THOUGH THESE THREE represent only the most historically visible of the city’s artists, the current vein of work being produced, much of it by the city’s majority black population, is fueled by many of the same conditions that have long made Baltimore a site of such originality. The longstanding availability of cheap space in which to work and experiment combined with the interconnected collegiality of its arts communities has fostered this energy, even as Baltimore’s residents, artistic and otherwise, struggle with the city’s dire political conditions. This paradox — the devil’s bargain of a city that operates as a laboratory for bold visions in exchange for social and economic precariousness — is at the heart of the city’s creative life.

The option to leave for somewhere bigger, more “important,” is always present, which makes staying a conscious act of loyalty. (Adam Jones, the Orioles’ most popular player for the last 10 seasons, once quipped that his favorite place in Baltimore was the airport; fans forgave him.) But the best way to understand the city’s strangeness — its ability to be not a lesser New York or a quieter Atlanta — is the richness of its underground, a place that feels very much alive in Baltimore. The work of the musician Abdu Ali, for example, combines the influences of punk, rap and Baltimore club (the city’s explosive, ecstatic brand of hip-hop inflected house music) to create something bracingly new. A gender nonconforming artist, Ali spoke about the need to recognize the contributions of women and queer artists to the city’s musical history — particularly the pioneers of Baltimore club, such as Miss Tony, who recorded tracks and spun records in drag through most of the ’90s, and K-Swift, one of the city’s most popular young D.J.s at the time of her death in 2008 — while also expanding the scope of what’s possible in the city. In 2013, Ali co-founded a concert and party series called Kahlon, which had the explicit goal of putting alternative and experimental black, L.G.B.T.Q. and women-identified artists on the same stage. As a Baltimore native, Ali noticed that too many of the shows they were going to, often dominated by straight, white artists, “didn’t reflect what the city really is, and what brings the charm to the city.”

“It’s the only city left that’s cheap enough to have a bohemia,” John Waters told me, still willing, on a hectic day, to fulfill his lifetime role as ambassador to Baltimore’s creative byways. “It used to be people said, ‘I moved here,’ and people said, ‘Why?’ And now, when I say I have an apartment in New York, people say, ‘Why?’ It’s the opposite of what it used to be.” (As if his committed relationship with the city needed any more emphasis, a huge exhibition of his visual art, “John Waters: Indecent Exposure,” opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art last fall.) In the wake of the family-friendly musical adaptations of “Hairspray” (1988), including a live television version two years ago that reached more than 11 million viewers, it’s easy to forget how subversive much of Waters’s work remains. “Pink Flamingos” has not been tamed by time; if anything, it might be even more shocking now, removed from its immediate post-60s context of ritualized taboo breaking. The entire movie feels like looking through a keyhole into a very particular, and quite varied, fetish party. A large woman in a baby crib relentlessly demands eggs; a man flexes his anus (in close-up!) in time to “Surfin’ Bird”; a live chicken is crushed between a couple as they have sex. Divine is treated throughout as a kind of dominatrix deity, responding to all dissent with violence. There are many places in America, one imagines, that would disinherit the person who produced such scenarios, or at least treat them warily. But Waters has become a synecdoche for the city — the embrace of queerness, of “perversion” of all kinds, a stand-in for Baltimore’s willingness to accept all comers and to make art out of whatever’s around.