The American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) is a Baltimore treasure housing the art of self-taught artists – many of them working class, some with histories of mental health breakdowns, of exile and genocide, of poverty and exclusion. This is outsider art that leaves you gasping with awe at the dazzling work people can create out of matchsticks or crocheted yarn remnants or broken dishes. Many of the exhibited pieces are sparkly and intricate and wrenching and extreme. This museum honors, among many others, the intuitive art of an American truck driver, a Ukrainian farmer, a Turkish baker, and an English laborer. These artists are not Fine Arts graduates: they are plain, often troubled, folks whose talents plow through the obstacles in their lives.

The poet Verandah Porche, a New England treasure, will be reading from her new collection Sudden Eden. The book party is being held at a Cambridge home (parking will be permitted) on Wednesday, April 24 from 7:00-8:30 p.m. Please call 617 354 6237 for the address.

Calling all progressive organizers! RootsCamp MA (April 6-7, 2013 at 1199 SEIU in Dorchester) shakes up the traditional conference model. No need to submit workshop proposals in advance. Instead attendees decide an agenda together each morning of the conference. This is cross-issue progressive movement building, where all attendees bring what they know and what they are curious about.

The Free Software Foundation has just announced the line-up for its upcoming LibrePlanet 2013 conference, to be held in Cambridge, MA at the Harvard Science Center on March 23-24.

LibrePlanet is where global free software community members and newcomers meet together to learn from each other, share accomplishments and face challenges. This is the fifth annual LibrePlanet conference.

This year's LibrePlanet conference is designed for all experience levels. Whether you're interested in learning more about what free software is and why you should use it, or whether you've been contributing code to free software projects for years, you will find plenty to do at LibrePlanet.

In the posh 19th century neighborhood of Nook Farm in what was then the most affluent town in eastern United States, Hartford, Connecticut, both Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain built their dream homes – literally next door to each other. The two houses have been restored and serve as magical museums of their literary times. Each house offers frequent tours, but on weekends it is possible to enjoy a 90-minute joint tour of the beautiful homes.

By hearing the stories of what went on in these rooms we visit, it is possible to get an intimate picture of the lives of these icons of American literature. It provides a context for understanding the changing ideas of race and gender in pre- and post-civil war America.

I did not know that the very first state-accredited LBGT art museum, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, is located in NYC until I heard that it was exhibiting a mid-career retrospective of the unique photographic work of Del LaGrace Volcano. Volcano (now resident in Sweden) is an artist I have known personally since the early 1990s when we were both living in London. In her life and her art, she has been dissecting and refiguring the concept, the performance, and the social understanding of gender. He rejects language that distorts the complex reality of trans and intersex identity and so I will use pronouns in this piece in as fluid a way as suits the artistic work. Volcano hermself uses imaginative, inclusive terms – including s/he and herm.

The lovely Berkshires town of Stockbridge is home to the Norman Rockwell Museum as well as his work studio, moved from Main Street after his death in compliance with a stipulation in his will. I checked out the studio first, where it had been planted on a hill with an amazing pastoral view.

Instead of maintaining it as it was at the time of his death, the studio was re-set to 1960, with reproductions of classic art (Michelangelo’s “David,” Brueghel, Picasso, etc) on the walls and an antique etching machine in the corner (he didn’t use it, just liked the looks of it).

Within an hour of my arrival to The Berkshires, I rush out to Jacob’s Pillow, the unique dance campus that has been declared a National Historic Landmark. To celebrate its 80th anniversary, it is mounting an enlightening photo display tracing decades of performances and featuring such luminaries as Mark Morris and Alvin Ailey when they were very young dancers. The dominant subjects of these photos, though, are Ted Shawn, the founder of Jacob’s Pillow, and his troupe called “Men Dancers,” usually shirtless and leaping with homoerotic abandon in the late 1930s.

Shakespeare and Company is a remarkable multi-theater complex in Lenox. Founded in 1978 by an Englishwoman Tina Packer, it was at first housed in Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount,. The company was able to purchase a permanent complex on a 30-acre estate where they moved in 2000. Throughout its 35 years, Shakespeare and Company has increased its reputation for theatre excellence and courage.

Despite a tornado watch and a pounding thunderstorm, the various theatre parking lots were filling as I arrived to see this world premiere of “Cassandra Speaks”, a one-woman, one-act play by the radical playwright Norman Plotkin (“Malcolm X” and “The Wobblies”). Directed with no small skill by Nicole Ricciardi, the actor Tod Randolph is remarkable as Dorothy Thompson.

The Pulitzer Prize winning author Edith Wharton came from a privileged background and made a bob or two from her writing – enough to build this wonderful home, The Mount; but despite being rich and successful, she was always bucking gender limitations, not the least the accepted blueprint for women of her class as wife and hostess. Like ambitious women of every age, she had to bust through a number of historic obstacles: she was the first woman to win a Pulitzer, the first to be awarded an honorary PhD from Yale, and the first woman full member in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

So it is fitting that The Mount should be one of only 5% of National Historic Landmarks dedicated to women. In this, Wharton’s 150th birthday, The Mount is offering tours, films, exhibitions, jazz evenings and literary events.