Newport views Tom Wolfe is famous for authoring the nonfiction books The Right Stuff and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , as well as the novel The Bonfire of the Vanities .  And for wearing white suits, sometimes with matching homburg hat and gloves. 

Thinking locally On the whole, I wish many of these 13 grant winners were more exciting.  The art often feels conservative or academic.  Even when the craft is impressive, the artists often seem to have little they care about and little to say. 

An incomplete picture Over the past dec-ade, Providence art has been known for its visionary printmaking and graphics, crafty constructions, and funhouse installations, but local painting has tended to operate out of the limelight. 

Flushed As the anniversary of the show approached, it seemed like the MFA might let this landmark in its history — and Boston art history — pass unnoted.  So I stepped up as, let's say, a guest curator. 

"Flush with the Walls" at the MFA A group of 21 local artists have snuck their drawings, prints, photos and sculptures into a pair of bathrooms at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts for a one-night, guerilla exhibit. 

Light and dark In Marc Leitzel's sharply real scratchboard drawings in AS220's main gallery (115 Empire Street, Providence, through June 25), he depicts a tense moment between a couple in bed, a wind-blown woman wrapped in a cape, and a woman with tree branches and leaves bound up in her hair and opossums or rodents peeking out from the leaves. 

Season of surreality Summer art in New England means driving up Route 1 in Maine with the car windows down, past the odd and amazing roadside metal giraffes and caterpillars, and discovering — as I did a few summers back — a nondescript house that turns out to be Fawcett's Antique Toy & Art Museum. 

We take care of our own Montana Phipps was supposed to go out for a run with a friend after school, but the dark storm clouds squelched their plans.  So on June 1, she was in her bedroom at the end of Stewart Avenue, with a view across her neighborhood of wide lawns, hedges, and leafy trees in Monson, a town of some 8500 people nestled in a valley about two hours' drive west of Boston. 

The high life Across the country, on January 16, 1920, citizens drank up at liquor "wakes" before the 18th Amendment, ratified a year before, went into effect at midnight, banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of "intoxicating liquors."