A renowned Black pianist will perform in Annapolis. Is it a milestone?

Twenty years ago, José Luis Novo was applying for a job in Annapolis.

It was just two years after the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra had decided to part ways with the only Black conductor in its history, voting against renewing his contract over declining ticket sales.

Among the questions the search committee asked Novo, one stands out in his memory.

“They said, ‘We would like to offer you the job, but we are afraid that you are too progressive for our audience,’ ” Novo recalled. “And maybe they asked me, ‘How would you approach that?’ ”

“And I said, ‘Well, that’s a good point.’ I said, ‘I will depart from where your audience is right now.’ ”

Annapolis is a city with a racist past. There’s just no nice way of saying that. It was a marketplace for enslaved people; it carries the burden of lynchings and a long record of discrimination, both overt and subtle.

The arts, well, have always had their own problems.

Despite a widespread fondness for past glories like the music of Carr’s Beach, a segregated resort where renowned Black musicians performed, diversity in arts can be hard to find in Annapolis.

“Once upon a time, there was like nothing,” said Darin Gilliam, an arts promotor and educator who is part owner of ArtFarm Studios. “There was, I mean, nothing.”

An Annapolis High School graduate, she came home from college in the early 2000s and joined arts advocacy groups, only to find she was the only person of color involved.

“I mean, every single event — every single event — there was not a person of color leading it,” Gilliam said. “There was not a person of color attending, and it was kind of depressing.”

This weekend, two guest artists will appear in the Annapolis Symphony’s Masterworks Series. While neither is a first, their appearance represents both progress and the challenges in diversifying local arts.

Korean American composer Nicky Sohn will premiere her first symphony, commissioned by the ASO through a California program that gives young composers a chance to work on a grand scale. Then Awadagin Pratt will perform Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4., a traditional piece for orchestral music interpreted by something of a rarity — a successful classical pianist, educator and conductor who is not only Black but who has made confronting racism part of his art.

“One of the things that orchestras get criticized very often for is that we don’t change easily and we are kind of elitist,” Novo said. “For my whole tenure with the Annapolis Symphony, I’ve been fighting that from the start.”

Annapolis has more than the symphony. It is a small-town cultural arts center, where dozens of small stages host a variety of musical genres. Eight performing arts companies put on multiple productions each year. Dozens of galleries and museums expand the visual arts beyond boat paintings.

Maryland Hall, the biggest stage in town, seats 725. Plans for public art works can generate enormous interest. The city has had two poets laureate.

So, why when you see a focus on artists of color does it stand out as noteworthy? Why are audiences so overwhelmingly white when the population of Annapolis is 35% Black or Hispanic?

“I, myself, have played just about everywhere there is to play in Annapolis,” said Kelly Bell, whose namesake Kelly Bell Band has played what he’s dubbed “phat blues” for 30 years. “But that’s because of the popularity of the act and the money that people think it’s going to bring in, not because they’re trying to spread their diversity values.”

“I’ve been on radio stations where they told me I was too Black.”

There are groups that promote Black art and culture in Annapolis, such as those that organize the Kunta Kinte Heritage Festival and the Annapolis Juneteenth Parade. The Banneker Douglass Museum focuses exclusively on this, while several groups, including the Arts Council of Anne Arundel County, the Maryland State Archives, Maryland Hall and Visit Annapolis, have programs exploring it.

“It’s important that we collectively push to center [diverse] artists in our state’s capital to preserve, celebrate, and share the rich diversity that is Maryland,” museum Director Chanel C. Johnson wrote in an email.

While people of color perform and stage exhibits in Annapolis, it is hard to find any place where you can walk in and expect to be blown away by work from the Black or Hispanic experience.

“The talent is there, but it feels like sometimes, when specifically Black and Latino faces in the arts get pushed to the front, it’s more to like check a box or to say, ‘Oh, look,’ we’ve got this one Black artist that we work with, or this one Latino artist that we work with. ‘Look at us, we’re doing a great job,’ ” Gilliam said.

It’s not just Annapolis, of course, that struggles with diversity in the arts. It’s a broader culture that doesn’t always respect diverse viewpoints from diverse artists.

Bell said he often runs into difficulty with the national anthem — something he’s sung thousands of times — because of the threats to enslaved Black people and indentured servants written into the third verse by Francis Scott Key, a slave owner and anti-abolitionist.

“Why in the hell would that be our national anthem?” Bell asked. “We are a diverse nation, and at a difficult time in our country where we’re talking about immigration and everything else, we’re still singing that damn song.”

There have been changes, many of them for the better.

Maryland Hall showcases artists of color, as does ArtFarm. But often they struggle to find artists that fit both goals, local roots and diversity.

Annapolis High School, among the most diverse schools in Anne Arundel County, has an arts magnet program, Apex Arts. It produces a significant number of young Latino and Black artists, some of whom will have their senior projects on display at Maryland Hall through May 17.

Many go to college to study art and never return, choosing cities with bigger and more diverse arts communities.

Half the board members at the county arts council, which provides grants and other help to smaller arts programs, are people of color, including Gilliam. Many of them work in the arts.

You can find minority artists if you know where to look. Black musicians and poets like Davonne D’Neil and Gayle Danley will be part of this year’s Annapolis Songbird Festival featuring women artists on April 20. The Kelly Bell Band, with its mix of styles that can send Blues snobs into conniptions, will play at Club Vibe on May 25.

Fifty percent of the Annapolis Symphony Academy classes are students of color. It didn’t exist when Novo arrived here 20 years ago, and one of the goals was to give minority students learning and performance opportunities that public schools cannot match.

“By the time we actually opened the academy, we were exactly 50-50,” Novo said. “So it has been surprisingly easy to stick to the goal.”

The audience is younger than when Novo started with the ASO in September 2004, and regular performances at the Music Center Strathmore in Montgomery County have helped reach a more diverse audience. The music, like Sohn and Pratt on Friday and Saturday, has changed, too.

“I think all that mix is hopefully going to produce the result that we want,” Novo said.

The Annapolis Symphony Orchestra will perform the fifth concert of this season’s Masterworks series, “Roman Festivals” featuring the World Première of Nicky Sohn’s Symphony No. 1 and pianist Awadagin Pratt playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Maryland Hall and at 3 p.m. Sunday at the Music Center at Strathmore. General Admission tickets are $33-$91, plus fees. Student tickets are available for $10.

Rick Hutzell

rick.hutzell@thebaltimorebanner.com

Rick Hutzell is the Annapolis columnist for The Baltimore Banner. He writes about what's happening today, how we got here and where we're going next. The former editor of Capital Gazette, he led the newspaper to a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 2018 mass shooting in its newsroom.

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