rotunda for Waters. The first exhibition of pieces from the donation took place in 2022.
In June 2022, it was reported that AFSCME Council 67 would represent BMA workers, along with those at Walters Art Museum and Enoch Pratt Free Library if unionization efforts were successful at those institutions.
From Wikipedia’s article on Baltimore Museum of Art, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5