Walters Art Museum

Baltimore / United States

The Walters Art Museum, located in Mount Vernon-Belvedere, Baltimore, Maryland, United States, is a public art museum founded and opened in 1934. It holds collections established during the mid-19th century. The Museum's collection was amassed substantially by major American art and sculpture collectors, a father and son: William Thompson Walters, , who began serious collecting when he moved to Paris as a nominal Southern/Confederate sympathizer at the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861; and Henry Walters , who refined the collection and made arrangements for the construction of a later landmark building to rehouse it. After allowing the Baltimore public to occasionally view his father's and his growing added collections at his West Mount Vernon Place townhouse/mansion during the late 1800s, he arranged for an elaborate stone palazzo-styled structure built for that purpose in 1905–1909. Located across the back alley, a block south of the Walters mansion on West Monument Street/Mount Vernon Place, on the northwest corner of North Charles Street at West Centre Street. The mansion and gallery were also just south and west of the landmark Washington Monument in the Mount Vernon-Belvedere neighborhood, just north of the downtown business district and northeast of Cathedral Hill. Upon his 1931 death, Henry Walters bequeathed the entire collection of then more than 22,000 works, the original Charles Street Gallery building, and his adjacent townhouse/mansion just across the alley to the north on West Mount Vernon Place to the City of Baltimore, "for the benefit of the public." The collection includes masterworks of ancient Egypt, Greek sculpture and Roman sarcophagi, medieval ivories, illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance bronzes, Old Master European and 19th-century paintings, Chinese ceramics and bronzes, Art Deco jewelry, and ancient Near East, Mesopotamian, or ancient Middle East items. In 2000, "The Walters Art Gallery" changed its long-time name to "The Walters Art Museum" to reflect its image as a large public institution and eliminate confusion among some of the increasing out-of-state visitors. The following year, "The Walters" reopened its original main building after a dramatic three-year physical renovation and replacement of internal utilities and infrastructure. The Archimedes Palimpsest was on loan to the Walters Art Museum from a private collector for conservation and spectral imaging studies. Starting on October 1, 2006, the museum was enabled to make admission free to all, year-round, as a result of substantial grants given by Baltimore City and the surrounding suburban Baltimore County arts agencies and authorities. In 2012, "The Walters" released nearly 20,000 of its own images of its collections on a Creative Commons license, and collaborated in their upload to the world-wide web and the internet on Wikimedia Commons. This was one of the largest and most comprehensive such releases made by any museum.

Baltimore Museum of Art

Baltimore / United States

The Baltimore Museum of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, is an art museum that was founded in 1914. The BMA's internationally renowned collection of 95,000 objects encompasses more than 1,000 works by Henri Matisse anchored by the Cone Collection of modern art, as well as one of the nation's finest holdings of prints, drawings, and photographs. The galleries currently showcase collections of art from Africa; works by established and emerging contemporary artists; European and American paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts; ancient Antioch mosaics; art from Asia, and textiles from around the world. The 210,000-square-foot museum is distinguished by a neoclassical building designed in the 1920s by renowned American architect John Russell Pope and two landscaped gardens with 20th-century sculpture. The museum is located between Charles Village, to the east, Remington, to the south, Hampden, to the west; and south of the Roland Park neighborhoods, immediately adjacent to the Homewood campus of Johns Hopkins University, though the museum is an independent institution and not affiliated with the university. The highlight of the museum is the Cone Collection, brought together by Baltimore sisters Claribel and Etta Cone . Accomplished collectors, the sisters amassed a wealth of works by artists including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Pierre-August Renoir, nearly all of which were donated to the museum. The museum is also home to 18,000 works of French mid-19th-century art from the George A. Lucas collection, which has been acclaimed by the museum as a cultural "treasure" and "among the greatest single holdings of French art in the country."The BMA is currently led by Director Christopher Bedford, who was appointed in May 2016, after a year-long search. Prior to joining the BMA, Bedford led the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Massachusetts for four years. He helped the Rose Art Museum out of the international controversy from 2009, when the university proposed selling off the museum's top-notch art collection to help with its struggling finances.In November 2019, it was announced that the Baltimore Museum of Art will only purchase works made by female-identifying artists in 2020. The decision was made in efforts to work towards “re-correcting the canon.” To also mark the 100th anniversary of 19th amendment in 2020, all 22 exhibitions planned for the museum that year will be focused on women artists.Since October 2006, The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum , have offered free general admission year-round as a result of grants given by Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and several foundations.The Baltimore Museum of Art is the site of Gertrude's Chesapeake Kitchen, owned and operated by chef John Shields.

