Screens are seasonal.  You might be hard pressed in winter and fall to walk the neighborhoods of Northeast and Southeast Baltimore and find more than a handful of painted screens. But should you go hunting in "high season" in the late spring and summer, be prepared to walk the streets of Highlandtown, Canton and Fells Point and see what you find. Look up on the second floors as well.

Several guaranteed year round exhibitions of painted screens can be found all over town.

Here are some of the most reliable destinations.

Hatton Senior Center

2825 Fait Avenue (corner of S. Linwood) Canton 21224

Canton’s Hatton Senior Center has always been a favorite site.
Be sure to check out the exterior windows of the Center. Each one was decorated with a scene from the neighborhood by a Master Screen Painter when the building was designed in 1989 as part of a percent for art program. Enjoy paintings of landmarks by Johnny Eck, Frank Cipolloni, Ben Richardson, Ted Richardson, Leroy Bennett,

Tom Lipka, Dee Herget. If they are not in the windows, check inside during business hours. http://www.baltimorecity.gov/neighborhoods/facilities/senior.html

410-396-9025

Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Southeast Anchor Library

3100 Eastern Avenue, Highlandtown 21224  410-396-1580 Enoch Pratt Library
In 1976 a savvy librarian commissioned screen painter Richard Oktavec, the son of screen painting’s inventor and then tradition bearer, to paint four aluminum window screens with scenes of the landmarks of southeast Baltimore neighborhood--The Patterson Park Pagoda, The Broadway Market, The Shot Tower and the rowhouses. They hung in the storefront library, a former auto parts shop, until the new library was built and opened in 2007. Oktavec’s paintings have been cleaned and reframed in typical wood grained frames replicating the typical window treatment of an earlier day and now are on permanent exhibit behind the circulation desk.

American Visionary Art Museum

800 Key Highway at Inner Harbor Baltimore 21230 www.avam.org 410-244-1900
The museum’s newest addition, the Jim Rouse Center for Visionary Thought, honors the vision of Urban Planner James Rouse with a 2005 installation of four full-sized brick and formstone row houses bedecked with 20 screens by the Masters of screen art and their students. Get a quick history lesson and watch the 28 minute documentary film, "The Screen Painters" in the Rowhouse theater.

The Midway Bar

421 E. Baltimore Street, Baltimore 21202

In a fit of patriotism during the Bicentennial Year (1976) the owner of the Midway Bar in the midst of Baltimore's infamous "Block" applied full-sized custom-made screens to the six windows of the building's facade. Screen Painter Ben Richardson, enjoying his own need to celebrate America built and painted the scenes: Baltimore's Washington Monument, the Shot Tower and the USS Constellation, New York's Statue of Liberty and two great ships under full sail.

Museum Collections
One of William Oktavec’s finest and earliest Red Bungalow screens dating from as early as 1930 is on view at the Maryland Historical Society, 901 West Monument Street, Baltimore 21202 in the Mount Vernon section of the city.

Sightings

Tell us when and where you find a screen—on a specific address or in the attic.

Send us a picture. Tell us what you know about it. Or let our experts have a go at it. 

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or send them to:

The Painted Screen Society

P.O. Box 12122
Baltimore, Md.
21281

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