Category: Art & Theater

Words inspire art at Kimball Jenkins

An upcoming exhibition at the Kimball Jenkins Estate will pair works of art with poetry but flip the traditional ekphrastic approach. Since time immemorial, poets have written about paintings, but “Dwelling Places” instead has painters responding to poems.

The effort, which opened Aug. 7, unites Kimball Jenkins-affiliated artists with a Concord-based poetry group.

The idea traces back to last year, when Kimball Jenkins Executive Director Martha Lemire attended the Percheron Poets’ annual Poetry & Pie event for the first time. “I was so inspired by the poets and their original writing,” she recalled. “I said, wouldn’t it be cool if next summer we did an exhibition around poetry, and have artists respond to your words?”

Art in Bloom, floral arrangements coupled with artwork, is a January tradition at Kimball Jenkins, and Lemire wondered if poets could inspire a mirror image of that. “We did it backwards,” she said. “I thought it would be an interesting concept to see what they could come up with.”

The Percheron Poets enthusiastically endorsed the idea.

The mechanics of the pairing varied. Some poets already had artist collaborators and had been working alongside them for months, while others didn’t. Lemire put roughly five or six unmatched poems out to the wider community of artists who exhibit at or teach for Kimball Jenkins, who then chose the ones that spoke to them.

The show’s evocative title came from the poets themselves. “This is your show,” Lemire told them. “We were hoping to have the poems shine in this whole collaborative exhibition that we’re doing together. So I gave them the opportunity to come up with their title, and they did.”

In a Zoom call, Percheron Poets member Brenda Wilbert explained the title’s meaning.

“It reflects a positive feeling associated with writing from the seat of one’s own heart and mind — the inner life where the soul dwells,” she said. “Dwelling places are bright enough to encompass the poems and artwork. It’s a fun way of thinking of them dwelling for a while in the old, elegant mansion.”

Wilbert is also an artist, one of the exhibition’s many hyphenates. She works in wearable and digital art, built around her Heart Full of Color unisex clothing collection. One of her pieces was recently featured in a Montreal Clothing Co. marketing campaign. She recently had a solo show of her artwork at Kimball Jenkins.

“I was so blessed and honored,” she said of the five-week exhibition of her paintings alongside a room of mannequins dressed in her clothing line, including one posed at a piano. Wilbert is also a playwright and once ran her own theater company, following in the footsteps of her late husband, also a playwright.

For “Dwelling Places,” Wilbert contributed two poems. She created the artwork for one herself. For the other, “How They Grew,” about her father’s tomatoes, she recruited Susan Huppe, a retired art teacher. “Susan doesn’t really show her work, and now I encouraged her to do it,” she said. Huppe’s painting is being used to promote the exhibition.

The Percheron Poets origin story traces back to a workshop Adele Sanborn ran in Boscawen at the now-shuttered Twiggs Gallery. “Right outside Twiggs, there were Percheron horses,” Wilbert said. “We were looking at the horses when we’re in this meeting, and this is how it all started.” The group has met monthly ever since.

Wilbert spent her earlier career in mental health services. She’s written often about grief but came to poetry late in life.

“I decided I wanted to do it,” she said, pointing out an overlap between that kind of writing and visual art. “Writing poetry or expressing art is often very healing.”

What is Wilbert most looking forward to at the event? “People being present with both the poems and artwork,” she said simply. “Like to really go through them, the mansion, and just sit with us. Really look at the poem, read the poem, look at the artwork, and just be present there.”

She’s also eager for another year of the gathering that inspired “Dwelling Places.” However, she’s quick to clarify one thing: for Poetry & Pie on Aug. 23, Wilbert will only read — she does not bake. “I’m not a cook, forget it,” she said. “I go to the Co-Op; I get a lot of great pies over there.”

Art & Poetry: Dwelling Places
Where: Kimball Jenkins Estate, 266 N. Main St., Concord
When: Through Saturday, Sept. 5, various days and hours. Public opening reception Aug. 13, 5:30-7:30 p.m. in the Kimball Jenkins Mansion.
More: kimballjenkins.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Making peace, and art, with AI

When Elsie Kagan talks about painting, it sounds like a jazz player’s memory of hearing a standard for the first time.

“I’m full of influences from other artists and from the history of the medium I work in,” she said by phone from Chicago, mid-residency with the artist collective Tiger Strikes Asteroid. “So I don’t feel like I take full ownership for whatever I’m making. There’s this kind of porous relationship I have to all of my resources and influences.”

