Reading

David London Announced as New Director of Baker Fund

Previous Story
Article Image

BmoreArt News: MCAAHC, Reginald F. Lewis, Tom Mil [...]

Next Story
Article Image

The Baltimore Renaissance?

The Board of Governors of The William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund (Baker Fund) have announced David London as Director of the grants program, one of Baltimore’s significant arts funders. “This is a critical moment for arts and culture in Baltimore,” says David London. “I could not be more honored to step into this role to continue the important work of the Baker Fund in supporting the incredible creativity and artistry of our region.”

London follows Melissa Warlow, who will retire from BCF after 35 years at the end of January. Her tenure includes over 30 years of working with the Baker Fund, including serving 18 years as its Director. Her many years of service, inquisitive mind, and warm heart made Melissa beloved to Baltimore and its arts community. 

The Baker Fund Grants Program has been housed at the Baltimore Community Foundation (BCF) since 1989.

According to BCF president & CEO Shanaysha Sauls, “Melissa’s devotion to supporting our cultural institutions and the artists who enrich our local community can be found in every corner of Baltimore. Charming yet discerning, funny yet compassionate, Melissa brought all of this to her role as a grantmaker, colleague, partner, and friend. Her retirement is so well-deserved, and she leaves a strong foundation for the legacy of the Baker Fund.”

David London and Melissa Warlow

On January 6, 2025, London began his work with the Board of Governors to facilitate the Baker Fund’s ongoing investments in the region’s art and artists. He brings over 25 years of experience in the arts and culture sector, including 15 years in Baltimore. Before joining the Baker Fund, London spent 12 years at the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance (GBCA), where he served in a variety of roles, including Deputy Director and Director of Innovation. His accomplishments include expanding the Baker Artist Portfolios and Baker Artist Awards, two flagship programs managed by GBCA and supported by the Baker Fund.

As an artist and curator, London has worked closely with many Baltimore-based cultural organizations, including Baltimore Theatre Project; the Jewish Museum of Maryland; Maryland Center for History and Culture; and The Peale, Baltimore’s Community Museum, where he served as both Director of Operations and Chief Experience Officer. He has also created and presented original programs at Creative Alliance, Port Discovery, The Walters Art Museum, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others.

The William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund was established in late 1964 by Mary Sawyers Baker in memory of her husband to benefit the citizens of Baltimore. During its first 40 years, the fund supported a wide variety of causes and organizations. In 2007, the Baker Fund shifted its focus entirely to arts & culture, making it the largest private dedicated arts funder in the region. Connie Imboden, the great-niece of Mary Sawyers Baker, has served on the Board of Governors since 1996 and has served as President of the Board since 2006.

“David’s innovative ideas over the past decade have transformed the Baker Artist Portfolios and Awards program into a robust and dynamic offering to artists in the region,” says Imboden. “We are excited to see what new ideas he brings to the Baker Fund’s overall approach to investing in the arts in Baltimore.”

Imboden herself is an accomplished artist–a photographer with works in museum collections throughout the world. She recently closed her 50 year retrospective, Endless Transformations: The Alchemy of Connie Imboden at the Katzen Center at American University in Washington, DC, and continues to work in her studio in Baltimore.

Over the past 60 years, the Baker Fund has continued its founders’ civic-minded philanthropic tradition, benefiting the residents of the greater Baltimore area. Annually, the Baker Fund commits over $1 million in funding to support both individual artists and arts & cultural organizations and to help provide cultural and artistic experiences to the region’s diverse audiences.

BmoreArt caught up with London on his first week on the job to find out more about the foundation and his vision for the new role.

 

David London, Seance Table, photo by Theresa Keil

BmoreArt: David, congrats on your new role! For any reader not familiar, what is the William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund, and how do they operate?

The William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund is one of the only dedicated private arts funders in the Baltimore Metropolitan Area. It makes over $1million in strategic investments annually to Baltimore’s art and artists, and helps ensure that residents have access to quality artistic experiences.

The majority of the Baker Fund’s annual grants provide funding to strengthen the programs and practices of arts and cultural organizations in Metropolitan Baltimore. These include grants for general operating support, organizational capacity, as well as for the presentation of innovative programs that deepen audience engagement and build new audiences. We also have a reserve fund program that is designed to help facilitate the ongoing financial stability and success of our grantee organizations.

What are just a few of their recent projects or key grants programs?

