[Editor’s note: We will continue to update this space as more information becomes available.]

Following an announcement by Governor Larry Hogan on March 12 that all gatherings of 250 people or more are to be postponed, many of Baltimore’s venues and art spaces have announced cancellations and rescheduled events. Here’s what’s still open, what’s coming later this year, and what to expect from the weeks ahead.

Visual Arts

The JHU Museums have announced that, as of March 16, all locations will be closed and public programs through April 12 are postponed or canceled. The American Visionary Art Museum has closed through March 31, with public programs and tours cancelled through April 12. The previously scheduled Logan Visionary Eco-Conference has been postponed to a later date.

Leadership teams are hoping that the BMA’s 2020 Vision Community Celebration and the opening for Brice Brown’s PROSCENIUM at Evergreen Library and Museum can be rescheduled for later in the year.

The Walters Art Museum and The Baltimore Museum of Art have closed to the public through March 31 and cancelled all events and programming through April 12. The Reginald F. Lewis Museum is also closed to the public, and a reopening date has yet to be released.

Some options remain for viewing museum collections. The Walters’ St. Francis Missal can be viewed in full on the museum’s Ex Libris site along with many other precious manuscripts.

The Baltimore Office of Promotion & Arts announced that all galleries and attractions will be closed starting March 14.

Events related to Maryland Art Place’s Out of Order and Merkin Dream have been postponed, with new dates TBA. Y:Art Gallery has cancelled its March 21 artist talk with Maureen Delaney, Erin Raedeke, and Richard Townsend but will remain open for regular business. Please check with your local galleries for information on postponements and adjusted hours.

Music

Creative Alliance has instituted a new full refund/exchange policy during the month of March and fully canceled the March 21 performance by the Marja Mortensson Trio. The annual Baltimore Old Time Music Festival has been postponed, and the leadership team is currently looking at new weekends, likely in the summer, to hold the event. Tickets will be transferred to the new date once it is confirmed, and refunds will be available at that time for those who do not wish to attend.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and other events scheduled at both the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall and The Music Center at Strathmore are cancelled through March 21. BSO president and CEO released the following statement regarding the closure: “Of course, as recent history has shown us, the BSO has navigated challenging times thanks to the collective support and strength of our community. In addition to inviting patrons to exchange into future programs, we are also deeply appreciative to those patrons who would consider donating their tickets to support the BSO at a pivotal time in our transformation.”

The Modell Performing Arts Center at The Lyric has postponed all events through March 18, and some performances have already begun being rescheduled for this summer.

Horse Lords, Mdou Moctar, Versus, and Joy Postell have postponed their upcoming shows at the Ottobar, though the venue remains open at this time. According to the Ottobar Facebook page, “Our plan is to remain open this weekend in full capacity, and evaluate throughout. We’ll then start the new week studying the news and continue on from there…We will post online and our website any sudden changes that may arise. If you do not feel comfortable attending a show, you have the option to adjust or refund your ticket.”

Rams Head Live! has closed indefinitely in response to the 250+ gathering rule, and will work to reschedule impacted performances. Tickets for performances that are rescheduled will remain valid, and tickets for shows that cannot be rescheduled will be refunded within 30 days of an announcement of cancellation. Baltimore Soundstage and Metro Gallery have also postponed events through late March.

Sound Garden announced today that Record Store Day will be moved to June 20, 2020, affecting all area record stores.

Literature

Enoch Pratt Libraries has closed to the public, and all public programs, including the CityLit Festival, are postponed or cancelled through March 31.

According to a statement from Enoch Pratt CEO Heidi Daniel, the library is expanding programs for those stuck at home, including instituting a digital library card program to offer those without library cards the opportunity to register for instant access to online materials and databases. The Books by Mail program for homebound customers will also be expanding and can be initiated by contacting the library’s circulation department.

Greedy Reads has closed to the public and suspended all events through the month of March at both locations, but patrons can still make purchases via phone/email for pick up or delivery, or through bookshop.org and Libro.fm. Charm City Books announced that all events are cancelled. In addition, all Charm City Books stock will be available for purchase online, and delivery within Baltimore City is available for free. For those outside the city, delivery is still an option at the cost of $5 or less. Events at The Ivy Bookshop and Bird in Hand are cancelled through March 30, and updates will be posted as soon as new dates are scheduled.