That porousness now includes a surprising collaborator: generative AI. Kagan’s solo exhibition, “the drop falls,” opens Aug. 7 at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth. The next day, she’ll demonstrate her process, which includes using an agent to transform her paintings, then join her husband, Carl Robichaud, for a public conversation about art and machine intelligence.

Robichaud has spent 25 years working on nuclear risk and now leads AI-related grantmaking at Longview Philanthropy, an organization Kagan describes as “concerned with the long-term protection of humanity.” Longview, she continued, considers AI “a real threat to our future.”

Paradoxically, this belief led Kagan to first engage with AI in her painting.

Such alarmism “was so difficult to wrap my imagination around,” she said. Then she realized there are visual AI models as well. “So I started to bring AI into the studio, thinking that it would be a very alien experience, but I actually had a kind of opposite reaction to them.”

Specifically, she found the models’ human-like characteristics soothing.

“The way that they operate visually seemed to kind of rhyme with what I’m interested in as a painter,” she said. “There are these visual cues they come up with as a response to prompts, but there are all these glitches, confusions and inventions … you’re sort of fighting between an experience of illusion and creating space and story and depth.”

Her method is simple to describe and harder to categorize. She paints, photographs the painting, feeds the image into an AI model, and lets whatever comes back seed the next canvas. Early on, she said, a model would take an unadorned photo of her canvas and abstract it, unprompted.

“It had kind of an innate understanding of my visual vocabulary as painting,” she said, calling the discovery “an absolute delight.” Crucially, she resists the idea that this is fundamentally different from how she’s always worked.

“It seemed very natural to kind of move from art historical references to AI,” she said, “because what is this AI? It’s just a kind of card catalog of all of our own making. It is us.” But she’s also watched the tool change under her, and not for the better, in her telling.

Outputs that once felt rough and painterly now come back “smoothed out,” closer to what she calls “faux reality” than to the glitchy abstraction she originally found useful. An early transformation of an impressionistic pool of water she called “long time gone” felt natural, while a later one seemed a bit Thomas Kinkade-y.

The model seemed to be correcting her, she said. “It’s decided that you’re a little too abstract here.”

The different systems she’s used have also converged in behavior: “They all used to kind of have their own characteristics and impulses, and they all behave more similarly now,” she believes. That convergence is a sign of where the technology’s heading. “Out into the stratosphere on its own, and kind of away from our own control and humanness.”

She’s aware this doesn’t square easily with the climate concerns running through some of her paintings, or the resource costs of massive data centers powering the models she uses.

“There’s no real good answers to any of this,” she said. “It’s coming for us, good and for bad. We should try to engage with it just as a human who’s experiencing the world as it is.”

That tension of engagement without illusion is likely to be present during the conversation with Robichaud, whom Kagan describes as her temperamental opposite on the subject. He evaluates AI risk “from a very high bird’s-eye point,” she said, mindful of its threat but having “an ability to sort of remove an anxious emotional reaction to the moment.”

Kagan calls herself granular and anxious by comparison. On stage, she plans to do something the gallery walls don’t: show her source material directly; “pull the curtain back” on which paintings prompted which AI responses, and introduce other artists grappling with the same tools — many of whom want nothing to do with it.

“A lot of my painter peers,” she said, “won’t touch this stuff with a 10-foot pole.

In the Meantime: Art Making Alongside Machine Intelligence – Artist Talk with Elsie Kagan + Carl Robichaud
When: Saturday, Aug. 8, 1 p.m. presentation, 2 p.m. conversation
Where: 3S Artspace, 319 Vaughan St., Portsmouth
Tickets: Free (Suggested donation $5), reserve spot at eventbrite.com
Elsie Kagan exhibit, ‘the drop falls,’ runs through Sept. 27 alongside Mina Kim’s exhibit, Between Lines and Breath

Featured photo: “long time gone” by Elsie Kagan (at left) and the AI interpretation of the work (at right). Courtesy images.

Buy some works, meet the artists in Goffstown

By Chelsea Spear
listings@hippopress.com

Uncommon Arts on the Common, the 16th annual arts and crafts festival organized by Goffstown Main Streets, lets attendees purchase art directly from artisans who live in the Goffstown area.

“Goffstown’s just a really strong community, people with a lot of different interests, and I think the art reflects that, especially with what you’d see on Art on the Common,” Chloe DuBois, who serves on the board of Goffstown Main Streets, said in a Zoom interview. “You have crafters, you have people who upcycle, painters, painting a variety of subjects, but you kind of really see a breadth of everyone’s interests and their connection to their community through their art.”