The Baker Fund remains committed to investing in a broad range of organizations that make up the robust cultural ecosystem in Baltimore. It also supports service organizations in the area, such as Maryland Citizens for the Arts (MCA), Maryland Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (MdVLA), and the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance (GBCA), who foster collaboration across the cultural community, strengthen organizational abilities to work at the highest levels.

In order to support individual artists, The fund created the Baker Artist Award program in 2009, in partnership with the GBCA, who manages the Baker Artist Portfolios and Award programs. Artists of all disciplines from the Baltimore-region are invited to create a free, online portfolio, which they can use to promote their work, and connect with curators, collaborators and other artists. Having a portfolio also allows artists to participate in a variety of opportunities to share, show, and sell their work throughout the year.

Tell us more about the Baker Artist Portfolios!

Every artist who has a Baker Artist Portfolio is automatically considered for one of the annual Baker Artist Awards, which awards $90,000 a year to artists across six disciplines. One artist each year receives the $40,000 Mary Sawyers Imboden Prize– the largest art prize in the region. Awardees also receive promotional support and showcase opportunities, including an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art for awardees in the Visual Arts and Interdisciplinary Arts categories.

As an artist yourself with two decades of experience in performance, museums, and theater, you have had a front row seat into Baltimore’s arts ecosystems. You have insight into what is working well in Baltimore and perhaps what could use more support and intentionality. Can you describe an experience you have had, artistically / professionally, that shaped your vision for Baltimore’s arts and culture sector?

Baltimore is such an incredible place to be an artist. It is filled with seemingly boundless creativity, incredible artistic talent, and opportunities to connect, collaborate, interact with, and learn from a robust creative community. I give so much credit for my own work to this city, which provided me space – both literal and figurative– to explore, and experiment, and create, and try, and fail, and succeed.

The arts in this city thrive on experimentation. There are tools and resources available to support creativity and expression, and a community of artists, administrators and other arts professionals who are accessible to connect with and learn from at any time. I believe that for all of these reasons, incredible things can grow here.

All that said, like the city itself, the arts here also certainly have challenges. Without deep philanthropic pockets, many organizations must compete for limited funding. The slow return of audiences post-COVID has also meant less revenue overall for organizations across the country, and has been felt particularly hard in the city.

The perception of Baltimore is also always a challenge in a city that often gets portrayed in the world as unsafe, and, undoubtedly can feel that way too. As blight remains and even reclaims some neighborhoods, it can be particularly hard in Baltimore to attract new audiences, especially from surrounding areas.

But this is why I believe in Baltimore’s art and artists so much. I believe that the unique creativity of Baltimore is not only the key to attracting all kinds of new visitors and residents, but that the more creative our city becomes, the more successful we will be in coming up with new ideas and approaches to help the city grow and thrive.

David London, Magician and Perfomance Artist

In your most recent role at the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance (GBCA) as Deputy Director, you spent the past decade working on and with the Baker Artist Portfolios and Baker Artist Awards, to make them more accessible and relevant to artists across the region. As one of the Baker Fund’s flagship programs, how do these awards and free online portfolio website create significant opportunities for Baltimore-based visual artists, performers, musicians, and writers? Can you talk about where the program was 10 years ago when you started (12?) and where they are now, how they will continue to operate in the future?

When I started working at the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance and working on the Baker Artist Awards program in 2013, I inherited a beautiful website, and a brilliantly constructed awards program. I have to give tremendous credit to the Melissa Warlow, Nancy Haragan, along with Steve Ziger and Connie Imboden from the Baker Fund Board of Governors, who began hatching the plan for the Baker Artist Awards around 2007, launching the program in 2008, and awarding the first artists in 2009.

Over the past 13 years, we have continuously updated the technology, refined the award structure, and introduced the $40,000 Mary Sawyers Imboden Prize–designed to be truly transformational in the life of an artist. We also added a variety of programmatic offerings available not just to awardees, but to any artist who creates a portfolio. Hundreds of artists from the site now participate in a variety of live events annually with program partners such as the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Peale, Current Space, Baltimore Theatre Project, City Lit Project, Contemporary Arts, Waterfront Partnership, WTMD, among others.

Today the Baker Portfolios serve over 700 artists per year, many of whom use their portfolio as their primary website. This year’s deadline is fast approaching. Artists have until January 31 to create or update their Baker Artist Portfolio in order to be considered for a 2025 Baker Artist Award. Click here to browse the Portfolios. If you are an artist interested in creating a portfolio for the first time, please visit www.bakerartist.org/welcome.

