Seacoast History Blog #113
May 07, 2011

I simply cannot keep up with this town. Three times this week I was biking through town working on this new Segway tour and I thought I was paying attention. But this evening, while attending the opening of a new exhibit at Strawbery Banke Museum – there was a building I’d never seen before, not seen the day before. “That’s where they’re going to build the new gundalow,” my wife Maryellen told me. And she should know. She’s preparing for the biggest exhibit of maritime art in the city’s history at the Discover Portsmouth Center. The paintings arrived today from the Sawtelle Collection and Prof. Richard Candee was beginning to assemble the show on the newly painted walls with the new track lighting in the old Portsmouth library. But that was just a warm-up. (Continued below)

Friday evening we headed first to the Portsmouth Athenaeum for the opening of yet another exhibit. “Fire on the Water” is focused on the battle between the USS Kearsage and the Confederate merchant raider Alabama. Kearsage was built here at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and launched 150 years ago. I haven’t been able to assimilate all the details yet. It takes me three or four trips to a history exhibit to get the story into my head. This was the first of a rapidfire series of exhibit openings across town and across the Seacoast. May used to be just a gentle prelude to the summer. Now it’s one event after the next in this explosive “shoulder” season.

We were going to walk quickly across town to catch the opening of the Fitz-John porter exhibit at Strawbery Banke. That was the plan. We were so confident of a timely attendance on our way home that we ordered dinner from Frank at Savario’s. “We’ll be back in half an hour to pick up the calzone,” we told him. Fat chance.

Just around the corner from Savario’s on Pleasant Street was a painter on a scissors lift working on a mural that covered the whole side of the Marple & James real estate building. He had completed a giant open mouth and was painting away – over windows, pipes, sash, and brick. This was an installation idea from the Portsmouth Museum of Art. And then there's the Art Speak annual street art coming, a project of the City cultural Commission. Further down State Street a dark skinned woman with an array of spray paint cans was creating an astonishing piece of art on a wall.  She apologized because her work was not yet finished, but we simply wanted to admire the process.

“Why are there so many people downtown?” I asked Maryellen. “It’s the first Friday of the month,” she explained. “It’s Art About Town Night.”  Like I said, I try to keep up, but this city is getting ahead of me. There were art events going on all over the place. And when I could pull my eyes away from the spray painter at work, my wife had disappeared into a new art gallery. “Calzone!” I called to her across a crowded room an hour and a half later. ‘Calzone!”

© 2011 by J. Dennis Robinson on SeacoastNH.com All rights reserved.

Photos 2011 by J,.. Dennis Robinson (c) SeacoastNH.com.