“It should be a great consolation to you to know that, for a while, you fulfilled your dream, and on your own terms. Do you know how few human beings ever do that?”

-Grace Hartigan in a letter to George Ciscle on June 10, 1989 after learning of the closing of the gallery. At the time, the late artist was director of MICA’s Hoffberger School of Painting.

A Singular Vision

By Linell Smith

It was clean, spare and filled with light – a space that invited you to drop in and strike up a conversation with an artist’s work. 

In 1985, when George Ciscle opened his gallery on the alley-like Morton Street, he introduced many Baltimoreans to a new way of encountering art. As an artist and educator himself, Ciscle dreamed of exhibiting provocative works with themes that could knit together artists and community members – enriching everyone through the experience.

By all accounts, that is exactly what he did. Over the next four years, the former carriage house became a center for exploring the minds of both unknown and established artists through their paintings, sculpture, works on paper, hand-painted photos, ceramics, even the matchstick creations of the self-taught.

“It was a very nontraditional gallery space at time where you didn’t have that for the arts,” recalls Fred Lazarus IV, director emeritus of Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). “George used the space as a forum to present people and artists and ideas that were really not being shown elsewhere.” 

During its four-year run, the gallery featured 32 solo and 10 group exhibitions.

It celebrated young artists, many just emerging from the creative kiln of MICA. It helped seed an audience for the American Visionary Arts Museum. It raised awareness of AIDS, and the need to fund outreach and treatment, through a groundbreaking fund-raiser for HIV-Experience Resources Organization (HERO). It displayed the sensibilities of LGBTQ artists and themes of social justice. It elevated unconventional and provocative work at a time when the federal government was questioning the purpose of art -- and the art world was seeking to redefine itself.

Rebecca Hoffberger, founder and director of the American Visionary Arts Museum, says the gallery’s 1987 exhibit of American outsider art, work created by self-taught artists who often had mental illness, helped pave the way to the opening of AVAM eight years later. The show introduced Baltimore to an art world operating by its own vividly original rules. 

“Whether as a gallery owner or activist in the community, George has always been a consummate teacher,” she says. “And I feel that his work in curation has been an extension of the things he loves most.”

The diverse voices in his shows – whether solo, two-person or group – provide a portrait of Ciscle’s desire not only to advocate for challenging perspectives but also to build a community that could acknowledge them. By the time he realized he needed to extend his professional platform, The George Ciscle Gallery had accomplished its mission: Providing experiences that both informed and lingered with its artists, patrons and admirers.

Critics praised its “beautifully installed exhibits of venturesome art.” The late art critic John Dorsey called “one of the most imaginative contemporary art galleries we’ve ever had in Baltimore.”

A SIngular Vision

The gallery was different, according to its artists. So different, in fact, that many people weren’t quite sure what it was.

“George had to really educate the public,” remembers sculptor John Ruppert. “People would come in and ask ‘Is this work for sale?’ That gallery was a great inspiration to the art presence here in Baltimore. He really got behind his artists and was very dedicated to them.”

Artist Trace Miller praises the way Ciscle staged and curated shows. “George could make anything look good. I remember you’d walk into his gallery on Morton Street and it was like walking into a gallery in Chelsea, New York. It had this air of professionalism.”

 “George was not afraid of showing really large works that probably wouldn’t sell because most people wanted stuff that was going to fit on their wall,” remembers painter Joan Stolz. “He didn’t seem to be so concerned with what would be a commercial success.”

Lazarus says that the ideas and insights forged in those gallery days formed the basis of Ciscle’s future curatorial career at The Contemporary and at MICA. Working with young artists and students led Ciscle to conceive of the “un-museum” that further defied the existing conventions for exhibiting art.

“The gallery gave George the opportunity in a sense to seed his own philosophy, and then the Contemporary let him expand it in a really significant way,” Lazarus notes.

“George always saw the triangle between the art, the artist, and the community, and considered his work as basically bringing those three pieces together. While the traditional gallery would look at the art from the point of view of potential patrons, George was much more concerned about the impact that the show and the artist would have on the community.”

But he was also devoted to the work of helping art lovers to build their private collections. Stan Mazaroff, an early board member of The Contemporary, says that Ciscle introduced him and his wife Nancy Dorman to the work of the late artist Keith Martin in 1985. With the gallery owner’s guidance, the couple purchased watercolors by Martin as well by another gallery artist, the late Robert Reid. He calls Ciscle “spirited, knowledgeable, innovative and intellectually courageous.”

“I learned early on that George is a wonderful, wonderful teacher,” Mazaroff says. “Nancy and I have benefitted greatly from his knowledge and guidance and spirit.”

Lazarus says The George Ciscle Gallery made art accessible at a time when many curators believed that “art should speak for itself.”

“He was always trying to make sure that the art said something that was comprehensible to the audience who was visiting the show,” he recalls. “George was all about written materials that helped articulate the voice of the artist.”

“I was striving to tell a story through the art work,” Ciscle says. “Even in group shows, the idea was to tell a story – whether identity politics or social justice -- from multiple viewpoints. It was an opportunity for me to create dialogue between artists’ works.”

Most of the artists, he says, had never before shared a public stage with one another – much less with the Baltimore community. The lasting gift of The George Ciscle Gallery is that it brought everyone together, and did just that.

Linell Smith 

An award-winning journalist, Linell Smith is a senior editor and writer for Johns Hopkins Medicine publications. In her 30 years as a staff writer and columnist for the Baltimore Sun Papers, she covered a variety of subjects including health, aging, the arts and cultural trends. Her work has been recognized nationally by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Headliners Competition and earned the prestigious Dart Society Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma. As a free-lancer, she has written for publications ranging from the Washington Post Magazine to Sports Illustrated.