Over 30 years of creativity and connection

Creative Alliance’s largest annual fundraiser, the Marquee Ball, is back and is still the wildest party in Baltimore!

This is more than a gala. It is a call to action to join us in investing in the transformative power of the arts. Your sponsorship will fund programs that inspire young minds, connect diverse communities, and further Baltimore’s role as a thriving hub of cultural innovation.

Shape the future of Baltimore

When you sponsor the Marquee Ball, you join a dedicated circle of changemakers committed to Baltimore’s brilliance. Your support turns vision into reality—funding youth arts and community festivals that define our city. Together, let’s strengthen the cultural fabric of the community we cherish and keep Baltimore a vibrant home for every artist and neighbor.

2026 Lifetime Achievement Award: Tom Hall

The Lifetime Achievement Award honors those who have lifted up the arts in Baltimore throughout the course of their careers. This year, we are honoring WYPR host and dedicated arts leader, Tom Hall

Tom Hall is the host of Midday, the award-winning, highly rated news and public policy program on WYPR Radio that features interviews with elected officials, community leaders, as well as thought provoking authors, artists, researchers, journalists, and scholars from around the world.

Tom joined the WYPR staff as the Host of Choral Arts Classics in 2003. After 10 years as the Culture Correspondent and then host of Maryland Morning, Tom became the host of Midday in September 2016.  In 2020, Tom and the Midday team won an Edward R. Murrow Regional Award, one of journalism’s most prestigious awards.

In 2006, as the Music Director of the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, Tom received an Emmy Award for Christmas with Choral Arts, a special that aired on WMAR television, the ABC affiliate in Maryland, for 21 years.  Early in his career, he was named “Best New Broadcast Journalist” by the Maryland Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.  Baltimore Magazine and the City Paper have named him “Best Local Radio Personality”  and “Best Talk Show Host” multiple times.

His publications include articles in the Baltimore Sun, Style Magazine, and Baltimore Magazine, and he is a co-author of The Bach Passions in Our Time:  Contending with the Legacy of Antisemitism, published by the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies.

Tom serves on the board of directors of the Baltimore Community Foundation.  He lives in Baltimore, with his wife, Linell Smith.  Their daughter, Miranda Rose Hall, is a television screen writer and playwright based in New York.

2026 Golden Formstone Award: Rosiland Cauthen

The Golden Formstone Award honors those whose commitment to the arts, innovation, education, and culture, lifts Baltimore everyday. This year, the honor goes to Rosiland Cauthen, Executive Director of the Baltimore School for the Arts.

Roz Cauthen was named Executive Director of the Baltimore School for the Arts in July 2021. She has been at BSA since 2016, beginning as the head of Theatre Department.

Rosiland Cauthen is deeply committed to equity and access, and she has successfully led the equity work at BSA during the 2020-21 school year. She will continue the work to develop an Equity Action Plan to take the next step of implementing the equity initiatives at the school, to refine processes, policies, and programs that support an inclusive learning environment.

Focused on creating innovative programming, and continuing the excellence in arts and academics that our school is known for, Rosiland Cauthen also gravitated toward promoting healing and restoration in the classrooms, studios, and on stages.

Rosiland Cauthen came to the school from Center Stage, where she served as the Director of Community Programs. Cauthen is a graduate of the M.F.A in theatre program at Towson University, where she has taught courses as adjunct faculty and directed their Theatre Arts Mainstage productions.

2026 Marquee Ball Honorary Chair

This year’s  Marquee Ball Honorary Chair is acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Ainsley Burrows

Ainsley Burrows (b. 1974, Kingston, Jamaica; based in Baltimore, MD) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work excavates untold histories and unspoken emotional terrain. Raised in Brooklyn, Burrows first found his voice through poetry, music, and performance, disciplines that continue to shape the physicality, rhythm, and psychological intensity of his paintings.

A life-altering car accident in his early twenties redirected him from an MBA program toward a full commitment to art. He toured internationally as a poet and performer before turning decisively to painting in 2009, translating his literary instincts into a bold visual language. Between 2016 and 2019, he completed The Maroons: Rebellion, a 125-painting series confronting resistance, memory, and diasporic identity. Select works debuted in his first solo museum exhibition at SUNY Oneonta in 2022, marking his formal entry into the contemporary art landscape.

Working primarily on large-scale canvases, Burrows has developed four interrelated methodologies—NeoChaos, Raktism, String Theory, and Thirdism—each expanding his investigation of abstraction. NeoChaos channels sweeping gestures and saturated color into visceral, expressive fields. Raktism introduces dimensional inquiry, probing boundaries, time, and spatial perception within the flatness of the canvas. String Theory, informed by scientific cosmology, engages full-body movement in dynamic arcs and kinetic lines. These approaches culminate in Thirdism, a subtractive process through which luminous figures and emotional topographies emerge from layered intensity—order revealed through disruption.

In 2024, Burrows was awarded the prestigious Joshua Johnson Council (JJC) Residency, a collaboration between the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Maryland Institute College of Art, affirming his growing institutional recognition.

He has presented solo exhibitions at Rush Arts (Philadelphia), Creative Alliance (Baltimore), DC Arts Center (Washington, DC), Gallery in the Sky (World Trade Center, Baltimore), and Quid Nunc Art Gallery (Baltimore). His work has appeared in group exhibitions at 11:Eleven Gallery (Washington, DC), Arlington Arts Center (VA), Amos Eno Gallery (Brooklyn), LaiSun Keane Gallery (Boston), and O Santuario Galleria (Lisbon). His paintings are held in notable private collections, including those of Hill Harper, Jeffrey Wright, Lisane Basquiat, Raymond McGuire, and the Capital One Collection.

Burrows’ practice is driven by a singular pursuit: to translate lived experience, ancestral memory, and emotional complexity into abstraction that feels at once urgent and expansive.