Artscape’s top official said Monday that city leaders should consider moving its main stage concerts indoors and rescheduling the mammoth outdoor arts festival to its traditional weekend in mid-July, after summer storms caused cancellations on both Friday and Saturday night this year.
“If there is any lesson that I have learned from this year, it is to plan for the Plan B,” said Rachel Graham, CEO of the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts, the quasi-government agency tasked with mounting city festivals.
Even as Graham’s staff was dismantling the white tents that dotted the festival’s footprint in the Mount Vernon and Bolton Hill neighborhoods, she and city officials already were thinking about what — if anything — should be done differently for the 2025 festival.
“We might need a Plan B location for the Artscape concerts, though that presents logistical challenges,” she said.
This was supposed to be the year that Artscape returned to a semblance of normalcy. Often described as the largest free outdoor public art festival in the U.S., Artscape was shuttered in 2020, 2021 and 2022 by the coronavirus pandemic. In 2023, Tropical Storm Ophelia caused the festival to cancel all activities for safety reasons on Saturday, the event’s only full day.
A destructive lightning storm that toppled trees, closed roads and dumped nearly three inches of rain on city streets caused Artscape to cancel its two major headliner performers this weekend: “Queen of Soul” Chaka Khan on Friday and iconic percussionist Sheila E. on Saturday and sent crowds hurrying home.
While Khan and Sheila E. didn’t perform, BOPA was contractually obligated to pay them anyway. Graham didn’t have a firm figure for the entertainment budget for this year’s festival, but thought it might be around $350,000.
The storm even wreaked havoc with Sunday’s headliner, The Original Wailers, a popular reggae group styled after Bob Marley, when drummer Anthony Watson’s flight was grounded on route to Baltimore. BOPA’s logistics team found a substitute drummer from Washington in time for Sunday’s concert, Graham said.
The weekend storms appeared to have caused no serious damage to either festivalgoers or costly equipment.
“When you consider the impact of this storm, we were remarkably fortunate,” Graham said.
None of the white tents secured to the ground with weights were overturned by the storms, though Jack Danna, director of commercial revitalization for the Central Baltimore Partnership was one of about half a dozen volunteers who got soaked while struggling to manually hold down a tent during the worst of Saturday’s storm. They were attempting — successfully — to shelter the expensive sound equipment for a dance floor that Mobtown Ballroom had set up in the middle of Charles Street.
“Well,” Danna said, “everyone knows that at Artscape rain is always a possibility.”
He and Ellen Janes, the partnership’s executive director, said they considered this Artscape a success.
“It’s a great festival,” Janes said. “It’s worth the effort of putting it on. We really see it as a way of building community and elevating local artists, and this Artscape accomplished that.”
City Council President Nick Mosby pointed out that bad weather at Artscape is not unusual.
An analysis of temperature and precipitation data recorded by the National Weather Service from 2000 to 2024 for Artscape weekends showed there have only been five festival weekends when there wasn’t any precipitation recorded and the daily high temperature wasn’t at least 95 degrees.
Moreover, the very first Artscape, which was held in June 1982, was marred by torrential rains on two of the festival’s three days, sending musical acts fleeing inside different venues, including the Fifth Regiment Armory.
“I’m not a fan necessarily of moving Artscape indoors,” Mosby said. “Baltimore is such a beautiful city, and outdoor festivals are really important to the urban fabric in America. If the calendar had shifted by literally just a few days, it would have been fabulous.”
Moving concerts indoors would prevent the concerts from being canceled, but Graham said that relocating the performances indoors has its own challenges. Neither the 2,400-seat Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall nor the 2,500-seat Lyric Opera of Baltimore is large enough to accommodate crowds for headliner events, she said. Indoor concerts would be twice as expensive to stage.
“The concerts are free public events,” Graham said. “Who determines who gets in and who doesn’t?”
Graham said she finalized an agreement last week to conduct an extensive study on the economic impact of the 2024 Artscape. It will be conducted by the Greater Baltimore Committee, Visit Baltimore and possibly the Office of the Comptroller of Maryland.
The study results won’t be available for weeks or months. But Graham said that in addition to calculating an economic impact and assessing visitors, it should be able to provide estimates of everything from hotel room stays to flights taken by out-of-state visitors.
“The whole point of the festival is to use it as an economic driver,” Graham said. “Creativity and culture are so important to the economy of the city.”