Uncommon Arts on the Common was founded in 2009 by Goffstown Main Street, an organization that “helps with programming around Goffstown’s Main Street Village from events, public art,” DuBois said.

Because these events are primarily volunteer-run, they “rotate whoever’s involved with the organization, an event comes up and we get together and make it happen,” DuBois said. This year, the volunteers honed their focus on the artisans and craftspeople of the Goffstown area.

MJ Depictions will be selling photo prints at Art on the Common, and photographer Bonnie Grower will also be on hand with prints of her pet photography. Those in the market for what DuBois describes as “more practical” arts will want to check out Diana Plank, who sells elegant ceramic trays and drink coasters with citrus designs. YarnMeThings will be selling hand-crocheted plushies. Style mavens will want to check out Luna Rose and Clay and Cotton, two retailers that sell vintage clothing, and accessorize their new outfits with jewelry from Meadow Rose or Ear 2 Ear Jewelry.

While the event is keeping a tight focus on handmade arts, DuBois mentioned that Uncommon Arts would also be hosting some demonstrations, such as “live painting in front of the crowd so people can go up and ask questions.” She also singled out blacksmith Jay Davini as a vendor whose work she regards as “super cool.”

“Uncommon Art is really here to support or celebrate is livening up the village in the middle of the summer in between a season of things going on and celebrating using artists, local artists and crafters to liven it up and really support the businesses,” DuBois said. “It’s a really fun time if you want to just get out and see what your neighbors have been up to.”

Uncommon Arts on the Common
When: Saturday, Aug. 1, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Where: Main Street in the Village of Goffstown, see the website for a map
More info: goffstownmainstreet.org

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Class and consequences shape new Chris Bohjalian novel The Amateur

When Vermont author Chris Bohjalian began writing his new novel, The Amateur, he kept it a secret; the only person who knew about it was a lawyer. It wouldn’t be the last time attorney-client privilege would connect to the book, which, much to Bohjalian’s surprise, would turn into a courtroom thriller.

The Amateur follows Mira Winston, a teenage golf prodigy whose life is derailed when she smashes a golf ball through a practice net and accidentally kills a classmate, Kenny Foster, a caddy. In a first for Bohjalian, who’s written 24 novels, it has a table of contents, with section titles portending that she will ultimately stand trial.

Critically, the book explores Mira’s sexual exploitation by a middle-aged country club member that begins at age 15. Her experience leads to an irrational, magical thinking belief that the death was karmic punishment for being a homewrecker, when in fact she was a victim.

Bohjalian is an almost blank slate writer who starts with a premise and lets it lead him forward. The Amateur centers on the question of what a life-altering event does to someone who’s bound for greatness. As with previous novels, the future is often present, beginning with revealing that Mira will abandon golf and become a novelist.

“Dread is my jam, and that means I use a lot of foreshadowing in my work,” Bohjalian said in a recent Zoom interview. “So you know that at some point Mira is indeed going to be on trial, and that she’s not going to be an LPGA golfer. She’s going to be something else, and that will turn out to be a female version of me.”

It’s not Mira who best resembles Bohjalian, however, but the boy who dies at her hand. “I am Kenny Foster,” he said. Like Kenny, he moved frequently as a kid, attending six schools in five years across three states, the last particularly tough. “I parachuted in just before 11th grade,” he said. He also caddied at a country club that his family could never afford to join.

That class divide is deftly addressed in the book. Kenny’s parents spent most of their limited earnings to ensure that he had a good education and a brighter future. At the gilded country club, however, he met derision, getting the caddy equivalent of scut work, servicing meager tippers, and pathetic or inebriated duffers.

“F. Scott Fitzgerald said something along the lines of, ‘I grew up in the worst house on the best block’ … a lot of that was my childhood,” Bohjalian said, alluding to a The Great Gatsby character who described his house as “a small eyesore” in the “consoling proximity of millionaires.”

Confronting those inequities is one reason Bohjalian considers the novel his “most important” since 1997’s Midwives and The Sandcastle Girls, written in 2012, but it’s not the main one.

“We’re in the midst of enormous cultural transitions, a reckoning, so to speak,” he said. “I view The Amateur as important because it gets at all of those issues of how we look at young women, and the way we often give men of my generation a pass they do not deserve — Exhibit A, the man in the White House.”

This leaves the question of why Bohjalian kept The Amateur under wraps until he announced it with an email titled “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” The answer isn’t nefarious, but practical.

Writing on the sly was less subterfuge than a reflection of a desire to work without pressure. Legal counsel provided plot guidance for Bohjalian when it became clear that The Amateur would not be solely about becoming a writer, but also about beating a murder charge. Still, he completed it in 90 days in what he described as “a frenzy.”