Theater

As of March 12, the Hippodrome Theatre has cancelled the upcoming Celtic Woman and The Band’s Visit touring dates and shared the following: “If you are a ticket holder for one of these events, please hold onto your tickets as we work to reschedule their performances in Baltimore. We will be in touch in the next 7-14 days with more information on the status of this event.”

Everyman Theatre has waived ticket exchange fees and upgrade charges for the remainder of the New Voices Festival, and the two remaining shows in the festival, Cry It Out and Berta, Berta, have been postponed to the summer. Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains will be suspended following the March 14 performance and resume on April 15. The theater’s annual gala, originally scheduled for March 14, has also been postponed. Center Stage has postponed the Baltimore Butterfly Session previously scheduled for March 14, but is organizing with local artists to hold a virtual discussion about responses to the current public health crisis within the creative community. More information about this online gathering can be found here.

Charm City Players’ production of Matilda originally scheduled for March 14-29 is postponed, and CCP has encouraged ticket holders to keep their tickets while they work to reschedule show dates. Announcements regarding the status of the show will be communicated over the next two weeks.

Baltimore Improv Group’s managing director Terry Withers announced on Thursday that it would suspend all performances starting March 16 and reevaluate the following week. This includes practices, meetings, and unofficial gatherings at BIG’s theater and training center. Classes will continue but switch to larger venues to enable distance between performers beginning March 16.

Vagabond Players will suspend the remaining performances of Constellations, which were originally scheduled through March 22. The Fells Point company will offer ticket holders refunds or exchanges for future performances.

Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, which had previously reduced seating capacity to promote social distancing, has suspended The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) and March student matinees for Romeo and Juliet after March 15. Those with tickets to this weekend’s shows are asked to make responsible choices about their attendance. Options for ticket holders beyond those dates are outlined here, and the company hopes to continue with Studio classes.

The closing weekend of The Mineola Twins at Fells Point Corner Theatre has been suspended, and plans for the upcoming production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf are to be determined. Tickets for the current production can be exchanged for future performances.

Arena Players is suspended through March 27 and has also reduced seating capacity for its shows effective immediately. Spotlighters Theatre has delayed the opening of its Dogfight until March 26. The Strand remains open with increased sanitation measures.

Film

The SNF Parkway Theatre is closed from March 13-March 26, and the theater will be deep-cleaned before staff and patrons return at the end of the month. The Charles, CinéBistro at The Rotunda, The Landmark Harbor East, and The Senator Theatre will be closing by end of day March 16 in response to the latest announcement by Gov. Hogan.

Cara Ober is relatively easy to spot at an art exhibit preview. It’s not only because of her art-chic style and general confidence and authority when it comes to art, but because she is deeply, passionately inquisitive about the work. Even if you were to close your eyes, you could most likely recognize her by her voice; she is often the first person, in a room buzzing with press, to look directly at the artists and start firing off insightful questions—the ones that either seem too difficult to ask or had eluded others, sometimes even the artists themselves.

Ober is her own brand. Or, more accurately, her name is synonymous with BmoreArt, the Baltimore arts and culture magazine that she founded in 2007. She didn’t know then how much the city would come to need a platform that exposes the community to what’s happening in the arts while validating the artists who work here. The longest-running arts publication in the city, it gracefully strikes a balance between high art and pop culture, with a range of subject matter covering visual art, music, theater, film, and extending into other culturally rich areas, like food.

“I always have people asking me, ‘Do you still make art?’” the Maryland Institute College of Art alum says in her Area 405 studio, which is relatively barren and appears to serve these days mostly as storage space for her older work. “I’m like, these magazines are art! They are collaborative, community-based art, and it is part of my art practice. Creatively, I find it really satisfying.”

The “observer effect” theory states that an observer changes the nature of whatever it is they are observing. Though usually used to describe scientific phenomena, it could also be applied to Ober’s observations of Baltimore over the past 12-plus years. In 2007, at a time when seemingly everyone was creating a blog, Ober started BmoreArt on Blogspot to showcase visual art events. The webzine evolved to include biannual print magazines, with funding from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, and this year has grown again, adding more staff and a new initiative that connects Baltimore artists with collectors.

