ARTSCAPE BALTIMORE ART FESTIVAL
7-18-09 POST KEYWORDS: artscape, baltimore, free arts festival, the metro gallery, robert matteson, robert mcclintock, phil kutno, cake, cojo art juggernaut, artsucks.com, cojo
It's touted as "America's Largest Free Arts Festival" with a projected attendance of 350 thousand over three days. Considering I've got a brother already living in Baltimore, a full tank of gas, and my girlfriend Molly along for the ride with an ipod full of a week's worth of Ron & Fez Audible Podcasts to get caught up on I decided it would be worth the drive down to check out ArtScape Baltimore.
We hit the road around the time I normally hit the sheets just before nine in the morning. We made good time and pulled up to my brother's apartment about half past noon. He lives just a few blocks from Camden Yards so we hoofed it to the light rail. As we were buying our train tickets we noticed a person walking by in a giant inflatable anime panda costume. WTF?!
Molly reminded me that she had read online that on the other side of town but running concurrent to Artscape was the OTAKON 2009 convention. Their website says they meet "to celebrate all anime, manga, and all facets of Asian pop culture! " Passing the stop for the convention center we saw hundreds of teens and adults in full cosplay manga / anime costumes, furry outfits, and jedi gear all sweating it out in a blazingly bright July sun.
If you have ever been to a comic book convention then you've seen the kids that come in costume. This event is special because it's where they meet and act out their characters without any of that pesky illustrated literature laying around. I didn't get any shots of the weirdness and geekery but I did take a look at some of the best of it on FLICKR OTAKON 2009
The train dumped us off at the Target ® Family Art Park which was just a bunch of red and white information tents and some kiddy art activities. Target® loves sponsoring art events.
I noticed we were right across the street from the Meyerhoff Theatre where my brother and I saw Joel McHale's stand-up back in May. Now at least I had an idea where we were. Across the train tracks was a parking lot chock full of funnel cakes, booze, and cheese fries. 
In search of art Molly and I went downhill instead. We picked up a map from a booth for a buck and entered the first main thoroughfare.
We walked for a hundred or so feet finding only more booze, twisted pretzel tents, and promotional set-ups for Geico, Honey Bunches of Oats, and Zone power bars. "Oh look, you can get a photo with the Geico Lizard. I want to get a photo with the Lizard!" I heard one woman walking by say to her husband while pushing a stroller. 
We started to wonder where fuck was the art in this art fest?
The blue glass angled design school is pretty kickass. I don't remember seeing that before. Also you will note in this photo the streetlights were still on and changing on closed off streets. Just diagonal from this building but still on the main fair route was an art store, which was . . . closed?
Across the street from the design school is MICA where I initially went to a portfolio day when I was college hunting way back in 1994, only to learn that I unequivocally didn't want to go to there. At the time I felt their computerless art program was antiquated and that SVA would be more of a fit and had a harder screening process. The photo above was taken early in the day while the crowds were still lean. 
This is how MICA looked around 5:00 PM.
We finally stumbled on some artist tents. I was pleased to see a lot of line art in the first few tents. As I love the art of the line, I always like to see when it's done well and accepted in the fine art world. The dog didn't seem to give a shit.
There were some clowns on stilts with parasols, and some normal looking people with stilt legs, without clown costumes. They made less sense.
By the middle of the day the crowds were getting thicker. We decided it was time to meet and talk to some of the more reputable artists in the show. Primarily artists who's work I recognized or names I already knew. The most famous of them being Robert McClintock (see below)
As far as hometown Baltimore fine artists go, there is nobody bigger than this man, Robert McClintock. He is a digital photographer / painter who works directly over his photographs using a handheld digital paintbrush. His animals and city scenes mainly of landmarks and places in Baltimore are bright, vibrant, and painterly (even thought they were rendered in photoshop). When we ran into him he was standing on a corner autographing handheld fans with his artwork printed on it as his street team handed them out and directed the line of loyal admirers.
Near Penn Station there were the remnants of what had been the art car parade, which happened at 11AM and we had unfortunately missed. CLICK HERE to see a few photos I took of some of the art cars from Artscape . In the top photo you can see a van covered with old cameras. In the bottom photo a van with a red crustacean on the roof. 
