The Baltimore Festival of Maps is a citywide celebration organized by the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance to encourage Baltimore residents and visitors to explore museums, theaters, galleries and educational institutions from March 16 through June 30, 2008, using the Walters Art Museum's exhibition Maps: Finding Our Place in the World as the impetus for their exploration.
Activities in the Baltimore Festival of Maps will range from one-day interactive workshops and demonstrations to performances and rare views of historic documents. The participating organizations focus on a variety of studies and disciplines including art, history, science, music and conservation.
Click here for a complete program schedule.
Participating institutions will offer the following:
EVENTS
Baltimore Jazz Alliance
The Baltimore Jazz Alliance will expand its "Where IS Baltimore's Jazz? Where WAS Baltimore's Jazz?" map to include an historical perspective on where jazz could be heard in Baltimore and the locations from which many of Baltimore's historic jazz greats emerged. A launch event will include a free concert combining "old" and "new" jazz talent.
Flag House and Star-Spangled Banner Museum
For Mapping Mary Pickersgill's Baltimore, visitors will walk in the footsteps of Mary Pickersgill, maker of the Star-Spangled Banner, along the streets of Jonestown, one of Baltimore's oldest neighborhoods. Examining early 19th-century maps and recent research on Mary's 1813 neighborhood, participants on special guided tours will encounter the landmarks and residents of her historic world when Baltimore was a bustling boom town of maritime trade.
Jewish Museum of Maryland
In connection with the museum's exhibition Voices of Lombard Street: A Century of Change in East Baltimore, the museum will hold a Family History and Archival Exploration Day. Participants will use color-coded maps and primary sources to find out about families that lived in the historic neighborhood over the past 100 years.
EXHIBITIONS
Art On Purpose
Art on Purpose will engage at-risk Baltimore City neighborhoods in creating community-made Maps on Purpose, detailing neighborhood hidden treasures, perception of safety, gang territories and other site-specific topics. The maps will be used as the basis for neighborhood celebrations, networking events and advocacy.
Center for Cultural Education
Putting Black History on the Map will collaborate with the Enoch Pratt Library to highlight over 75 cultural and historical African American landmarks throughout Baltimore.
Contemporary Museum
RE-MAPPING introduces the work of Kianga Ford and Arnold Schalks, who will reinterpret the concept of a map to create a new map of Baltimore, inviting visitors to rethink the details of their city, including the neighbors they pass on the street, the rote paths they take on the way to work or school, or the buildings they walk by each day.
Creative Alliance
Artist Laura Burns returns from a yearlong residency in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico with a four-channel video installation promoting public dialog about the effects of globalization in Baltimore, particularly the burgeoning Latino population in the neighborhoods of Southeast Baltimore.
Historical Electronics Museum
The Historical Electronic Museum will present Mapping with Radar, a series of maps derived from radar, some over 50 years old, showing details of topography, vegetation and land use. Included in the exhibit is a long-forgotten nine-foot map of the West Coast produced from a single piece of film.
Homewood Museum and the Sheridan Libraries of the Johns Hopkins University
Harmony to the Eyes: Charting Palladio's Architecture from Rome to Baltimore will be an interpretive exhibition of all of the published works of Andrea Palladio in celebration of the 500th anniversary of his birth. Palladio's works will be set in context with displays of the architectural treatises that informed him.
Maryland Historical Society
Borders and Boundaries: The Mason Dixon Line will feature the rare 76-inch long by 27-inch high map of the "...boundary between the provinces of Maryland and Pennsylvania," known today as the Mason-Dixon Line, printed by Robert Kennedy in Philadelphia in 1768 and signed and sealed by members of the Boundary Commission.
Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), George Ciscle Exhibition Development Seminar
Beyond the Compass, Beyond the Square, installed in Mount Vernon Place, will be a site-specific exhibition created and curated by students that raises questions about the nature and history of maps, and reveals the power of the process of mapping to promote new connections to familiar places, as well as a offering fresh perspective on this familiar, historic urban landscape.
Maryland Science Center
Mapping Science will offer visitors the chance to explore the variety of maps at the Maryland Science Center. The perception of maps as only static and two-dimensional will be challenged as the exhibition highlights the various ways maps are used in the fields of astronomy, biology, paleontology and earth science. The Maryland Science Center will also explore maps from a scientific perspective with Body Worlds 2: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies, which displays over 200 organs of the human body and maps the daily processes of living.
Parks & People Foundation
The Parks & People Foundation will present Baltimore's One Park and the History of the Gwynns Falls Stream Valley, an interpretative display of landscape changes over the last 200 years in Baltimore City and the metropolitan region, focusing on green space, open space and parks.
Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University
The Peabody Institute will feature Augenmusik: Mapping Music, an exhibition of music scores from its archive that show preliminary sketches and the final scores. Performances of new works will be held during the course of the exhibition.
The Walters Art Museum
Organized in collaboration with the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Johns Hopkins University's Program in Museums and Society, Mapping the Cosmos will display images from the Hubble Space Telescope that map the universe.
WORKSHOPS AND SEMINARS
Painted Screen Society of Baltimore
Calling All Screen Painters! will be a walking/driving tour map of sites around town focusing on East Baltimore's famed painted screens. This unique tour will acquaint Baltimoreans and visitors with our unique traditions. Activities include film festivals, teach-ins, paint-a-thons, screen census, reunions and workshops.
Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture
Mapping the African Diaspora will include a series of genealogical workshops, cultural performances, children activities, films and panel discussions.
EDUCATION
Cathedral of Mary Our Queen
A special artist-in-residency program for students includes sessions with ceramic artist Amanda Pellerin to create a 25-square-foot mosaic map mural.
Orems Elementary
Fourth grade students will participate in a mosaic map-making project taught by ceramic artist Amanda Pellerin.
Port Discovery
Maps and Me features literacy and arts-based activities introducing children to the wonderful world of maps will be offered to school groups as part of the Wonderful Wednesday programming and on select weekends for family visitors.
Young Audiences/Arts for Learning
Students will work with professional ceramic artist Amanda Pellerin to observe and analyze a variety of maps to define their purpose, interpret and construct their meaning, and identify their elements. Students will also create maps of their own.