The Baltimore Museum of Art - photo: GV
To support the arts in Baltimore City. High unemployment coupled with a dead real estate market and pension obligations skyrocketing out of control have left our new mayor with unprecedented financial challenges.
The BSO’s musicians have just agreed to a painful reduction in pay, and all cultural institutions in the City are facing cuts in public funding that will be very, very hard to absorb.
The Baltimore Opera is gone.
How will we ever come out of it, if we don’t find some way to fund the arts regionally, with a dedicated revenue stream? As St. Louis – another city without a county – figured out more than a century ago.
The Walters - photo: GV
Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum since 1994, has been with the Baltimore institution for more than 20 years. A native of Minnesota, Gary received his B.A. from Carleton College in 1967 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1976 before working as Senior Associate for Byzantine Art Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.