Currier Museum Celebrates Pop Artist Robert Indiana

While the White Mountains have always been associated with outdoorsy activities, for much of the 19th century, they played a particularly important role in the arts.  The new country was looking for an artistic identity that was distinctly "American," and the untamed wilderness of northern New Hampshire inspired scores of painters.

As long as there have been stories of princesses, there have been little girls to love them. The Disney princess phenomenon seeds young imaginations with shiny pink costumes, and gossip magazines continue the fantasy with pages devoted to Kate Middleton, and before her, Princesses Grace and Diana – the latter proving that becoming royalty is no guarantee of living happily ever after. Beyond these two dimensional characters are scores of real princesses  -- sometimes tragic, often extraordinary human beings who left scant record of their lives. Mental Floss columnist Linda Rodriguez McRobbie scoured through history for stories of women who fought, stole, schemed and survived, and pulls them together in her new book, Princesses Behaving Badly: Real Stories From History – Without The Fairy-Tale Endings.

I was once invited to Thanksgiving dinner by a friend who warned me that her family was “Not a Real Norman Rockwell Kinda Bunch”. We know that image: brightly scrubbed faces hover in smiling anticipation over sparkling china as Ma sets the turkey in front of the family patriarch ready to be carved. That painting is titled Freedom From Want and it’s one of those homespun scenes that only happens in what author Deborah Solomon calls “Rockwell Land” -- a magical reflection of American life as it should be. Solomon’s new biography of the illustrator, beloved by the masses and dismissed as corn ball by the art world, reveals a complicated, neurotic, and repressed man who lived very far from the America he invented.

Deborah Solomon is author of American Mirror: The Life and Times of Norman Rockwell

With over twenty years of experience on the editorial side of design publishing, Charlotte and Peter Fiell are pioneers in bringing great design to the masses with big, beautiful glossy books. Their first book together, “Modern Design Classics Since 1945”, was published twenty-two years ago and introduced mid-century modern furniture to a new generation of design lovers and novices.

They are also the former editors-in-chief for the best-selling design imprint Taschen. Three years ago the design power couple established their own line of art and design books—Goodman Fiell—which publishes titles written by the couple in addition to books written by experts across a wide range of disciplines; from art and architecture to natural history and popular culture.

Education policy in the U.S. is currently laser-focused on engaging students in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math—or “STEM” subjects. The goal is to prepare future generations to prosper in the new global economy. But where do the creative arts fit into this equation? How can art and music education help drive innovation? Eric Booth is a pioneer in art education, and is the author of several books, including, “The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible.” He is also an artist, an actor, and musician and is widely referred to as the father of the teaching artist profession.

3S Artspace is a Portsmouth nonprofit working on renovating a large building into studio space for artists, a farm-to-table restaurant, performance space and a gallery. For Catherine Scala, finding studio space here gave her the boost to continue her career as an artist.