You don’t need to get too far from Portland’s Arts District before you remember that plenty of people are just looking for pretty pictures of lighthouses. Each passing year, Portland’s sense of artistic community seems to grow stronger. The congregation is growing, but where are the itinerant preachers? The University of New England campus in Biddeford is a damn long slog out of Portland in this January weather, but that’s exactly why it’s so comforting to see young area artists and their forward-thinking ideas represented.

The work of Hilary Irons, collectively entitled "The Ladies’ Paradise," is beautifully illustrative yet intellectually demanding, off-the-cuff in its stylization yet remarkably complex in execution. The works featured in the Stella Maris Hall (by the office of the prez no less) range from ornate canvas pieces to scraps of paper with doodles and written notes about B vitamins. All works are characterized by a cartoonish style of figure drawing predominantly focused on colonial-era

At the close of each year we make resolutions and invent scenarios about ourselves that we hope will have come to pass 12 months from now.

What would make the first day of 2006 something other than just another day? What could art possibly have to do with it?

In order to try and figure out how to answer these questions in a way that wouldn’t make me sound to myself like a hopelessly hopeful broken record, I re-read some of the end-of-year musings I’d written for this paper in the past.

I found one piece, written in the last days of 2003, which came out in the first issue of 2004 — the "wishes for the new year" theme. In it I wished that Portland could try out its own version of French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou’s COMMEMOR project from two decades ago, where he proposed that countries considering war should swap war memorials first, and hopefully instead.

COMMEMOR aimed, in Filliou’s words, "to make the future generations aware of the absurd and murderous obscenity

The name of the game for the 2005 Portland arts scene was engagement. The year saw the tightening of bonds between artists and institutions, collectives and consumers. Instead of ego-centric investigations of "why-me?" artists turned to public works and communal events as if to say "what about us?" The result is an even more vibrant Portland arts culture, determined to make itself stronger and more effective in the community. In a larger social spectrum, that attitude seems downright avant-garde.

No other event could lay better claim as flagship for this move to engagement than the opening of SPACE Gallery’s "Reclaiming Space" this fall. SPACE affiliates in HAZMAT attire blocked off Congress Street with copious square footage of sod and let the people play in a reconstructed urban Eden. Little (and not so little) kids admired puppet shows, musical arrangements, and acrobatic performances while the gallery space inside hosted a variety of visual and auditory explorations on the theme.

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The current show in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s special-exhibition room, " Bellini and the East, " is another flickering jewel in the Gardner’s crown. The Bellini in question is not even the relatively famous Giovanni — who painted the Madonna of the Meadow and Sacred Allegory and The Feast of the Gods before being eclipsed, at least in the annals of art history, by Giorgione and Titian — but his older brother Gentile, who in his time (1430–1507) was most noted for an enterprise, the narrative frescoes in the great hall of the Doge’s Palace, that a great fire eradicated in 1577. It was Gentile who in 1479, at the conclusion of a peace between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, sailed to Istanbul in response to Sultan Mehmed II’s request for a Venetian painter. There he executed the portrait of Mehmed II that resides in the National Gallery in London and now anchors the Gardner show.

Just what else Gentile did during his 16 months in Istanbul is hard to confirm,

Sometimes crusty and uneven as a horned toad’s skin, sometimes squat as a toadstool, sometimes misshapen and irregular as potholes on a city street, the MFA’s "Contemporary Clay: Japanese Ceramics for the New Century" is nevertheless pervaded by an air of monumental dignity. Commingled with the craggy vases and the platters that resemble slabs of roughly painted rock are their opposites: porcelain boxes so delicate and refined, they seem fit to hold only vapor; nesting bowls that begin as elegant troughs and then reduce in size to tea bowls, the smallest being no bigger than a fruit fly. Between those extremes of apparently random, found, natural forms and the meticulously hand-hewn is where most of the ceramic artists in "Contemporary Clay" weigh in. No matter what its style, each work is marked by a reverence for tradition and artistry that also allows for idiosyncratic expression.

