Ripping the Veil

Rachel D. Graham, the CEO of the Baltimore Office of Promotion and Arts, also known as BOPA, wants you to know that the organization is not a mess. 

“BOPA is probably no more messy than a lot of organizations in the city,” she told me as we sat together at BOPA’s downtown Baltimore offices. “It’s just our mess was all over the front page.”

Graham took over the job in early February after the fraught departure of former CEO Donna Drew Sawyer. 

“Some of the mess, I will say in some cases, is manufactured, and is conversations of folks who have never stepped foot in this office, and probably have never had a real conversation with anyone on this staff. Are there challenges? Absolutely. But again, I’ll say we’re probably no messier than any other entity. Just like I said, our mess has been on full view.”  

Not everyone knows exactly what BOPA does — that’s a problem Graham says she is working to fix. But nearly everyone is familiar with Artscape. Putting that festival together is one of the organization’s biggest tasks.

They also oversee other events in the city, including New Year’s Eve and July 4 celebrations, and the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade. The group helps manage some culturally significant sites in Baltimore, including the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower, the Top of the World Observation Level at the Inner Harbor, and the Cloisters. They provide funding through grants to city artists and cultural events here. They also manage the Baltimore Film Office. 

The front-page headlines Graham refers to are from the beginning of 2023, when the organization, with Sawyer at the helm, announced that there would be no Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade that year. The move drew the ire of many local politicians, including Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott.

“It has become clear that BOPA is not meeting the expectations of the city and is causing significant disappointment and frustration for the residents of Baltimore,” Scott wrote in a letter that called for Sawyer’s removal. If it didn’t happen, he threatened, the city would withhold funding for the next fiscal year. 

BOPA is a nonprofit, but receives funding from the city, which is used to put on city events. 

“The letter came after a series of gaffes, flubs and missteps that Sawyer has made over the past year, including failure to produce the city’s Artscape festival for the third year in a row and then scheduling next year’s event to coincide with Rosh Hashanah, one of the most sacred holidays on the Jewish calendar,” wrote Ed Gunts in Baltimore Fishbowl.

In the end, Sawyer resigned, and, after a tense budget hearing, the Baltimore City Council voted in June 2023 to withhold $1.7 million from the organization.

That budget was the one Graham inherited when she came on board. She said mending the relationship between BOPA and city government was one of her first tasks.

“One of the first things I did, even before I actually took the seat, was start meeting with city council members and asking the question, ‘So what’s really the problem? What has your challenge been?’” she told me.

Clearly, she has already made some headway. 

At a June 7 press conference held at City Hall to announce this year’s Artscape headliners, Scott said it has been “lovely” working with Graham, both because he’d partnered with her before when she served as the director of external relations for the Reginald F. Lewis Museum and because, he said, both are committed to working to make arts and culture better in the city.

“I’m very excited to work with you,” Councilman Mark Conway told her when she represented BOPA at their city council budget hearing in May. “In my district, we don’t have any arts events and maybe we should,” he said.

In June, the Baltimore Board of Estimates approved a one-year contract with BOPA.

“The new contract changes the way BOPA is administered to bring the once-independent, quasi-governmental agency partly under city control,” the Baltimore Sun wrote.

While she has already tackled important conversations with people in power, Graham says she hasn’t even begun the conversations that she really needs to have — and those are with the people of Baltimore. 

“I have an idea. I have some things that I know are important. But none of that has been vetted or tested with community,” she told me.

She said that because she started the job so quickly (she was just in her tenth week when she went before City Council), she hasn’t had the conversations that she really needs to have.

“I talked to the same people everybody else has been talking to about arts and culture in the city. If I articulated a vision right now with any specificity, it would look exactly like what we’ve had in the past. And I don’t want that.”

“We are responsible for serving artists, but we are also responsible to community to kind of rip the veil between art and community,” she said. 

Graham told me that one of the first things she told her staff was how important it is to remember that they work for the people of Baltimore.

“When I came in the door, the conversation I had with our staff was, yes, we report contractually to the mayor, but the citizens of Baltimore City, that’s your boss.”

Both in my conversation with Graham and in remarks she gave before the city council, Graham spoke forcefully about the importance of supporting artists — especially poor and working-class artists. 

“The arts have the ability to save lives,” she told city council members. “The lack of access to arts as an outlet, or as a vocation, or as a support of the educational framework can almost assuredly contribute to adverse outcomes for some of the most vulnerable populations in our city.”

That means a conversation about supporting all artists isn’t just about art — it’s about transportation, income, access to food, and access to housing. She pointed out that the center of the city, where lots of cultural events take place, is often more expensive than East and West Baltimore. That means artists have to travel to get there. 

“The perspective that I bring to this role is looking at artists as the whole person. So us providing travel prizes… the prize money that we provide in the exhibitions is important. But there’s so much more that needs to be addressed with artists,” she told me. That means “communities needing access to quality, affordable housing, access to transportation, access to healthcare services, access to fresh and affordable food.”

She said she hopes to leverage the power that comes with the BOPA CEO position to establish community partnerships that can create better, more sustainable ways to support artists. 

“We could always use more dollars, but we’re trying to figure out how to intelligently utilize the dollars that we currently have.”

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