Arts & Culture

This fall, Manchester's trees aren't just turning orange, red, and yellow - they're also turning blue.

With the help of local volunteers, New York City-based artist Konstantin Dimopoulos is coloring the trunks of about 100 city trees at the Currier Museum and Victory and Pulaski Parks.

On display right now at the Kimball-Jenkins Estate in Concord is a series of 12 murals. Each tells a story of a perfect day with mom or dad, and they were painted during a special summer camp for families dealing with incarceration. NHPR’s Peter Biello spoke with Kristina Toth, the program administrator for the Department of Corrections’ Family Connection Center.

[This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.]

Tell us about the summer camp portion, because it's different from what we normally imagine a summer camp to be. What makes it different?

This week, the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester is welcoming art-lovers to its gallery for a new show. Boston-based artist and Tufts Professor Ethan Murrow has created wall drawings and a sculpture honoring Manchester's working class roots. Last week, ahead of the show's opening, he and a team of art students put the finishing touches on the drawings.

[Editor’s note: We highly recommend listening to this story.]

The historical museum in Lyme is wrapping up a summer exhibit on wedding gowns. The exhibit offers insight into the evolution of women’s styles and it also shares some intimate stories of town residents.

Note: we recommending listening to this feature

The scene is one part Keebler Elves, one part Lord of the Flies.

A skinny kid with spaghetti arms swings a hammer, while another wields a blow torch. The nearby oven is cranking at nearly 1,000 degrees, when a collective urge to sing Led Zeppelin breaks out amongst the crew.

[Editor's note: we highly recommend listening to this story.]

The Summer Music Series swings through the Mount Washington Valley this week to visit the only music shop in New Hampshire that builds steel drums, the national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago.

After a listener wrote us about it, NHPR’s Leila Goldstein visited the shop, Maccabee Panworks, in Conway.

The multi-talented musician Theo Martey has traveled the world with West African drumming groups. After settling in Manchester in 2001 he formed the Akwaaba Ensemble and they've been touring New England ever since.

While Martey plays traditional West African music, he also mixes contemporary recording effects and nontraditional instruments into his work. Martey spoke with NHPR's Peter Biello about his music.

(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

Whether it's for a tablet, phone, or hardback, booklovers are always on the lookout for what to read when life slows down in the summer.  We hear what's new in fiction,  including a thriller co-written by a best-selling author and a former President.  For non-fiction fans, we review new works of History, Humour and Self-Help.  And as always, some N.H. authors make the list.  Get your pen and paper ready if you are looking for help with ideas for your reading list this summer! 

Just off busy Main street in Conway Village, George Wiese gives a tour of the inside what’s known as the Bolduc Block in the center of town.

Constructed in 1931 by local businessman Leon Bolduc, this batch of brick buildings has housed a department and grocery store, the post office and many other businesses over the years. And at the heart of the block, a theater: The Majestic.

Nori and Sarah Kozuma opened up the Horseshoe Cafe on Newmarket’s main drag last year.

The Bay Area-transplants, married and heavily tattooed, divide the duties: Sarah handles the baking, including fresh breads, spreads, and a few pastries. Nori is the one-man coffee department, doing everything from importing to roasting.

“So I’m still baby roaster. We normally say about 10 years to be called a roast master,” Nori says with a laugh.

While he may classify a novice, Kozuma knows more about coffee than he’s letting on.

Studies have shown that reading over summer vacation keeps kids' brains active and reduces stagnation or setbacks in reading levels (known as the "summer slide"). But how often do kids and teenagers read for pleasure these days? We talk with educators, librarians and authors about why independent reading is so important, what books appeal to kids nowadays, and what strategies help encouraage kids to open a book this summer.

Imane Naji Amrani is in total party planner mode. She wears a pink dress and matching pink headscarf. Focused and firm, she tells a group of teenage helpers where food should go and hurries to get everything done before sunset.

Every night for the month of Ramadan, families at the mosque in Manchester take turns cooking for the Iftar, the evening meal where Muslims break their fast each night during Ramadan. Tonight is Naji Amrani’s night to cook.

The interlude is polished and playful.

“I have something very special coming up here. I just kind of have to set the stage .... we have a giraffe that’s going to be performing with us out here.”

The audience laughs away.

This is the opening of a song track on one of The Shaw Brothers’ records. They’re playing live at Prescott Park in Portsmouth. And if you’ve ever enjoyed a concert at the Prescott Park Arts Festival, you can just imagine the giraffe was either a prop or a set painting for a youth theater act that used the stage earlier.