A case in point is Kaneshige Kôsuke, the third son of a National Living Treasure of Japan, Kaneshige Toyo (also

The other day, an artist friend was telling me about when she was in first grade and her older sister "opened this pink suitcase of mine and out rolled Barbie and Ken, naked, in this love-locked embrace." My pal had imagined the satiny suitcase interior as a romantic hotel where the couple could go to do whatever you do when you’re young and plastic and in love. But she was mortified to see her matchmaking so rudely exposed. And worse — they were her older sister’s dolls.

This came up because we were on our way back from seeing the smart and funny and somewhat frustrating show "Plastic Princess: Barbie As Art," which has been organized by Leonie Bradbury and will be up at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly until February 4. My friend’s memory was stirred by Framingham artist Gwendolyn Holbrow’s sculpture Keep It Clean, which featured Barbie and Ken naked in the shower (a real fountain) in a love-locked embrace. Before long, we were talking about the whole Barbie body-type, female-sexuality,

It’s no special wonder that the art collection of George and Joyce Wein, the founders of the Newport Jazz Festival, would be as rich in jazz motifs and as evocative of the history of 20th-century African-American painting as "Syncopated Rhythms," the rewarding and intelligently documented show at the Boston University Art Gallery.

What is a wonder is how many of the artists were themselves entrenched in jazz culture. The influence of jazz finds its most visible expression in subject matter: Oliver Johnson’s stunning 1977 portrait of Louis Armstrong; Norman Lewis’s 1943 oil Harlem Jazz Jamboree; Romare Beardon’s riveting 1981 collage Uptown Sunday Night Session.

More significant is the influence of jazz on the artists’ lives and, beyond that, on the styles their work embodied. Beardon wrote song lyrics and belonged to the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. Miles Davis took up painting in the 1980s after a 40-year career as one of the seminal musicians in he his

The star of Joan Snyder’s show at the Nielsen Gallery on Boston's Newbury Street is a recent painting called Pond. Describing this image of a tiny round body of water decked with lily pads makes it sound like an aerial view of the woody landscape around the artist’s summer home in Woodstock, New York, but the visceral delight of the work is in how it conjures a place by an alchemy of materials: syrupy drips and dabs of paint; the muddy ring of the pond edge concocted from dirt and herbs and papier-mâché; the mysterious dark translucent water (an acrylic varnish?); the felty softness of the cloth-and-paper lily pads; actual wet autumn leaves; patches where the raw linen stands bare. This is glorious old-school painterly painting, the sort that gets you all choked up and giddy.

And there’s plenty to see with Synder’s show of recent work at the Nielsen Gallery through December 3 and a 30-painting retrospective at the Danforth Museum in Framingham, Massachusetts that was organized by

All day the sky had been threatening to rain from a sunless overcast, but only when several hundred people gathered at 6 pm a week ago last Monday on the front lawn of the MFA’s west wing for Zhang Huan’s performance of My Boston did the showers start. Then there were the badly behaved dogs. My Boston began with nine dog owners marching their leashed canines — mostly pedigrees, with a couple of mutts — several times around a multitiered mountain of used books.

The processional, given ceremonial importance by a loud rhythmic chant coming from a nearby speaker, began as orderly but quickly deteriorated as one of the huskies attempted to devour the Boston terrier just ahead of it. Held back by only a rope collar and an owner who weighed little more than her dog, the husky — and the impending bloodbath — distracted attention from the apparition a few yards away. A naked man, Zhang Huan, was emerging from the surrounding hedges. Hairless, muscular, and dark, he looked like a huge salamander

The magnitude and the density of Thomas Hirschhorn’s new exhibit at the ICA — the space has been so filled with objects from ceiling to floor that visitors must squeeze through narrow passages in single file — create a kind of awe no matter what else you may think of the show. Living-room furniture, mannequins, six-foot candelabras of crudely fashioned wood, walls of sneakers, walls of globes, rubber ducks, countless photographs, panes of glass, toys, dolls, multiple television monitors playing silenced music videos, two 20-foot forms resembling the fuselage of an airplane, large, painted biomorphic shapes hanging from the ceiling by industrial chains — this is just a fraction of the cornucopia that crowds the stairs and walls and floors.

And then there’s the tape. The banisters are covered in tape; the panes of glass that form a row of stalls as you enter the first floor have been repaired by tape. Tape holds the candelabras to the floor; tape adheres to the rubber ducks on one dais, makes its way o