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Sunday, November 28, 2004
"O say can you see" - Now the words mean more
Neal Peirce
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BALTIMORE - Emblazoned across the wall of a whiskey warehouse-turned-museum, the great neon letters face toward Fort McHenry, birthplace of our national anthem.
Rebecca Hoffberger, the dynamo of energy and artistry who founded and directs Baltimore's American Visionary Art Museum, tells a visitor to note the spangles fluttering inside each letter.
So what's a spangle? You sing the national anthem a lifetime and don't know? Correct answer: a spangle is a sequin. Think of showgirls. Now you know.
Mixing patriotism and whimsy, civic pride and celebration of human ingenuity, the new museum complex on Baltimore's Inner Harbor has just added a Jim Rouse Visionary Center. Rouse, who passed away in 1996, was the developer-idealist who formed a multibillion-dollar real estate firm, founded the mixed-income new town of Columbia, Md., invented the festival marketplaces in such cities as Boston and Baltimore, and then created the Enterprise Foundation to spread affordable housing across America's less fortunate neighborhoods.
Throughout his career, Rouse insisted that cities are far more than an economic sum of their parts - population totals, roads and ports and rail, offices and business output. Rather, he argued, cities' ultimate mission is to elevate the dignity of the individual human being, to open up frontiers of "the humane and the beautiful.'' "Unless cities 'work for people,''' he said, ''they are not working well at all.''
So a new building celebrating Jim Rouse the visionary, set on the same Baltimore Inner Harbor that he helped rescue from decay, a place to honor diversity and promote originality, could hardly be more appropriate.
The Rouse Center's parent - America's only congressionally recognized Visionary Art Museum - was opened in 1995 to show the work of untrained, untamed, spark-of-genius artists. From religious visionaries to mental patients, they clearly aren't among society's appointed and anointed. But their wondrous paintings and sculptures are so intriguingly displayed that Travel Holiday magazine actually ranked the Baltimore museum No. 4 on a list of the United States' top 25 museums.
And the new Rouse Center, founder Rebecca Hoffberger's latest creation, will only add to the allure (and sheer fun). Kept essentially in its original warehouse shape to get tax credits, the building's entrance area features a 40-foot steel Phoenix and an 11-foot Cosmic Galaxy Egg right below a 38-foot-wide stainless steel Bird's Nest Balcony from which one gets a superb view of the Baltimore skyline that Jim Rouse helped shape.
And of course there's the "O SAY CAN YOU SEE'' sign, pointed physically toward the harbor, but thematically into the new Jim Rouse Visionary Center.
Walk into the new museum and you're in a cavernous exhibit area overhung by a curving wall festooned with hundreds of pieces of cobalt blue glass, a reminder of such historic Baltimore products as Noxema and Bromo Seltzer. Behind the walls are two classrooms - one for hands-on art-making inspired by visionary artists, a second hard-wired for the kind of sessions Rouse would especially have enjoyed - exploring the best global innovations to better community life.
There's an interactive exhibition on Jim Rouse; some of us who knew him have had a chance to record stories there. And the building is topped by an entire third-floor whitewashed barn-styled hall for meetings of up to 500 people. A big dinner in honor of the opening was held there Nov. 13, with top Maryland and Baltimore elected officials, members of the Rouse family and donors to the $9.3 million project on hand.
But this was no normal "museum dinner,'' and not just because mirth and wonder pervade the Visionary Art Museum milieu. Hoffberger noted the shift, the expansion of her institution's visionary activity - "from making things to making a difference'' - not an insignificant need in a city such as Baltimore, which still suffers some of America's most distressing poverty rates.
Social visionaries like Rouse, said Hoffberger, "creatively transmute immeasurable personal loss and outrage at injustice into redemptive strategies for positive change.''
If there's any member of the U.S. Congress who really believes that, it's Maryland's feisty Sen. Barbara Mikulski. At the dinner, she recalled her days as a young activist on the streets of Baltimore, fighting inequality, helping neighborhoods organize, struggling against the highway bureaucrats who wanted to plow an interstate road across the Inner Harbor - right where the black-tie diners were comfortably seated.
In those days, Mikulski recalled, all the business and establishment doors were closed to neighborhood advocates - except when she went to see Jim Rouse. "He listened, he contributed, he offered his support. I'll never forget that.''
Neal Peirce's e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.
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