Tad Montgomery can still remember when he first discovered morels.

He was five years old, working in the garden with his mom and siblings, when a thunderstorm suddenly rolled in. They all ran under some nearby trees for shelter.

“Mom, what are these things? They’re really weird!” exclaimed his sister, looking to the ground.

His mom had no idea what to make of the brown, brain-looking things emerging from the soil. But, being an amateur naturalist, she piled all the kids in the car and drove them, soaking wet, to the local library.

A new documentary explores what it means to be a female veteran of the military through the lens of a pageant known as Miss Veteran America.

The participants are veterans, and they help raise awareness of homelessness among female veterans. The film is called "Served Like a Girl," and tomorrow at Red River Theatres in Concord, a screening of the film will be followed by a panel discussion of the issues women veterans face.

The book Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 is an in-depth look at some famous and-not-so-famous figures that all seemed to converge in and around Boston in that one year. 

The catalyst for author Ryan Walsh’s book was the author’s love for Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks album- what many consider the singer-songwriter’s masterpiece- and the little-known fact that Morrison wrote much of the songs for it in Boston.

Morning Edition Host Rick Ganley spoke with Ryan Walsh by Skype to learn more.

When he was a kid, Dan Walker lived in a house on Cottage Street, not far from downtown Littleton. Three doors up the hill from his house, in an old Victorian, was Bishop's Homemade Ice Cream. To young Dan, this seemed normal.

"I thought everyone had an ice cream shop a few houses away," he says, laughing.

Gretchen and the Pickpockets formed about six years ago while front-woman Gretchen Klempa was a student at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. Since then the band has been performing in and around the Granite State, pleasing crowds with mostly upbeat funky tunes enriched with lively horn hooks.

An unusual musical spectacle will take place tonight in the Upper Valley. It’s a take on an iconic performance art piece from the 1970s.

In that first version, a woman - naked except for a garland of flowers around her neck - played a “cello” made completely of ice. Now, the piece is being re- imagined to reflect modern themes, and that’s required some modern engineering as well.

Eating local in New Hampshire can mean more than just stopping by the farmers' market. For more adventurous residents, it means foraging for wild ingredients – like seaweed, straight from the Seacoast.

NHPR’s Annie Ropeik reports this old culinary tradition is getting a second life. 

At her home studio, embroidery artist Sarah Benning stitches together one of her pieces. It’s a sun-filled room at this time of the morning. The artist’s finished work spills into the space around her with dozens of circular canvases bubbling up onto the walls. There are also plenty of house plants around.

“A lot of my work is inspired by my own house plants,” Benning says, “The very first plant pieces I stitched were actually inspired by houseplants that I killed, luckily I’ve gotten better and they’re not all dead plants now.”

The trend of the speakeasy bar - drinking establishments that play with the history of our prohibition days - has taken off in big cities like New York and L.A. But New Hampshire now has at least a couple secretive watering holes of its own.

There’s a new place to grab a drink in Concord called Chuck’s BARbershop. Liu Vaine is the owner and he's started up a similar place in Nashua called CodeX.

Concord lost one of its most provocative landmarks last Thursday night when artist Thomas Devaney closed his giant Eye for good.  For the last five years the foam and wood sculpture came to life after dark when Devaney turned on his projector and lit the 6-foot by 8-foot structure with a filmed loop of his own blue right eye. NHPR’s Sean Hurley attended the closing of the Eye and sends us this. 

A lot of people hear "cooperative business" and think of their local food co-ops. But, the co-op model isn't limited to bulk bins of quinoa - it was designed to share profits with workers and give small businesses leverage against megastores.

So, what role do they play in the Granite State? 

Plus, we'll hear from area high school students, in this post-Parkland moment, who are organizing to tell lawmakers: Never Again. 

In some countries in Europe, red wine is part of daily life. Not so in the US. And as a result, Americans may be missing out on the health benefit of a particular antioxidant found in the skins of grapes. Now a chemist at UNH is trying to get more of this antixodiant, resveratrol, into the American diet through coffee. 

Glen Miller is chair of the chemistry department at the University of New Hampshire, and a few years ago, he first got the idea of putting resveratrol into spring water. But when he did, he saw a huge problem. 

There are the mysteries you know about, and then there are the ones lurking in your midst. For the staff at Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, it was a bit of both.

The site, run by the National Park Service, is the estate of Gilded Age sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Saint-Gaudens is behind many iconic monuments still standing today, most famously of Civil War heroes in Chicago and Boston.