A Word From the Commission
For decades visitors have traveled to Annapolis to walk our colonial city street and admire our outstanding architecture. Throughout the town you will also find an impressive array of outdoor sculpture, paintings, murals and stained glass in public spaces that will tempt you to explore the city for its art alone. Follow the footsteps of artist Charles Willson Peale, Louis Comfort Tiffany, William H. Rinehart, and John Hesselius, and an array of international award winning sculptors. Today new artists are adding to the creative legacies or our City. Murals commissioned by the Art in Public Places Commission adorn walls throughout the City. We invite you to explore Art in Annapolis in the City’s historic house museums, its churches and its cemeteries, the State House the oldest in the USA in continuous use) the United States Naval Academy and St. John’s College, one of American’s oldest schools.
Note: The City houses too many collections of art to be listed in their entirety in a catalogue of this kind. The Art Collection of the Naval Academy includes thousands of paintings and prints and many outstanding sculptures. Tours are provided by the USNA Visitor’s Center. There are over 10 small museums in this City and numerous art galleries and regular art walks. Local artists and musicians are featured in coffee shops throughout the town. Annapolis is alive with the performing arts with numerous successful community theatres and the regional center, Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts, celebrating decades of successful ventures. In this catalogue we have tried to focus on art that is free and accessible to the public mostly outdoors, grouped by subject matter and arranged in ways that encourage walking and discovery. Annapolis is a place where culture and art have driven the spirit of America’s first peacetime Capital since its recognition in colonial times as the Athens of America. It is a City displaying 300 years of art, a City art gallery without walls.