Baltimore Museum of Art Does Another Ho-Hum Race Show

After my dear friend Julia Alexander’s memorial service in Baltimore in late May, I visited the Walters Art Museum, which she directed for eleven years, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. I hadn’t been to the BMA in a few years but wrote about its full-blown embrace of woke ideology around 2020 and its subsequent scandals as it tried to use money from the sale of art in its collection to pay for its insane DEI program. An uprising among donors nixed the art-for-cash scam; Chris Bedford, the director at the time, fled to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, now on life support; and sneaky trustees quit, whether ashamed or not, I don’t know.

I always enjoy visiting the BMA, which has very good European Old Masters, superb mosaics from Antioch, and hundreds of works by Matisse collected by two Baltimore sisters. Its American art is good, too, with galleries redone in 2022 to display paintings, silver, furniture, sculpture, and stained glass together. The building is a John Russell Pope gem from the 1920s, stately and commodious. The BMA also has a lovely sculpture garden. Baltimore, for all its problems, is a unique place with lots of spirit and no slouch when it comes to high culture.

About the Author

Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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After my dear friend Julia Alexander’s memorial service in Baltimore in late May, I visited the Walters Art Museum, which she directed for eleven years, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. I hadn’t been to the BMA in a few years but wrote about its full-blown embrace of woke ideology around 2020 and its subsequent scandals as it tried to use money from the sale of art in its collection to pay for its insane DEI program. An uprising among donors nixed the art-for-cash scam; Chris Bedford, the director at the time, fled to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, now on life support; and sneaky trustees quit, whether ashamed or not, I don’t know.

I always enjoy visiting the BMA, which has very good European Old Masters, superb mosaics from Antioch, and hundreds of works by Matisse collected by two Baltimore sisters. Its American art is good, too, with galleries redone in 2022 to display paintings, silver, furniture, sculpture, and stained glass together. The building is a John Russell Pope gem from the 1920s, stately and commodious. The BMA also has a lovely sculpture garden. Baltimore, for all its problems, is a unique place with lots of spirit and no slouch when it comes to high culture.