Students from Hamilton Elementary - Middle School and City Neighbors Charter School are featured in the March First Fridays event. Support these young people as well as other local artists from 6 to 9pm on Friday, March 7th, at the Hamilton Gallery! Light fare to be served.

The Hamilton Gallery is located at:

2927 Hamilton Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21214
(right next door to the Hamilton Arts Collective)

We're gearing up for the Hamilton Art Crawl 2008, slated to happen this coming Spring. This will also be the first time we've featured an Arts & Crafts marketplace, affectionately titled The Hamilton Bizarre.

Applications are now being accepted! Download the application form now at the following links:

Windows DOC format

Adobe Reader PDF format

Application deadline is MARCH 7th 2008.

DON'T BE LATE!

Some more details:

Application Form Due: Friday, March 7th

Date of Event: Saturday, May 3rd from 9:00am-noon
Set up and breakdown: Saturday, May 3rd from 8:00am-9:00am.
Everything must be cleaned up by 2:00pm.
MORE INFO AVAILABLE ON THE APPLICATION.

Lots of developments as of late, folks...

-->The HAC can stay where it is, in the same building!
-->The main performance space is now on the second floor!
-->The art gallery is now on the FIRST FLOOR!
-->Plans for the third floor are TOP SECRET!

Details on these and more developments can be found on our MySpace Blog, as well as in this downloadable PDF file.

Please contact Steve if you can be of any assistance. Thanks!

Hamilton Arts Collective may be looking for new home

The Hamilton Arts Collective, a two-year-old gathering place for Northeast Baltimore artists and arts lovers, has been forced to shut its doors after city fire inspectors declared its Harford Road headquarters unsafe for public gatherings.

"We are in somewhat of a holding pattern," said Steve Thomas, the group's managing director. "One of the main things that we need to determine is whether or not the building is suitable for us even to start doing renovations."

The key, Thomas said, will be the cost of updating the 80-year-old building's fire escape to meet code requirements. The collective operates out of the second and third floors of a commercial building at 5440 Harford Road.

Thomas said there have been indications the cost could reach into six figures, a sum he said is "way out of [the] price range" of the nonprofit organization's budget. The group hopes to bring in an architect or engineer soon, to come up with an estimate.

If the cost is prohibitive, Thomas said, the group may have to look for other space in the area. That could prove difficult, however, since the city only recently changed the building's zoning so that it could be used for assemblies, and may not be willing to designate a second building in the same area for such purposes.

"There's no way that we want to give up on this at all," said Thomas, refusing to assign blame for the group's situation on any of the city's regulatory agencies, which he said are "simply trying to keep people safe."

"We're going through the school of hard knocks, that's for sure," Thomas says. "The folks who are the board members, this is the first time we've ever tried to do something like this in our lives. We just wanted to have some shows and display art."

The building, which has been used as a meeting hall, photographer's studio and live theater in previous incarnations, houses a pizza restaurant on the first floor. It has not been affected, Thomas said.

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Visit the Baltimore Sun's Critical Mass blog. Thanks to Chris Kaltenbach of the Baltimore Sun for posting news about our situation.