This past Thursday night, festive crowds gathered on the cobblestones at Mount Vernon Place to celebrate the annual lighting of Baltimore’s Washington Monument. The statue of George Washington looked regal as ever, perched atop his marble column amidst the colored lights and fireworks, but the venerable structure has suffered nearly two hundred years of wear and tear. The truth is, it could use a makeover, and, as Aaron Henkin reports, it’s about to get one.
Find out more about the restoration efforts of the Mount Vernon Place Conservancy
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Madison Smartt Bell is best known as a novelist, but he has always written short fiction as well. Releasing a collection of seemingly unrelated short stories is no easy feat in the evolving world of publishing, but Bell has found a rather unique approach. He joins producer Lisa Morgan to talk about his new book, Zig Zag Wanderer, which brings together two decades of short stories set in the US, Haiti, and beyond.
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This holiday season, local artists might want to add to their holiday wish-lists a “Ruby.” Over the next year, The Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance will be awarding a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in Rubys Grants to qualified applicants seeking to fund new creative projects. GBCA Grants Program Manager Sonja Cendak visits with The Signal’s Aaron Henkin to talk about how the program works.
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After a long career as a visual artist, Baltimore painter Jean-Pierre Weill has written his first book. It’s a children’s book – for adults – and it’s an elegantly simple crystallization of our grownup search for happiness through a maze of doubts and longings. Actually, to say that Weill has ‘written’ this book is to credit him with only half the work he’s put into it. Each page of the one hundred and eighty four pages in this story is supplemented with the author’s original artwork, done in watercolor and pen & ink. Here’s Jean-Pierre Weill reading from his children’s-book-for-adults, The Well of Being.