Given his prolific output, none of the people he normally confers with were concerned by his seeming radio silence at the time. “If anyone at Penguin Random House was wondering about my eerie quiet here in Vermont, all they assumed was I was giving myself a break and riding my bike and hanging out with my wife and my dog and having a lovely summer.”

Bohjalian will celebrate the book’s publication on Aug. 1 at BNH Stage in Concord, where he’ll have an onstage chat with Gibson’s Bookstore founder Michael Herrmann.

“I’ve known Michael since 1997, when I did my first event for Midwives at his bookstore; we’ve been friends ever since,” he said. Herrmann, he continued, “knows me better than almost any bookseller I know, and I think we will have a blast on stage, given our experiences together dating back 30 years.”

Gibson’s Bookstore presents Chris Bohjalian
When: Monday, Aug. 3, 7 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $45 includes copy of The Amateur, $15 admission only

Featured photo: Chris Bohjalian. Photo by Victoria Blewer

Two distinct styles join at Outer Space exhibition

In mid-July, a small second-floor gallery in Concord opened a show called “Montages,” with two artists, Peter Cordova and Kyoko Idetsu, showing their work. It’s billed as an artistic conversation, and that’s the idea that led Roger Buttles to open Outer Space Arts in a well-lit space across the hall from his own studio in the former residence of a Civil War colonel.

Pairing artists has been a constant at Outer Space since it opened in 2023. Sometimes Buttles looks for resemblances in genre or style. Occasionally he’ll mix media, bringing together a two-dimensional painter or drawer with a sculptor or ceramicist. “I’m not repeating myself over and over, because that becomes stagnant to me,” he said by phone recently.

For Buttles, the connection between Cordova, an illustrator who also works in ceramic sculpture, and Idetsu, a Japanese painter, was that both disorient the picture plane in their work.

“That’s why I titled the show ‘Montages,’” he said. “There are multiple perspectives — not in a cubist sense, but a distorted perspective coming together into one unified image.”

Cordova’s ceramic works aren’t included in the exhibition. “There were a few I could have chosen, but logistically it made more sense to keep this show all two-dimensional,” Buttles said. “His works are all colored pencil on cardboard. Kyoko’s side has both paintings and works on paper — pen and ink.”

The inspiration for Outer Space, and the reason Buttles pairs artists rather than mounting solo shows, traces back to his time studying under Michelle Grabner at the Art Institute of Chicago. Grabner, an artist and curator, ran an exhibition space called The Suburban out of her garage and tool shed outside of the city.

Buttles, whose primary job is advising collectors in New York, Miami, San Francisco and other big cities, never planned to open a gallery. That changed when his wife, a radiologist, took a job in Manchester. The couple and their family, two twin daughters and a son, relocated from NYC.

Upon arrival he found a studio on Pleasant Street in Concord with enough space for small exhibitions.

“It’s affordable,” he said. “I don’t have the pressure or expectations of running a commercial gallery in an expensive city. That gives me a lot of creative freedom in what I show, because I’m not going to go bankrupt doing this.”

In other words, he’s not trying to build an empire.

“I’m basically breaking even … it’s not a money-making venture,” he said. Outer Space is closer to a calling, and a way of staying connected to the artist he still primarily believes himself to be. “I consider myself an artist first, who happens to run this artist-run exhibition space.”

Buttles grew up on Long Island with little exposure to art. His creative outlet was sports, and he played lacrosse through college. Photography found him almost by accident, sparked at 14 by an offhand comment from his older brother’s college friend about earning credit for a photo class.

That seed grew into a career in black-and-white photography. Finding William Eggleston’s color work at 22 was a key jolt of discovery. During his twenties, Buttles apprenticed in San Francisco galleries and frame shops, mounting Diane Arbus and Robert Frank photos one day, and Mission School painters the next.

His entrée into collecting came when he discovered Creativity Explored, a nonprofit studio in San Francisco, began buying their 20- and 30-dollar pieces and embraced the idea of affordable art. Coincidentally, Cordova worked there. He immigrated to San Francisco from the Philippines at 19 and joined the studio in 1996, having never made art before.

Buttles has already featured Creativity Explored artists in two prior Outer Space shows but held Cordova back, sensing he deserved one of his own. That show found its second half in Idetsu, an artist Buttles connected with separately. Her work centers on domesticity and child-rearing filtered through a Tokyo perspective.