After passing the lobster van I looked back and took a shot. That is one dense crowd. Looking left past the art cars you see Penn Station Baltimore, which has a massive metal statue of a man in front of it.
After Penn Station the festival goes over the Charles Street Bridge. The bridge was set up as an artsy carnival midway with artistic instillations by students of the School of Architecture + Planning, Morgan State University. Nearly all of them sucked.
There was a kid babysitter, a fortune teller, a few variations on karaoke, a fake dunk tank, some weird bullseye gong heart thing, some shitty Warhol Monroe distortion, cheap decorative things in plastic bags, a camera obscura, a woman in a crappy turtle costume, a punching bag that activated lights, a giant human foosball table. The foosball table looked like it would have been neat to see people strapped in and hitting balls, but I passed by it about six times and it never had anyone in the damn thing.
We enjoyed two of them. The first instillation was titled "Things to Put On Your Face" by Stefani Levin, which was pretty self explanatory. Molly had some fun playing dress-up (see below).
Here the artist, Stefani Levin, poses half stunned in front of her masks after having just been told that the photo is for a website called Art Sucks.
The other midway instillation we enjoyed was the Tiny Rave, I'll get back to that in a minute.
Just after the bridge was the first and only gallery we found open in the fair, The Metro Gallery. The guy at the door was nice, it was dark inside, with the promise of A.C. and cheap drinks. After showing our ID's I bee-lined it to the bar.
The show they had on was pretty interesting. Martin Atkins post punk drummer for Killing Joke was the artist featured in the exhibit. The pieces in the show were silkscreens Martin made for backdrops the band used when they performed on stage.
I had a drink, a very strong Sailor Jerry's Rum and Diet Coke, and we hung out there until the 3PM screening at the short film festival across the street.
Before we left I made a small rectangular pile of Cadillac baby blue Art Sucks buttons on the flyer table by the door (see above).
We walked over to the theatre and watched a half hour of entertaining documentaries. The presentation was followed by a short Q & A with one of the film makers. When we got back to The Metro Gallery the button pile was completely gone. I put out a stack of business cards and spread a bunch of colored buttons out around it.
Within a few minutes almost all the colors were gone. After that I went back a third time (as seen above) and dumped another big bag of the baby blue buttons around the cards. People were really digging the buttons at The Metro Gallery. A lot of people were picking them off the table and putting them right on their shirt.
Molly always gets amused when people get excited about the buttons, because she won't wear them unless I physically put one on her. I gave one to my friend and fellow artist Ran-D a few weeks ago and every time I've run into him since he is wearing it. He says it's a great conversation starter. I'm gonna have to figure out a way to make the buttons available to people online. I'll work on that.
The really cool looking Crocs (which don't look like Crocs) that Molly bought on our trip to Panama City last month ended up digging into the sides of her feet and after having relaxed at both the gallery and at the short film festival her feet were now starting to really kill her. Even after a few drinks she still was wary about walking.
My brother Brett and his girlfriend Karol met up with us at the gallery after we'd been there for about an hour. We walked for a bit in the direction of the bridge.
Back in the carnival midway we ducked into the second cool instillation "Abiku's Tiny Rave." It was wild.
It was a really bizarre environmental mindfuck going from summer to nighttime ecstasy induced late 90s rave scene by just passing through a curtain in a tiny door. Both Brett and Karol couldn't help attempting to hula hoop, it was just sitting there in the middle of the floor.
Here is some video I found on youtube of the tiny rave tent in action.
YouTube Film Credit: Bonediggy410 .
Brett and Karol broke off to check out all the stuff we had already seen so we went the other direction.
Jim Pollock's Recycled Metalworks was an interesting booth and unlike any other at this fair. Sculpture was almost a non-entity at ArtScape.
The next big artist we stumbled upon was pencil wizard Phil Kutno. His psychedelic pencil drawings are fucking phenomenal. Creatively intertwined, hidden imagery, all sorts of shit crawls out of this dude's brain into the large form pencil drawings he's been making for the last 20 years and selling prints of in galleries, art fairs and on his website.
