New Hampshire is known for its natural beauty, and this is certainly the perfect time of year to enjoy it, but equally enticing are the artistic vistas on view at the many museums and galleries located throughout the state. What could be better on a hot (or rainy) day than an hour or so of tempered air and a glimpse into another world, real or imagined?
Here are five summer exhibits to mark on your calendar. Visit the NHPR Community Calendar for more events.
- Beyond Words: Book Illustrations by David M. Carroll, Tomie dePaola and Beth Krommes. These three New Hampshire book illustrators are featured at an exhibit that runs until September 9th at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester. Original artwork is shown, along with drawings illuminating their creative process.
- Welcome to Bird Land: Michele L’Heureux with Helen Popinchalk. This exhibit draws inspiration from birds: their habitat, their flight patterns, their plumage, and the human enterprises of bird appreciation and birdwatching. Along with the interactive bird blind, the exhibition will feature collage, costumes, photography and bird prints. At the Lamont Gallery, Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, until October 13th.
- Overlooked and Undervalued: Three Hundred Years of Women’s Art from the Seacoast. Throughout history, women’s art has often been regarded as inferior to art created by men, or relegated to the world of decorative household crafts. This exhibition examines some of the myriad forms of female artistic production, both professional and amateur, in the Portsmouth area in the last few centuries. John Paul Jones House, Portsmouth until late September.
- Good Vibrations: Michele Johnsen. The artist explores the idea of life-size, diorama-like environments that create a barrier signifying the longing to immerse oneself in the magical and mysterious nature of the landscape. Johnsen’s paintings refer to the unknown places that exist beneath the surface of the natural world. Now showing at the Gallery at 42 Maple in Bethlehem, through the end of July.
- The Firmament: Toyin Ojih Odutola. Stories take center stage in Ojih Odutola’s drawings; the people she draws have lives, houses, family, friends and responsibilities, but those factors are indicated loosely. She poses questions about how we construct conceptions of race and how those conceptions shape experience. Hood Downtown, Hanover, through September 2nd.