Buttles insists that the upcoming show should feel unintimidating. He compares the experience with listening to classical music without needing expertise in music theory. “I don’t know anything about it technically, but I really enjoy it; I feel like that’s how art should be too,” he said. “There shouldn’t have to be a prerequisite of knowledge.”

“Montages”: Peter Cordova & Kyoko Idetsu
When: Saturdays, through Sept. 19, noon-3 p.m. (or call for appointment)
Where: Outer Space Gallery, 35 Pleasant St., 2nd floor, Concord
More: outerspacearts.xyz
A reception with both artists happens Wednesday, July 29, at 5 p.m.

Featured photo: “Two Indian Head Tail” by Peter Cordova. From outerspacearts.xyz.

Shakespeare al fresco returns to Saint Anselm College

For the past two summers, Theatre Kapow’s Shakespeare on the Green has leaned dark. A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2024 was filled with shadowy fairy magic. With last year’s Romeo & Juliet, the dusk forming over Saint Anselm College and the following sunset offered a celestial comment on the tragic love story.

With this year’s As You Like It, director Emma Cahoon is changing the weather, Shakespeare-wise.

“It’s a bit more contemplative,” she said by phone recently. “It’s a very considerate play … each of the characters, to me, feel less like caricatures and more like real people, which is something that I just love.”

As You Like It introduced Cahoon to Shakespeare, courtesy of an eighth-grade teacher with an innovative streak. Years later, living abroad in London, it was the first Shakespeare she saw performed live.

“It completely charmed me all over again,” she said. Making it this year’s Shakespeare on the Green production was an easy decision, partly due to its setting.

Much of the action unfolds in the Forest of Arden, where exiled characters shed their old identities and find clarity among the trees, making it perfect for an al fresco stage ringed by real ones.

“Shakespeare on the Green has some great elements for it,” Cahoon said. “It’s kind of ready-made for a play set in the forest.”

One thing is notably absent this time: the Manchester dance company that partnered with Kapow on both previous Green productions. Ballet Misha weaved choreography into Midsummer’s fairy realm and Romeo & Juliet’s doomed romance, but that collaboration isn’t part of this year’s show.

“This is really not a dance type production,” Cahoon explained.

Rather than treat the absence as a loss, she framed it as an opening. The language of As You Like It, uniquely dense with plot and character even by Shakespeare’s standards, rewards the kind of close attention that previous Green efforts didn’t demand. “We’re meeting the absence of Ballet Misha by really digging into the language, which is its own kind of fun.”

An expanded eight-actor cast is made up entirely of returning Kapow company members, many who appeared in the previous two Green shows — from Midsummer, Emma Weller, Molly Litt, Claire Soleil Gardner, Cecilia Lomanno and Samantha Griffin, with Courtney St. Gelais and Jay Doane carrying over from Romeo & Juliet as well.

St. Gelais, who played Oberon in Midsummer and Mercutio/Prince in R&J, takes on Oliver and Jacques this time; Doane, previously R&J’s Benvolio, plays Touchstone, Charles and Jacques de Boys. This continues the company’s gender-blind approach to casting classic texts with a fluid ensemble.

This allows performers to cross the gender lines Shakespeare wrote into characters like Rosalind, who spends most of the play disguised as a young man, Ganymede.

“I am super excited about the cast; it came together in what feels like kind of a miracle to me,” Cahoon said. “It’s a really, really strong group.”

Asked for an early favorite moment, Cahoon was quick to respond, even as rehearsals had just begun. At the play’s first read-through, St. Gelais took on Jacques’ famous “All the World’s a Stage” monologue, arguably the most recognizable speech in the play, and thrilled everyone in a way Cahoon had been hoping for.

“As soon as I picked As You Like It, I was like, I need to hear Court do [that] speech, and … it was the best reading of that monologue I’ve ever heard; it knocked us out of the water,” she said, already picturing how it will land outdoors, delivered beneath open sky with Alumni Hall as a backdrop. “I think it’s going to be beautiful to hear it in that space.”

The production serves as the opening of Theatre Kapow’s 19th season, built around the theme “Elemental.” Each show tied to a classical element, with As You Like It serving as the Earth effort. That’s apt for a play focused on characters getting back in touch with something more grounded than the court politics they’ve left behind — and it’s also being staged in the elements.

Shakespeare on the Green Series 2026: As You Like It
When: Thursday, Friday & Saturday, July 16 – 25, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Koonz Theatre, 100 Saint Anselm Drive, Manchester
Admission: $25, anselm.edu (children free, no ticket needed)

Featured photo: Cast of As You Like it. Courtesy photo.