Baltimore News: Rebecca Hoffberger, Adam Frank, Sheri Booker

Big Fish: The Artful Work of Cara Ober, Founding Editor of BmoreArt
by Marion Wink
Published December 7 in Baltimore Fishbowl

Excerpt: I met Cara Ober at the BmoreArt office and gallery in the converted storefront at 2519 N. Charles Street where it shares space with one of its supporters, the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. Colorful paintings hang on the walls of a large, square room; an inviting arrangement of couches and chairs floats at its center. The coffee table holds the most recent editions of the magazine — The Collect Issue (13) and The Environment Issue (14) — as well as a couple of bowls of Halloween candy that Ober lifted from her twelve-year-old son.

“We had only been in here a few months when the pandemic hit,” Ober explained. “Rather than canceling the shows we had already promised to artists, we installed a projector on the ceiling and had the front windows frosted. We held openings out on the street. And now, we still project art every day after dark.”

Creative solutions connecting local artists with the community is a theme that came up again and again in our conversation, during which I came to understand that Ober has profoundly impacted the situation of the visual arts in Baltimore by seeing what’s missing in the infrastructure and filling that space — with media coverage, with parties, with exhibitions, with studio tours, with speaker series, and more. In fact, I walked out of there thinking, Ober IS the infrastructure of the art world in Baltimore. Well, she and a couple of museums or whatever.