What is your vision as the new director for one of Baltimore’s most significant funders of art and culture? How do you want this foundation to change, expand, or support in the future under your new leadership? If your plans are realized, how will Baltimore look and operate differently in ten years? I think readers are concerned about federal funding for the arts over the next four years and hopeful that local champions will make Baltimore less vulnerable to federal cuts.

In my first few weeks at the Baker Fund, along with spending as much time as possible with Melissa Warlow to glean whatever knowledge I can from her nearly 40 years of service, I have been looking deeply at the existing objectives of the Baker Fund and assessing where I might pull inspiration from the past to look to the future.

I am taking a deeper look at our funding priorities: “Strengthening Organizational and Artistic Practices, Innovative Programs and Cultural Sector Collaboration,” and thinking about possible models that might allow for funding to more easily flow to artists through our arts organizations. And I have been thinking deeply about audiences, and how dollars can be strategically invested to attract, share, and grow the patrons for arts experiences, while helping to ensure that such experiences are accessible to as large an audience as possible.

I am also committed to refining our language around priorities, to help ensure clarity, accessibility, and ease of applying. Transitional moments like these are the ideal moment to examine how things are done to see if there is any opportunity to clarify and streamline the application and reporting associated with the grantmaking process. I’m also excited for the opportunity to continue contributing ideas to the Baker Artist Portfolios program and exploring ways that program can expand the support it offers to individual artists.

My vision for arts in Baltimore in 10 years would be that its organizations are thriving, that audiences for artistic programming are robust, and that we have even more great artists calling Baltimore home. I would also love for Baltimore to be known out in the world the way we know it here–a city filled with creativity, passion, experimentation and great art.

What other projects are you working on in your artist life?

I have spent the last few months upgrading the 200-year time machine that I built for the Peale Museum in 2018 into a “Present Time Machine”– the world’s first and only time machine designed to bring people to the exact place where the past meets the future. Earlier this week a team from Center for the Arts Gallery at Towson University came by to take the machine away, along with two other “objects of wonder’ to be part of their upcoming exhibition Alchemy & Reverie: A Cabinet of Curiosity, which runs January 31 – April 19.

After that, I am looking forward to returning to the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida later this year to present a performance lecture on Victorian Wonders and the history of early-American show business, in conjunction with the exhibition Conjuring The Spirit World, exploring the intersection of illusion, mystery and the otherworldly.

Reverie & Alchemy at Towson University

The William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund believes that arts and culture play a central role in the development and growth of healthy individuals and thriving communities and commits its resources to promote and sustain a vibrant arts and culture sector in metropolitan Baltimore. Its grants support organizational effectiveness, promote local artists and their work, and provide cultural experiences that welcome people of all backgrounds, enhance residents’ lives, and strengthen the region’s sense of cohesion and identity.

To learn more about applying to the Baker Fund, please visit www.bcf.org/baker To visit the Baker Artist Portfolios, please visit www.bakerartist.org.

Related Stories
The best weekly art openings, events, and calls for entry happening in Baltimore and surrounding areas.

This Week: Virtual artist talk with Kei Ito at UMBC, TU BLAQ Spaces artist talk + reception, SANDTOWN film premiere at SNF Parkway, Maryland Arts Day, The Future of Here exhibition opening at The Peale, Existence Beyond Code panel discussion at MCHC, Soil to Skin opening reception and more!

Baltimore art news updates from independent & regional media

This week's news includes: Glenstone Museum announces new exhibitions, the sublime Amy Sherald, Savannah G.M. Wood awarded Tabb Center humanities fellowship, from France to Baltimore, Ky Vassor installs work at Govans Presbyterian Church, remembering Susan Alcorn, and more!

The best weekly art openings, events, and calls for entry happening in Baltimore and surrounding areas.

This Week:  A Media Quilt Project video installation opening reception, TINY Art Soiree at Hotel Indigo, "Obscured Legacy" film screening at MCHC, BSO at the Lewis Museum, Future Histories opening reception at the Driskell Center, Inviting Light Kick-Off at the Parkway, and more!

Opinion Editorial by Nicholas Cohen, ED at Maryland Citizens for the Arts

Governor Moore’s proposal overlooks how crucial the arts have been to Maryland’s prosperity—and how pivotal they will remain in the future. Let us not turn our backs on the very policies that made Maryland a national model for the creative economy.