Tour Information

Baltimore City Tour

Friday, November 22
1:00 PM–5:00 PM

Your bus tour will visit many of Baltimore’s neighborhoods. We will first visit Federal Hill Park where you can enjoy a scenic view of the Baltimore Harbor and the downtown skyline. Next we visit Fort McHenry, where we will stand and view the harbor where Francis Scott Key gazed through the fog of the dawn’s early light and was inspired to write the historic words to the Star Spangled Banner. In the Fort we will see how early American soldiers lived during this era. After visiting the fort ,we will take a driving tour of the Mount Vernon neighborhood, viewing the Walters Art Museum, The Engineers Club, Peabody Conservatory of Music, and the beautiful Mount Vernon Methodist Church. We will pass the famous Westminster Cemetery where Edgar Alan Poe is buried on our way back to the Convention Center.

Chesapeake Watershed Environmental and Ecojustice Tour

Saturday, November 23
9:00 AM–12:00 PM

We invite you to join us for a water-centered look at ways that local communities are responding to broader environmental and ecojustice issues as they come to bear on the Chesapeake watershed. This tour will visit several sites in the Baltimore Harbor area, where participants will hear directly from local activists about their efforts to protect and restore their community’s aquatic resources and waterfront neighborhoods, which have borne disproportionate environmental degradation. Representatives from Blue Water Baltimore and other local organizations will help guide our tour of the Charm City’s recuperating waterfront.
 

Jacob Lawrence’s Genesis Series at the Walters Art Museum

Saturday, November 23
10:00 AM–12:00 PM

Painter Jacob Lawrence is known for using a series format to render in colorful expressive imagery and text the narrative stories of historical African American figures like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Each of the eight works on view in Jacob Lawrence’s Genesis Series (1990) describes a passage from the book of Genesis in the King James version of the Bible. The series reflects Lawrence’s youthful memories of passionate sermons about the Creation given by ministers at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem where he was baptized in 1932. The Genesis Series, loaned from Eddie and Sylvia Brown’s Baltimore collection, features the same unity and visual eloquence of his earlier series and has a powerful, expressive impact. Accompany your private docent throughout this limited-time exhibit at the Baltimore Walters Art Museum. Tours are limited to 25 people at once and will take 20 minutes. You'll then be free to explore the rest of the museum.

Manuscript Tour of the Walters Art Museum

Saturday, November 23
10:00 AM–12:00 PM

The Walters Art Museum houses one of the finest manuscript collections in the country and is especially rich in religious works. Join Lynley Anne Herbert from the department of rare books and manuscripts for a private, behind-the-scenes tour of some of the most exquisite and culturally diverse Biblical manuscripts in the collection, including works in Greek, Latin, Russian, Armenian, Ge’ez, and Arabic. Tours are limited to fifteen people at once and will take thirty minutes. You will then be free to explore the rest of the museum on your own. Examples of what might be shown include a Greek Gospel Lectionary (1594), the famous Armenian T’oros Roslin Gospels (1262), a rare Islamic Gospel Book (1684), an Ottonian Gospel Book in Latin (circa 1000), Ethiopian Gospel Books in Ge’ez (fourteenth and sixteenth century), and a Russian Old Believers Apocalypse (eighteenth century).

Saturday or Sunday: Washington DC Transportation

Saturday, November 23, 12:00 PM–5:00 PM or
Sunday, November 24, 12:00 PM–5:00 PM

Treat yourself to the best of the nation's capital on this five-hour day trip. The bus will leave from the Baltimore Convention Center and travel to the famous National Mall of Washington, DC. Participants will have the opportunity to visit one or more of several landmarks, museums, and other national sites on their own, many of which are complimentary. More information can be found here to plan your visit: http://www.si.edu/Visit/Index/map-mall

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Saturday, November 23, 12:00 PM–5:00 PM

This tour will provide a docent-led tour of the museum's permanent exhibition, "The Holocaust," which includes over 900 artifacts, 70 video monitors, and four theaters with historic film footage and eyewitness testimonies. The tour will include a special visit to the museum's library and archives, with information about the museum's academic resources. Additional museum exhibitions can also be viewed: "Some Were Neighbors: Collaboration and Complicity in the Holocaust," "Remember the Children: Daniel's Story," "A Dangerous Lie: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and "From Memory to Action: Meeting the Challenge of Genocide." Participants will board a bus from the Baltimore Convention Center and travel to Washington, DC and back for this special inside look into the museum.
 

Fell's Point Ghost Walk

Saturday, November 23
7:00 PM–9:00PM

Picture Fell's Point, in Baltimore, Maryland, as it was: a rowdy seaport town, the birthplace of the sleek and dangerous clipper ship. Its streets full of sailors from foreign lands spilling off ships, immigrants anxious to start a new life, ladies of the night looking to make ends meet, and all the characters looking to make a living off the maritime industry. Given this explosive combination, is it any wonder that many spirits remained behind? Join us under the cover of night to explore the many haunted pubs, shops, and residences. But don't stray too far from the group because you never know when you'll find yourself face-to-face with the unknown. The Original Fell's Point Ghost Walk lasts approximately one hour and is an entirely outdoor walking tour. A bus ride from the Convention Center to Fell's Point and back will be arranged.

Yoga: Special Smithsonian Exhibitions at the Freer Sackler Museum of Asian Art

Sunday, November 24
12:00 PM–5:00 PM

Participants will board a bus at the Baltimore Convention Center and travel to Washington DC to the Freer Sackler Museum of Asian Art. The curator of the Sackler Gallery will give a private tour of the special exhibit "Yoga: The Art of Transformation" and the complementary exhibit "Yogis in the European Imagination." Through masterpieces of Indian sculpture and painting, "Yoga: The Art of Transformation" explores yoga’s goals, its Hindu, as well as Buddhist, Jain, and Sufi manifestations, its means of transforming body and consciousness, and its profound philosophical foundations. The first exhibition to present this leitmotif of Indian visual culture, it also examines the roles that yogis and yoginis played in Indian society for over two thousand years. This exhibit includes more than 120 works dating from the second to the early twentieth century. Temple sculptures, devotional icons, illustrated manuscripts, and court paintings—as well as colonial and early modern photographs, books, and films—illuminate yoga’s central tenets and its obscured histories. Borrowed from thirty museums and private collections in India, Europe, and the United States, the highlights include an installation that reunites three monumental stone yogini goddesses from a tenth century Chola temple, ten folios from the first illustrated compilation of asanas (yogic postures)—made for a Mughal emperor in 1602—and Thomas Edison’s Hindoo Fakir (1906), the first movie ever produced about India. Visitors will also have an opportunity to view "Yoga in the European Imagination," a complementary exhibit with some forty European prints and books featuring images of yogis, fakirs, and sadhus. Dating from the sixteenth to early twentieth century, they provide a deeper look at European perceptions of South Asian ascetics.

Historic Religious Architecture Tour of Baltimore

Monday, November 25
1:00 PM–5:00 PM

As a major port city on the boarder of North and South, Baltimore developed a distinctive and varied religious landscape from the late-eighteenth through the twentieth century. The early histories of two of the nation’s largest religious groups, Roman Catholics and Methodists, are also anchored in the city. This tour will visit landmark buildings designed by architects of both local and national distinction. These will include the Basilica (originally Cathedral) of the Assumption designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe and distinctive historic buildings erected by Lutherans, Jews, Episcopalians, and other groups. Included are stained-glass windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany and other artists. Tour participants will experience the development Baltimore’s religious architecture from the revival styles of the nineteenth century to the modernist buildings of the twentieth. Participants will see how historic houses of worship are integrated into the life of the city and its congregations today.