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.
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.
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.
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."