"Art Sucks? I should pose like . . . "
"fuck you then."
The next booth we enjoyed, probably because we are big Obama fans was that of Pellinore Press. They had a neat display of simple singular woodcut masks. A strange throwback and I don't know what event you would wear them to or how you would display them but they are unique and neat none the less.
This girl is confused. There is no power button kid, it's art.
Above Owners Jonathon Poliszuk and Ursula Minervini pose with their singular woodcut Poe and Obama paper masks.
The last artist I wanted to meet was the pen and ink dragon master himself Robert Matteson. If you've ever been in a doctor's office or some random place and seen an intricately crosshatched humorous black and white dragon cartoon, then you've seen Matteson's work. When I was in Jr. High my friend Dan had a print. I believe it was two karate dragons fighting. It hung above his TV where we played way too many hours of Street Figher 2.
By this point it was Late afternoon and Molly's feet were killing her. We were waiting to see the band CAKE perform on the main stage CLICK HERE to see photos I took of the band CAKE performing at ArtScape. There were three music stages around the fair, as well as continual bands in Metro Gallery. Why didn't they call this MusicScape " With a few art tents thrown in!" the part about art tents being in small print.
Of the art that there was, I noticed a lot of California "style" street art (see above), most of the Baltimore artists working in this style seem to be ripping off either Mark Ryden, Ron English, Jeff Soto, or Camille Rose Garcia.
Of the few actual painters there were, many of them had signs prohibiting photography. One female line art painter who Molly actually enjoyed passed on having her work photographed for the site. We told her it would be good publicity and the snobby no-name bitch actually said "I don't need publicity.". Just a word of advice to all you young artists at MICA and elsewhere trying to make a name for yourself, YOU need publicity.
"Zatarain's Art" (see above) had a huge presence at this fair (CLICK HERE to read this month's related article about "Zatarain's Art") It's one of the most annoying and suckiest trends I've seen in my adventures in the fine art world and it was everywhere. It seems to slip it's way into a lot of bad fine art venues these days, Thumbs Up!
Molly cringed as I made her pose with the mongoloid looking bespectacled four-fingered corporate mascot for British Petroleum.
Strangely enough the felt BP douche was very similar to this woman's "artwork." The sort of craft fair, hand sewn, hand stuffed cabbage patch-esque turd faced suck-ass dolls you find for a nickel at the Salvation Army have no place in a legit art fair. Or do they?
I guess they have just as much place here as costumed corporate gas shills and car insurance Lizards. The guys on bikes handing out mini cereal boxes, or the tables of free smoothy shots, rice samples or mini toothpaste tubes for sensitive teeth. There was even a lunchable booth with craigslist hired rubber-gloved lunchable makers.
The final verdict on ArtScape Baltimore is that the majority of the show is music and craft over fine art. Jewelry makers, t-shirts, artsy toys, trinkets and street fair circus food. Most of what is presented as "fine art" looks like Zatarain's latest ad campaign or a Juxtapoz magazine knock-off. There are a few really great artists in the heap, if you know what and who you are looking for.
Most of the talent involved in ArtScape we found in the Short Film Festival, the live acts, the art car parade, the Musical Performance of CAKE- who knocked it out of the park. Everything alive, performing, and or moving were fun. It was a fun event. It was just that most of what little visual art / work on canvas / work on paper that was there just flat out sucked and was a piss-poor representation of the artistic caliber of a major city such as Baltimore.
Make the trip down next year if you want a massive street fair and some music from the 90s, it's fun and totally worth it if that's what you are looking for. Molly put it best the next morning over breakfast:
"ArtScape is a great art fair for the mom who loves flea markets." If you want to see a lot of great art and support the arts, take a trip to your local galleries and buy some paintings! . . .Preferably line art.
After breakfast, Brett and Karol took us over to Robert McClintock's Gallery in Fell's Point. Lots of bright images of dogs, Baltimore buildings, and streets. The subject matter is local but the color and rendering were unreal and more than made up for it.
We gathered our shit for NY, clicked our heels, said some magic words and instantly ArtScape Baltimore became just a distant memory somewhere over a mediocre, uninspired rainbow.