“BmoreArt is a huge gift for the [art] institutions that are here,” says Julia Marciari-Alexander, director of the Walters Art Museum. “Cara thinks about art in a holistic way. The intelligence with which she approaches the articles, it’s really excellent art criticism in the best sense—not necessarily negative, but thoughtful art criticism. And that’s a dying practice.”

Adds Donna Drew Sawyer, CEO of the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts: “Cara is really an example of the kind of can-do, maker attitude we have here in Baltimore . . . Cara moved forward and published this magazine, fearless of what others thought could or could not be successful. And she made it successful. I think she’s just pure Baltimore. That’s the way we do things.”

As for Ober, she can sometimes hardly believe it herself.

“I never thought this would become what it is,” she says. “I never thought this would be my job.”

“I never thought this would become what it is. I never thought this would be my job.”

Even as a little girl growing up in Westminster, Ober often felt like an observer.

“My younger brother was always the super-super talented artist,” the 44-year-old says. “We were both classically trained pianists, but he was one of those prodigy types. His talent never required any artist statement or introduction. I was like, ‘I’m an artist, too!’” she says with a chuckle. “But I was also in this role of being the audience and the fan, and maybe that’s what all journalists are. Maybe I just didn’t realize that that’s what my art was: paying attention to artists.”

Raised by parents who were both teachers, Ober saw teaching art as a viable career path. So she earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from American University and began teaching high school in Carroll County and later Baltimore County.

“I woke every day thinking, ‘This is not where I’m supposed to be.’ Going to a pep rally? Getting asked to prom by your students? Or someone asking you if they can go to the bathroom?”

These days, as a wife and mother in addition to being an entrepreneur, she usually wakes up to a running list in her mind of all the things she has to do, but she loves the work, interviewing and writing about artists, visiting exhibits, and art talks.

When she moved to Baltimore, her goal was to learn about the artists here and what made them successful—essentially, how they survived—because that’s what she wanted to do, too. She took adult education classes at Maryland Institute College of Art and rented studio space while still teaching high school. She started showing her work at galleries in Baltimore and D.C. Thinking her next move would be teaching art at the college level, she earned an MFA in painting in 2005 through MICA’s low-residency program.

Her first introduction to writing about the arts came through Radar, a pocket-sized art guide edited by Jack Livingston and published quarterly. “A lot of times, you pitch your stuff to new publications, and they’re snobby or standoffish, but he said, ‘Send me a draft,’” Ober remembers. “And then he’d be like, ‘This is like ad copy. Rewrite it. Change this. Change that. Change this.’” Ober pressed on, and eventually Livingston began publishing her work, which received positive feedback from readers. “When I started putting my stuff out there, people were paying attention. When you put your energy into something, and you feel that energy coming back—it feels good. So I kept doing it.”

While an adjunct professor at MICA in 2007, she created BmoreArt with another artist she’d met through the school (he quickly realized he didn’t want to write and backed out). Other artists jumped in, and the site was launched as a space to post upcoming events, gallery reviews, and press releases.

She later worked for Urbanite magazine as its arts and culture editor and would often cross-publish some of the content to BmoreArt. When Urbanite folded in 2012, she felt a void, particularly within the arts coverage in the city. Trying to fill it, she picked up the pace of BmoreArt, publishing multiple original pieces of content every week by herself and contributors.

But it was exhausting, she wasn’t making any money, and she had a child now—her son, Leo, was born in 2010. Just when she began considering calling it quits, she got an unexpected email from Jane Brown, president of the Deutsch Foundation. The two met for lunch to discuss the future of BmoreArt, and Brown eventually offered to help fund the publication because she believed it was an important component of the arts ecosystem.

“She had been doing this on her own for years without any financial support at all—which really tells you something,” says Brown. “As an artist herself, she’s super committed to artists at every level, and the emerging artists are a huge asset that this city has never properly valued or made any investment in.”

With funding from the Deutsch Foundation, Ober felt like she’d hit the lottery. She could pay herself for the first time.

By November 2015, Ober branched out to include a biannual print magazine. This was not a business decision, she says. This was an artist decision. “Most people told me not to do it, but I’m not a good follower of directions,” she says. “I wanted it to be beautiful. I wanted it to be an art object. I wanted it to be something people could keep and collect. I wanted it to be thematic, like an exhibition.”

