I began building a list of places to buy inexpensive, original artworks.

The human body contains infinite configurations, compositions and possibilities for reframing and re-examination. In photographer Matthew Chase-Daniel’s new book Body, it becomes the canvas for organically abstracted and dizzyingly decontextualized images, leaving us anxious for reference points.

Local artist Jordan West reminded me of the John Donne poem containing “No man is an island” on my visit last week to West’s Second Street studio. We’d been talking about the difference between working in isolation and in a group.

The outsider artist closest to my heart is Leonard Knight. Formerly a mechanic in the US armed services with no artistic training or experience, Knight has spent the last 30 years or so building and maintaining a 150-foot-tall installation in Niland, Calif., on the banks of the Salton Sea. He calls it Salvation Mountain; you may recognize it from the films Into the Wild and Bombay Beach.

Media Hive organizer Jason Goodyear says that, though the first three or four Hives will alternate between open and facilitated sessions, he hopes for the monthly get-togethers to sustain themselves. Each month, a performance follows the workshop, pulling from that very event or the previous ones.

I envision a world in which we make no distinction between the arts and, let’s say, business or politics, the unifying factors being a sense of imagination and a desire for connection.

Haiku puts images out there—everyday images—juxtaposes them, makes a joke or cuts an image in an unsuspected way. Then we, the viewers, decide what, if anything, the poem means.

 This story bursts at the margins with names all connected to the great and short-lived experiment in arts education known as Black Mountain College.

Marla Allison’s paintings captivate me.

Art that grabs me tends to initiate a dialogue about identity as a product of internal self and external place.

His paintings hanging on a wall behind him, Faustino de Vargas tells the woman in his barber chair that he became a better hairdresser after studying the visual arts.