High temperatures and a chance of rain won’t prevent Baltimore from having three big festivals next summer.
Mayor Brandon Scott on Monday announced the 2024 dates for AFRAM, Artscape and Charm City Live, saying the heat of summer won’t stop them from taking place.
Speaking at City Hall, Scott also expressed renewed confidence in the Baltimore Office of Promotion of the Arts (BOPA), nearly one year after he said he had lost confidence in the leadership of the agency.
Dates for the 2024 festivals are: AFRAM on June 22 and 23; Artscape on Aug. 2, 3 and 4; and Charm City Live on Sept. 21.
In his remarks, Scott made a point of addressing Artscape’s move back to summer after a one-year tryout as a fall festival. He said earlier this month that the city decided to move the festival back to the summer after consulting with stakeholders in and around the Mount Royal cultural district, where it has traditionally been held, and hearing that’s what they wanted despite potentially higher temperatures than in the fall.
“We’re moving it back in the summer, so the mayor doesn’t want to hear any complaints about it being hot,” he said. “It’s going to be hot. And it probably will rain a little bit, too. It’s Baltimore in the summertime.”
Scott’s remarks about the weather were an apparent reference to a 2022 decision by BOPA to shift the 2023 festival to the fall, after former CEO Donna Drew Sawyer said she didn’t like her employees working outdoors in the heat of summer.
A highly-paid arts administrator who was tapped to serve as BOPA’s CEO during the administration of former Mayor Catherine Pugh, Sawyer failed to produce numerous festivals and events during 2020, 2021 and 2022, even though Baltimore appropriated funds for her agency to do just that.
After Sawyer said she didn’t plan to put on the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade in January 2023, Scott said he had lost faith in her leadership of the agency and called for her resignation, which she submitted on Jan. 10. But Sawyer’s September date for Artscape had already been announced and couldn’t be changed at that point. Todd Yuhanick became interim CEO on June 2 and has worked to bring back the events Sawyer didn’t produce, including Artscape, the Baltimore Book Festival and the MLK Jr. Day Parade.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Artscape had typically been held on the third weekend in July, prompting some to say that it always takes place on the hottest weekend of the year.
Artscape’s move to September resulted in conflicts with other arts institutions and organizations that had events during the same weekend, raising questions about the city’s planning process and ability to accommodate all the bookings. The organizers of two smaller festivals, Hampdenfest and Remfest, said they were cancelling or postponing their events in part due to the potential conflict with Artscape’s fall dates.
The move back to the summer takes pressure off the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Lyric Baltimore, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and others that had events scheduled the same weekend as Artscape 2023 and were worried about logistics such as traffic control and security provisions.
To help prevent conflicts in the future, the mayor said, his Director of External Partnerships is creating and maintaining a “public-facing special events calendar” that will tell community leaders what’s coming up on any given week in 2024, so they’ll have a better basis for selecting dates for their own events.
“We want to make the events planning process as smooth as possible, and this new calendar will be a new tool that will…make all of this information more accessible but also more centralized,” he said.
Scott declined to name any headliners or give specific locations for the three 2024 events, saying those details will be announced closer to next summer. He did say Charm City Live will be in “a part of downtown,” as it has been for its first two times it has been held.
AFRAM and Charm City Live are produced by the Mayor’s Office, which this year created a cabinet-level position for a Senior Advisor of Arts and Culture, filled by Tonya Miller Hall. Artscape was produced this year as a collaboration between the Mayor’s Office and BOPA.
Asked at City Hall whether he has regained confidence in BOPA over the past year, Scott pointed to the fact that the agency’s interim CEO, Yuhanick, was standing behind him during the briefing.
“I don’t stand on people that I don’t have confidence in,” he said. “We know that they have new leadership, and they’ve been making great strides and we’re going to continue to work in partnership.”
BOPA has a contract with the city to serve as its events producer, arts council and film office until June 30, 2024 – before Artscape next year. Asked if BOPA’s contract will be extended, Scott stopped short of saying the relationship will continue but indicated it is a possibility.
“We are still having those discussions. We will be making those decisions,” he said. “But you can see by the partnership here and the partnership that has been extended with them and my office in recent months that we have seen a lot of improvement. This is about making sure that we’re putting the best effort forward for Baltimore.”
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