Arts

Arc printing

David Driskell’s PMA retrospective
For more than 50 years David Driskell, in his art and his distinguished academic career, has been a creative force in the intersection of modernist art and the African diaspora.

By KEN GREENLEAF | November 18, 2009

Basking in life

Two humans and two lizards, in Albee's Seascape
Nancy and Charlie (Kate Braun and Peter Josephson) have made it to the other side: Their kids are raised, released into the world, and producing their own offspring.

By MEGAN GRUMBLING | November 18, 2009

Simple and distinct

Solid, serious abstractions at CMCA
“Planes of Abstraction” at the Maine Center for Contemporary Art brings together five artists with broad experience who share a common interest in a simplified image.

By KEN GREENLEAF | November 11, 2009

Step right in

USM's spot-on view of '50s angst
Laura Reynolds, the young wife of a schoolmaster at a New England boys' boarding school in the '50s, has been advised about her proper role there: "Interested bystander."

By MEGAN GRUMBLING | November 11, 2009

Magic tricks

Alice Munro has them, Philip Roth doesn’t
You have to give a seventysomething writer credit for daring to begin a book with “He’d lost his magic.”

By ED SIEGEL | November 11, 2009

Spot on

Good Theater’s top-notch Frost/Nixon
After Watergate and an opened China, Nixon’s next most recognized legacy is probably the warning to make sure you know your medium: His infamously sweaty, maladroit television appearance in the Kennedy-Nixon debate was widely perceived to have cost him that year’s presidency.

By MEGAN GRUMBLING | November 04, 2009

Behind the walls

Museum L-A synthesizes history and art
Museum L-A is sequestered in the far end of the Bates Mill Complex in downtown Lewiston, with a bold red and yellow awning announcing its presence and trumping its otherwise unassuming facade, which might otherwise be lost in the sea of industrial brick and concrete.

By ANNIE LARMON | November 04, 2009

Rolling stoned

Jonathan Lethem’s freewheeling Chronic City
Every new gambit is just another log on the roaring bonfire of Jonathan Lethem's eighth novel.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | November 04, 2009

Soft thrusts

Players’ Ring’s Master is a tease
Seeking the gore-porn stimulations of mutilations, leather, and fellatio to get your Halloween on? Well, Players’ Ring is offering severed fingers, wanton women with whips, and a very, very demanding master, not to mention a mordant punchline. Rolling Die Productions does it all in the spirit of the early 20th-century French horror spectacles of the Grand Guignol Theater.

By MEGAN GRUMBLING | October 28, 2009

They’re crafty

A bright three-person show at ICON
While each of the artists exhibiting at ICON this month is stylistically distinct and refined, the relationships between the work of Joe Kievitt, Meghan Brady, and Andrea Sulzer provide a welcome cohesion, and a unique peek into the practice of three individual artists who have a dialogue outside the gallery.

By ANNIE LARMON | October 28, 2009

Looking deep inside

Jekyll finds the Hyde in all of us
"None of us," says Mr. Utterson, recalling the small group peering into Edward Hyde's dark flat, "wished to go inside."

By MEGAN GRUMBLING | October 21, 2009

Time and tide

Harbor Light bring local records to life
"The tide goes in, and the tide goes out," refrain the players of Lamplight Dialogues: A Nighttime Journey into the Ghost Lives of Puddle Dock . In the show's setting, the nearly 400-year-old city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the literal tide is the force of the mighty tidal Piscataqua River.

By MEGAN GRUMBLING | October 21, 2009

Jazz on paper

Romare Bearden's improv collage
A gem of a show, two shows really, has quietly appeared at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

By KEN GREENLEAF | October 21, 2009

Plotting experience

Kendra Ferguson and Noa Warren at June Fitzpatrick
Kendra Ferguson and Noa Warren are deftly paired at June Fitzpatrick’s Congress Street gallery this month, as an established and emerging artist each compulsive explore the subjective and human potential of minimalism.

By ANNIE LARMON | October 14, 2009