Welcome to the Artful Blogger, and thank you for taking the time to visit. We hope this blog provides enough timely, useful and provocative information that you will check back often. I plan to update regularly – several times a week, or more when appropriate.

My goal is for this blog to become a place for the fast dissemination of information about the arts in Maine. I view this blog as a complementary piece to my regular arts stories, columns and dispatches that appear in Go, our entertainment guide that comes out each Thursday in the Portland Press Herald, and the Audience section in the Maine Sunday Telegram.

I run into stories all the time that I never get to tell -- not enough time or space for all of them. The blog provides an outlet for those stories.

The information that appears here will be grounded in fact and will meet the same journalistic criteria of any arts stories that appears in the printed paper.

With that in mind, here we go …

I caught up with Daniel Minter on Monday morning at the new Museum of African Culture at 13 Brown St. in Portland, just off Monument Square and a few doors up from Margarita’s.

The museum, which used to beon Spring Street, celebrates its new home with a ribbon-cutting at 6:30 p.m. Friday. Minter also will open his exhibition “Maine’s Malaga Island,” a series of paintings and woodcuts he created to honor those who lost their homes when the state removed them from the midcoast island in 1912.

The work focuses on the notion of home and the struggles of people have to keep their homes. It’s powerful work, full of impact and passion. Look for my column about Minter and the museum in Audience this Sunday.

Cecil MacKinnon, director of “Much Ado About Nothing” at Portland Stage Company, arrived in Portland on Monday afternoon. She meets with cast and crew for the first time Tuesday morning. She’ll give her vision of the show, then turn the cast loose for its first read through. The play opens Feb. 29.

February is an exceedingly busy month for local theater. Mad Horse opens the much-anticipated stunner “The Pillowman” on Thursday in the studio theater at Portland Performing Arts Center, and Good Theater is in the midst of its run of “Marvelous! The Judy Garland Song Book” at the St. Lawrence on Munjoy Hill. Meanwhile, Portland Stage continues with “Fully Committed” through Feb. 17, and USM is readying “To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday” for a Feb. 14 opening. Acorn Productions teams with USM for a free performance of a 90-minute, three-person verion of “Hamlet” at 7 p.m. Feb. 12 in the Gerald E. Talbot Lecture Hall of the Portland campus, and Good Theater returns with “Prelude to a Kiss,” opening a four-week run on Feb. 14 at the St. Lawrence. See you in the aisles.

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