When the 2025 Artscape opens Saturday, it will be a make-or-break weekend for Baltimore’s marquee public city celebration — for the third year in a row.

What is often described as one of the nation’s largest free outdoor art festivals is moving from late summer to the spring (after having crossed into fall the year before). And it is moving to a new location — below the overpasses of a busy highway and on the site of a former homeless encampment.

There are concerns that Downtown Baltimore is being helped by the relocated festival at the expense of Station North, where Artscape was held for four decades, and where the economic recovery remains fragile. A new partnership is running Artscape, and one of the key agencies, the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts, is temporarily operating without a city contract.

Festival organizers aren’t downplaying the challenges. They realize that after six years when all or part of Artscape was canceled because of the pandemic or weather, the stakes are high. But they are confident the obstacles can be overcome.

“The new festival model is about building community and putting artists first and making our best effort to commoditize and grow the city’s creative economy,” said Tonya Miller Hall, the mayor’s senior adviser for arts and culture. “And it is about creating a world-class festival so that people from other states will want to visit.”

The catalyst for changing Artscape’s location was twofold: to participate in Mayor Brandon Scott’s Downtown Rise Initiative, a $6.9 billion economic development plan that aims to revitalize Baltimore’s core, and to avoid interfering with activities of such Station North anchor institutions as the Lyric Baltimore (which has a full slate of graduations scheduled all week) and the Maryland Institute College of Art (where school is still in session.)

Hall described the festival’s new locations at City Hall, the War Memorial and beneath the Jones Falls Expressway, as a “more compact and accessible footprint” than the former location along Mount Royal Avenue and Charles Street.

Still, she acknowledged that Artscape is unlikely to ever regain the estimated 1.5 million visitors the festival enjoyed during its heyday in the 1990s, when the main stage featured such superstars as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Joan Baez. The headliners this year are Robin Thicke, whose biggest hit, the song “Blurred Lines,” was released in 2013, and Fantasia Barrino, who burst on the public consciousness in 2004 by winning the third season of “American Idol” and recently starred in “The Color Purple” musical film adaptation.

“The music industry today compared to the 1990s is completely different,” Hall said. “It has become a big corporate entity. Baltimore’s population has also shrunk since the 1990s, and it is hard for us to compete and to pay those huge fees.”

‘A little love, a little care’

Robyn Murphy, interim CEO of the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts, said she hopes that Artscape will attract 50,000 visitors on each day of the festival and that a significant percentage will be visitors from outside Baltimore. While that would more than double the attendance for the past two years, it’s still below the pre-pandemic attendance highs of about 350,000 attendees over three days.

“Our hotel partners are telling us that they are at or near capacity,” Murphy said. “I think the Scout Art Fair alone will attract a significant number of visitors.”

Murphy was referring to a new feature of the 2025 festival — an exhibit of 40 local artists and five galleries, whose work will be sold for prices ranging from a few hundred dollars to $5,000.

Derrick Chase, the Baltimore-born, Brooklyn-based artist who curated the exhibit, applauded the change to the new location.

“The city has lost a lot of money over the past few years from Artscape,” he said. “They had this beautiful, elaborate footprint in areas where it couldn’t control what nature was doing.”

Following three years during which the festival was canceled in its entirety during the COVID-19 pandemic, Artscape 2023 and 2024 were crippled by torrential downpours, forcing officials to scrap major parts of the festival for safety reasons.

The new location, Chase said, is protected by the overpasses, which provide shade when the sun is unrelenting and shelter when it rains. In addition, he said, “that particular part of the city needs a little love, a little care.”

New murals, new lighting

Except for the summer, when the farmers market draws a crowd, the lots under the expressway are mostly vacant and can be forbidding. Three years ago, it was the site of an encampment for unhoused people.

“The blocks just north and west of City Hall are challenged, said Baltimore City Councilmember Zac Blanchard, who represents the area that includes Artscape’s new footprint.

“The new murals and lighting that will remain long after Artscape is over will be a shot in the arm for that part of downtown,” he said. “It won’t feel like a vacant space under an overpass anymore. I’m really excited about it.”

Hall thinks it’s important to pair festivals, which are inherently ephemeral, with permanent capital improvements.

This year, she launched the Oasis Mural Project, hiring more than 30 artists to paint 44 pillars supporting the expressway, and one wall. The murals will be enhanced by 14 vinyl LED light fixtures, which in addition to being attractive and eye-catching will improve visibility.

“There have been challenges in that area with safety,” Hall said. “This will provide an added layer of protection.”

Arts district concerns

But what benefits one neighborhood has the potential to take away from another. Some Baltimoreans have expressed concerns that Artscape’s move downtown will be to the detriment of Station North. While activity in the neighborhood has increased since the coronavirus pandemic and new businesses are opening, the upswing is recent and therefore, precarious.

Posts on social media were predictably blunt.

“This is one of the dumbest decisions I’ve seen,” reads one comment on Reddit. “Let’s take it out of the arts district, which needs the economic boost, and take it to a place that people from Baltimore are tired of.”

The relocation also appears to raise questions about the future of a portion of the $7 million in taxpayer-funded infrastructure improvements that were made to Mount Royal Avenue in 2011 to support the Station North Arts District as Artscape’s long-term home.

The improvements included laying underground conduits between Maryland Avenue and Lafayette Street to power the visual and sonic extravaganza that make up the modern rock concert.

Jamie Kendrick, who oversaw the improvements as the deputy director of the city’s Department of Transportation, wrote in an email to The Baltimore Sun that only a fraction of the $7 million was used for the conduits. The project, he wrote, “served many purposes (street lighting, telecommunications, etc.)” and “had vast independent value beyond Artscape.”

Also up in the air is the city’s evolving relationship with BOPA, its longtime arts council.

In November, Scott’s office sent a letter to BOPA’s board announcing plans to terminate its 22-year relationship, citing years of financial mismanagement. The city’s contractual relationship with the event-planning agency formally ended Jan. 20, a few days after Murphy was appointed BOPA’s interim CEO.

In January, BOPA also received its final quarterly payment from the city for the period ending March 31. In April, Scott announced the new Mayor’s Office of Art, Culture and Entertainment, to be headed by Hall and Linzy Jackson III.

It’s not entirely clear how BOPA’s status changed in a few short months from pariah to partner.

Murphy acknowledged that at least for now, BOPA is operating without a contract — though the mayor’s proposed 2025-26 budget provides $2.8 million for the arts council, a slight increase from previous years.

She referred questions about how the arts council is paying its bills during the interim to the city, while Hall referred those questions back to Murphy.

“The mayor allowed BOPA and me the space and grace to come to the table and work our issues through.” Murphy said. “The best answer I can give is that things change.”

Have a news tip? Contact Mary Carole McCauley at mmccauley@baltsun.com and 410-332-6704.