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The Five-Point Weekend Escape Plan

Coast Into the Creative Scene of Portsmouth











3. What to Do


Browse (and buy) original works by talented local artists at Nahcotta Gallery.  

Catch a live performance at the city’s 1878 Victorian theater, the Music Hall, which added an intimate, 124-seat annex, the Music Hall Loft, just around the corner in 2011. Throughout the year, the theaters host a number of popular cultural series, such as Writers on a New England Stage, which has welcomed the likes of John Updike, Stephen King, and Dan Brown; as well as plays from Maine’s Ogunquit Playhouse and even a film festival called Telluride by the Sea, which screens six indie movies fresh from the Colorado festival. In December 2012, the city welcomed a new venue, Portsmouth Book and Bar, built inside the 1860 granite Custom House. By day, the used bookstore and café serves up local beers, espresso drinks, salads, and small plates; by night, the spot turns into a cozy, living-room-like concert space, featuring string quartets, alt-country bands, folk singers, and indie acts, plus events like a Shakespearean Sonnet-a-thon.

Browse Portsmouth’s indie retailers for one-of-a-kind finds. Opened in 2009, Gus and Ruby Letterpress, an artisan stationery boutique and custom print shop, sells Samantha Finigan and Whitney Swaffield’s bespoke cards and paper products made with Whitney’s grandfather’s 1896 Chandler & Price press. The tiny shop is also stocked with locally themed gifts, custom-made for the store by the duo’s favorite designers, such as Portsmouth skyline bar glasses by Sisters of Los Angeles ($47) and canvas wine bags by Brooklyn’s Maptote ($22). For a peek into the shopping experience of Portsmouth’s past, stop by Pickwick’s Mercantile, which opened in December 2012. The Victorian-themed shop plays on the town’s trading history, offering imported goods admittedly more stylish than those a Colonial-era shopper may have encountered: Santa Maria Novella soaps from Italy ($18), Innouitoosh cotton scarves from France ($130), and Emma Bridgewater’s hand-painted porcelain woodpecker mugs from England ($36), plus NewEngland–made anchor-and-rope bracelets by Kiel James Patrick ($42).

Explore contemporary art and curated home goods at Nahcotta Gallery. The works on display here are often offbeat, avant-garde, and challenging—recently, Seacoast-based miniaturist Allison May Kiphuth displayed her Surrealist and minuscule dioramas featuring scenes of bat caves, alpine springs, icebergs, forests, and even outer space (from $175). Her work, along with that of other local artists, frequently appears in the gallery’s biannual Enormous Tiny Art exhibition, dedicated exclusively to pieces under 10 inches by 10 inches in media such as sculpture, watercolor, needle-felted wool, and photography. The shop also sells design-conscious objects like ribbed sake sets by Pigeon Toe ($100), handblown Ascutney whiskey glasses by Simon Pearce ($58), and porcelain plum vases by Middle Kingdom ($36).


Published on Jul 24, 2014 as a web exclusive.