Picturesque even on the rainy day when I visited the arts development, the Clipper Mill neighborhood, west of Hampden, is two parts industrial graveyard and one part Greek ruin. Giant renovated warehouses and dilapidated walls serve as ghosts of an industrial past, but the creativity of the neighborhood is astounding.
Home to artists' studios, fancy bistros, galleries, new housing complexes and even its own museum, the Clipper Mill area is truly a hidden gem of Baltimore.
The Amaranthine Museum is of particular interest. A far cry from the traditional, stand-alone "temple-of-cultural-authority" museum model, the Amaranthine is only accessible up a flight of stairs, around a corner, through a set of glass doors that remind the visitor of a doctor's office building, down a long hall full of exposed pipes and crumbling plaster, past the back end of a restaurant, and, finally, up to a pair of industrial-looking gray doors boasting the number 120.
No sign. No hours posted. In fact, the visitor is quite sure for the first few moments that he or she has arrived at the wrong place. But no, 3 p.m. sharp, the doors fly open and a friendly face peeks out as if surprised that someone would even think to come visit, especially on a rainy day.
The museum houses the life work of the late Baltimore artist and Hopkins alumnus Les Harris. Spanning 25 years of his work, the museum is organized in a labyrinthine pattern, snaking its way from contemporary art to ancient Egyptian, running through the ages and landing, resolutely, at the Big Bang and the dawn of time. Harris was a philosopher and professor, but mostly, he was a thinker.
While he started as a minimalist artist, he quickly descended into what he fondly called "maximalism," pulling out all the stops on his aesthetic, going for garish excess over tasteful omission.
Visitors begin to understand his strange artistic philosophy as they sift through the intensely lush visual display of the labyrinthine corridors.
The museum comprises, as aptly put by an article on the museum published in 2002, "a linear history of art and a decidedly non-linear theory of reality." The display is theatrical, though the space is by no means a testament to the theory of excess that the artist espoused. Housed in a large warehouse space, the museum relies on bright, untrained lighting, which works to make everything in the space significant.
A notion, one gets the sense, that the artist would have liked.
When I walked into the museum and the first thing I saw was a tangled web of tinsel hanging in front of a brightly colored canvas among wooden rods hanging from the ceiling that the docent casually referred to as "stalactites," my expectations weren't too high for the quality of the collection.
But then, as I roamed through the galleries, down the corridors, getting lost in the labyrinth and lost in thought, I found myself pleasantly surprised by how much all the excess around me actually made sense.
In his own compositions, Harris often used direct references from other works of art, starting with Pop, flowing through surrealism and beyond, to impressionism and further back, to rococo, to the Egyptians, sending the visitor soaring through the Ages of Aquarius and Pisces until landing, finally at the final room and the dawn of time, the birth of the gods, the big bang, the celestial.
Sally Harris, wife of the late artist and current director of the museum, said that she wants the museum to be used as an "educational tool, capable of inspiring those who come to visit." Along that vein, the museum has decided to set up a lecture series on the philosophy behind Harris's lifework, formally documenting how he grew and traveled in his philosophy.
The Clipper Mill area is a particularly relevant place to host this museum. Sally Harris attributes much of the foot traffic in the museum to the restaurant that sits adjacent.
Increasingly, artists are flocking to Baltimore, attracted by the alternative vibe and the "off the radar" feel of the city, according to Sally Harris. She spoke of the Clipper Mill area as "up-and-coming, filling up with artist types," saying that every year she finds there is more interest in the museum as Baltimore becomes more of an artistic city.
Oddly enough, instead of standing skeptical of the whole experience by the end of my visit to the Amaranthine Museum, overwhelmed by the wealth of visual stimuli, I found myself oddly inspired, settled with the notion of eras of aesthetic differentiation and the inevitable passage of time.
Turning immediately to the happy docent, I smiled and said, "OK. Let's do that again."