She printed a run of 3,000 and, only days before receiving them, realized she had a few logistics to figure out. Like where to store them. And how to distribute them. Hosting a launch party seemed like a viable option—she’d be able to get as many magazines in people’s hands as possible all in one place. The party sold out, with more than 300 attendees packing into the Maryland Art Place.

“It was so cool, and it was diverse in every way—age and race and background,” she says. “Art events aren’t always like that. All these different people in a room together.”

“I wanted it to be beautiful. . . . I wanted it to be something people could keep and collect.”

It was Ober’s open-mindedness that drew Angela Carroll to become a contributor to BmoreArt about five years ago. Carroll, an adjunct professor at Stevenson University and an arts writer, noticed a lack of people of color in media in this majority-black city, and because of that, artists of color were receiving poor coverage—their works either overlooked entirely or not contextualized properly.

“Cara was open to really supporting me in trying to fill that gap and correct that historical omission,” says Carroll, who also occasionally contributes to Baltimore. “If our archives don’t show these narratives, these publications are going to be in a really precarious situation in a few years when people start asking questions. BmoreArt has always tried to move differently. Cara is all about using writing as a radical tool and a mobilizing tool.”

BmoreArt has diversified since 2007 in every way, through its writers, the people it features, and even from covering predominately visual arts to now covering a variety of artistic mediums. People have noticed and appreciated the magazine’s scope. With a 12-year archive online, it charts a very specific narrative of a time and place and scene that wasn’t documented nearly as rigorously in traditional media outlets. Twelve years might not seem like a lot, but a lot has happened in the city during that time. It saw the rise of maker spaces, the rise and fall of several prominent warehouse studio spaces, and the transformation of city neighborhoods, most notably Station North, Greenmount West, and Barclay, after the Station North Arts and Entertainment District was designated in 2002.

“BmoreArt has become one of the few places you can turn to to trace the evolution of Baltimore’s art scene,” says Bret McCabe, another BmoreArt contributor. He met Ober before her magazine days, while he was covering arts and culture for Baltimore City Paper, where he worked from 2001 to 2011.

“Baltimore is affordable, you can create work, and that’s awesome,” he goes on. “But if nobody’s really paying attention, that kinda sucks.”

Baltimore artist Jeffrey Kent echoes that sentiment when he points out that Ober has helped to “fill a huge void. Without art, we’d not be a city; we’d be a large town,” he says.

Both Ober and Kent have similar missions: they’re practicing artists who help other artists and seek ways to give the city positive recognition.

Ober partnered this year with Kent to launch a speaker series, Connect + Collect. The series brings together nationally and internationally known artists and curators for free events open to the public.

They’re also offering studio tours to out-of-town speakers and Baltimore-based collectors. They select “artists we believe people should be collecting,” says Kent, director of the former SubBasement Studios, once the largest gallery in the city. He was the first person to represent and sell Amy Sherald’s work.

“The Walters, the BMA, MICA—they bring people to Baltimore all the time, but those people don’t see any of Baltimore. What if they could see some artist studios?” Ober says. “I’ve been doing this research for 15 years, and so has Jeffrey. There are artists here who are poised for national or international museum careers. What would happen if a group of collectors invested in these artists? How might that elevate the reputation of Baltimore?”

Ober also expanded BmoreArt’s staff this year, hiring a full-time managing editor and sales and marketing director. This will allow her to focus more on writing stories and being out in the community as the face of BmoreArt, rather than managing its daily operations.

Through the growth of BmoreArt, Ober is left thinking more seriously about its audience and who she isn’t reaching and why. What would draw people who aren’t interested in art to a publication covering the arts? It’s a question she asked herself as a high school art teacher, many moons ago.

“If you can sell the idea of contemporary art to high school kids—when all they really care about is gossip and getting laid—then you can interest anybody,” she says.

The trick?

“I still think the sex and gossip sells it,” she says. To that end, in a 2018 BmoreArt piece, she writes about female sexuality in ancient art but manages to draw in references to Kim Kardashian and the short-lived TV show I Love Dick. But of course, it’s about more than that. “It’s about making people realize that this work is about them. In the best works of art, you see yourself,” she says. “It gives you a sense of who you are and how the world works. It changes and deepens that. . . . It enhances your experience of being human in the world.”