Peale Museum

Baltimore / United States

The Peale Museum, officially the Municipal Museum of the City of Baltimore, was a museum of paintings and natural history, located in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. It occupied the first building in the Western Hemisphere to be designed and built specifically as a museum. The museum was created by Charles Willson Peale and his son Rembrandt Peale . It functioned separately as Baltimore City's historical museum while the original structure was being rebuilt, restored, and renovated in 1930–1931, and then merged with other historic sites, houses and museums in the early 1980s under the expansive efforts of a new executive director, with the name of the Baltimore City Life Museums and a broader mission in conjunction with the other historical locations/sites/structures in Baltimore. After opening a new three-story exhibition gallery, uniquely using the old cast-iron façade of the razed Fava Fruit Company and being re-assembled on the new structure facing North Front Street and the parallel new President Street boulevard , the new gallery and the B.C.L.M. ran into financial difficulties in the first year after the grand opening, coincidentally during the bicentennial celebration of Baltimore's establishment as a city. The Peale branch of the City Life Museums closed with the other branches, historic houses and sites later in 1997, after being refused a one-year extension of its five-year subsidy of about $300,000 annually by then Mayor Kurt Schmoke. Its large collections from over 66 years of original existence were disassembled, transferred and handed over to the Maryland Historical Society, founded 1844, now located on the city block on the southwest corner of West Monument Street and Park Avenue, centered in the old Enoch Pratt Mansion and adjacent research library and museum exhibition areas building. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965.Today, the museum is being renovated and relaunched as the Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture through a partnership between Baltimore's Department of General Services, which owns the building, and the Board of the Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture, a 501 tax-exempt, non-profit corporation. It is closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but anticipates re-opening soon.

Maryland Center for History and Culture

Baltimore / United States

The Maryland Center for History and Culture ), founded on March 1, 1844, is the oldest cultural institution in the U.S. state of Maryland. The organization "collects, preserves, and interprets objects and materials reflecting Maryland's diverse heritage". The MCHC has a museum, library, holds educational programs, and publishes scholarly works on Maryland.

Johns Hopkins University

Baltimore / United States

The Johns Hopkins University is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, the university was named for its first benefactor, the American entrepreneur, abolitionist, and philanthropist Johns Hopkins. His $7 million bequest —of which half financed the establishment of the Johns Hopkins Hospital—was the largest philanthropic gift in the history of the United States up to that time. Daniel Coit Gilman, who was inaugurated as the institution's first president on February 22, 1876, led the university to revolutionize higher education in the U.S. by integrating teaching and research. Adopting the concept of a graduate school from Germany's historic Heidelberg University, Johns Hopkins University is considered the first research university in the United States. Over the course of several decades, the university has led all U.S. universities in annual research and development expenditures. In fiscal year 2016, Johns Hopkins spent nearly $2.5 billion on research. The university has additional graduate campuses in Italy, China, and Washington, D.C., in addition to its main campus in Baltimore, Maryland.Johns Hopkins is organized into 10 divisions on campuses in Maryland and Washington, D.C., with international centers in Italy and China. The two undergraduate divisions, the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Whiting School of Engineering, are located on the Homewood campus in Baltimore's Charles Village neighborhood. The medical school, nursing school, and Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Johns Hopkins Children’s Center are located on the Medical Institutions campus in East Baltimore. The university also consists of the Peabody Institute, Applied Physics Laboratory, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, School of Education, Carey Business School, and various other facilities.Johns Hopkins was a founding member of the American Association of Universities. As of October 2019, 39 Nobel laureates and 1 Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Johns Hopkins. Founded in 1883, the Blue Jays men's lacrosse team has captured 44 national titles and plays in the Big Ten Conference as an affiliate member as of 2014.

Amalie Rothschild

Baltimore / United States

Amalie Rothschild was an American artist who lived and worked within the art community of Baltimore, Maryland. An accomplished painter and sculptor, she was also an art teacher, philanthropist, patron, and cultural advocate. Over the course of a long career, she made oil and acrylic paintings as well as drawings, watercolors, and other paper works. She also sculpted using found objects, Plexiglas, metals, and particleboard. Originally working in a realist style, she became well known for geometric abstractions based on figurative subjects. In 1993 a critic described this approach as "[walking] a tightrope between the abstract and the representational with a suggestion of three-dimensional depth." Rothschild was by choice a regional artist. Although she occasionally exhibited elsewhere, she did not actively promote her career outside a mid-Atlantic region centered on Baltimore. Thus, in 1997 a critic wrote, "Amalie Rothschild is a fixture and ornament of the Baltimore art world." At the time of her death a critic gave this career summary: "She was one of the leading artists of her time in this area. Her work is thoroughly modern and related to geometric abstraction, but without losing the figure. It has emotional reserve, often contains a hint of humor and at times recalls the childlike sagacity of the great Paul Klee."