Applying to art school typically requires a portfolio of ten to twenty images. This portfolio is usually completed in high school advanced placement art classes and should demonstrate artistic range, diligence, and an understanding of core compositional and...

My dreams hold a strong message from my ancestors to tell their stories. My maternal family line is Armenian. My grandmother survived the early 20th-century Armenian genocide in Turkey. Although I knew some stories about my relatives, they were laden with holes and...

Samira Abbassy’s personal and artistic odyssey began in Iran, where she was born in 1965, took her to England, where she moved with her family in 1967, and since 1998 has been focused on New York City and the United States. Though her paintings evidence a strong...

In lockdown, I became a room. I grew floors and walls, and sometimes ceilings. Mostly, I was a corner. People stood, ghosts floated, mice nibbled, and peepholes formed. Sometimes my walls and floors broke apart: wood splintered, joists groaned, and screws came loose....

Earlier this spring, I visited the Rabkin Foundation, at 13 Brown Street in Portland, to attend a small gathering. The event took place amongst an evocative exhibit of postwar American artist Leo Rabkin’s two- and three-dimensional works, paintings and sculptures. In...

Five months after graduating from college, I’d saved enough money substitute teaching at my old junior high school to pay for my round-trip airfare to Rome. I had my backpack with the rigid aluminum external frame and was ready to join my friends in Europe. Welcome to...

When we walk out of the door, we seek encounters: the moments that might just change our minds, or change our lives! When walking through the city, I often choose paths with the most foot traffic. When Nancy walks through the familiar woods and beaches on Peaks, she...

There is, without doubt, a mysterious aspect to our individual destinies. The irrational but persistent sense that the design of our lives is somehow cosmically guided becomes more intriguing, and slightly plausible, in old age. Before that, we are too busy to bother...

In a city filled with graffiti, Amsterdam is the perfect setting for a museum dedicated to street art. STRAAT, which opened in October 2020, showcases the work of street artists from around the world, each represented by a large-scale work, many of them created on...

While touring England in April, my wife and I stopped in at the Mill Bridge Gallery in Skipton. Housed in one of the oldest dwellings in this market town in North Yorkshire, the gallery specializes in photography and sculpture and hosts an artist in residence. As luck...

I never had any plans to become an artist. My passion was music. In 1980, I was Managing Director of the Public Access Electronic Music Studio at a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in Seattle. On a rainy night in December of that year, I was at home in my...

An Encounter I arrived at Green Acre Baha’i Center of Learning in Eliot, Maine, about 5:45 p.m. on Saturday 3 May, thinking I was quite a bit late for the opening. To my surprise, the huge hall was totally empty, except for a flock of hundreds of multi-colored origami...

In Jared French’s Prose, recently acquired by the Colby College Museum of Art, we witness an encounter between a man and a mirror. A nude, muscular, male figure stands before a large ovoid mirror, which faces outwards towards our space. The man stares into the mostly...

Encounters can be accidental or intentional. They can be consequential in mightily important ways for good or ill—or they can be of no matter at all. We all get to have a mix of both in life. To the extent we can control and steer our encounters, those are gambles we...

simply a cautionary tale for those left behind I have a small collection on a shelf—a wooden ear, a wooden finger, a wooden golf club, all the things that have come off my late husband's left behind sculptures during my moves. Most of his sculptures were under two...