ART Philip Barter, new oil paintings and constructions in wood, Gleason Fine Art, Portland. gleasonfineart.com. Through June 29. “Voices of Design – 25 Years of Architalx,” interactive exhibition that showcases the power of design, through Sunday; “Blueberry Rakers,” photographs by David Brooks Stess, through Sunday; “A Taste of Modernism – The William S. Paley Collection,” […]

‘Surface Tension” makes a curatorial case about why Space Gallery in Portland has been looking particularly good for the past year or two. The works are by local artists whose work I have mostly seen before. But in this show, organized by erstwhile Bowdoin curator Diana Tuite, their conceptual edginess and a hip-but-grown-up elegance help […]

An old saw has it that the Visual Arts Center at Bowdoin is the box in which the College’s Museum of Art arrived in. Aside from the fact that the Center is junior to the Museum by about 85 years and aside from the fact that it pits Edward Larrabee Barnes, the Center’s designer and […]

Graphic designer Sarah Mohammadi earned her degree from Maine College of Art on Saturday, capping an educational experience that she hopes will yield travel abroad and the chance to work professionally overseas. She got some real-world experience by pitching in with MECA’s recent design process that resulted in a new logo for the Portland art […]

The upcoming appearance of “Stomp” at Merrill Auditorium, presented this Wednesday and Thursday by Portland Ovations (portlandovations.org) got me thinking about improvised instruments, such as trash cans and push brooms, and the human drive for making non-vocal music. The voice can be a wonderful instrument in itself, but since the Stone Age, man seems to […]

Creative fundraising helps to keep the fun and learning going at the Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine.

When Daisy Buchanan attends a party at Jay Gatsby’s mansion in the new film version of “The Great Gatsby,” she’s wearing a crystal-coated chandelier dress by Prada and a drool-worthy pearl and diamond headpiece by Tiffany. The look is the glamour of the Jazz Age personified. Such costumes were a big help to Carey Mulligan, […]

Midway through “The Woman Upstairs,” Claire Messud’s spellbinding, psychologically acute and deliberately claustrophobic new novel, a character explains to the first-person protagonist how our view of a story is framed by the way it begins. There’s no forgetting how 42-year-old Nora Eldridge begins her account of life as the woman upstairs — that characteristically “quiet […]