When Baltimore’s celebrated Senator Theatre closed its doors, the city went into collective mourning. The Art Deco theater had been a beloved fixture of the city since it opened in 1939, representing the golden era of the American film industry, and memories for generations of Baltimoreans.

After weathering years of neglect and the financial troubles of former owner Tom Kiefaber, the theater was purchased by the city at auction in July 2009 after it went into foreclosure.

Baltimoreans can feel some measure of pride visiting The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Located downtown in a renovated industrial warehouse—a "factory," if you will—just a few miles from where Warhol grew up, the sprawling complex houses a gritty and glittering retrospective of his life, with some familiar artwork and Baltimore personalities in the mix. 

There's a huge Last Supper canvas on view. And there's a massive Camouflage painting and a "fright wig" Self-Portrait, too—just like at the BMA.

Like so many visionary artists, it seems, John Root Hopkins lives in the middle of nowhere. Outside Cambridge on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Route 16 rolls past clusters of aluminum sided houses and fields of corn and soybeans. In Church Creek, just beyond the firehouse, the road branches off and meanders through stands of Loblolly Pines to a gravel driveway that leads to Hopkins’s home, which overlooks the creek. The house actually belongs to Hopkins’s lady friend, Helen “Bunny” Crump, and she’s scurrying around packing for a trip to London, while Hopkins sits at the kitchen table.

Deborah Bedwell’s first encounter with a potter’s wheel was less than auspicious. The West Virginia native was a recent transplant to Maryland in 1969 when she signed up for a ceramics class at University of Maryland, College Park. She needed to fulfill a teaching certification requirement for her new position as an art teacher at Malcolm Middle School in Waldorf, and ceramics seemed like an easy, fun choice.