BLUEFIELD, W. Va. (WVVA) -Sunday evening, the Bluefield Arts Center’s Paine Gallery unveiled its newest exhibit, featuring a display of the beauty of one America’s northern states.

“The Maine Event” is the work of James Crim, Katherine Crim, and Carolyn Light, three experienced artists, who combined their art into one display, and showcased their artistic similarities and differences.

The theme for this exhibit is, of course, the state of Maine and the natural beauty to be found there. The artists say they wanted to work together on a theme, and when they took a trip up north to practice their respective mediums, they found their inspiration.

“I’m the photographer and, of course, these two lovely ladies are both the painters,” say James Crim.

“If you’re an artist, a photographer, you’re just attracted to Maine for the… light, for the water, for the lifestyle…” says Light.

“The landscapes, the seascapes, the movement. It’s just beautiful,” says Katherine Crim.

We asked these artists if they had any advice for those just getting started in their artistic pursuits. They say to make art for the love of making art and learn from others, both from classes and from art galleries.

If you’d like to see the Maine Event for yourself, they say you’ll have until the end of May to stop by.

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Boston Teachers Union President Jessica Tang was unanimously elected to take over as president of Massachusetts’s American Federation of Teachers chapter over the weekend, the statewide union announced in a release, making her the first person of color to hold the role.

“It’s an honor to represent the 25,000 educators, librarians, health and public service workers from across the commonwealth who make up AFT Massachusetts,” Tang said. … “I look forward to working together with the members of AFT Massachusetts to build our power, not just as AFTMA members, but as a labor movement and in partnership with community allies.”

The AFT Massachusetts’s 200 delegates met and elected Tang at the union’s annual convention over the weekend. She will take over for Salem educator Beth Kontos, who served as the AFT-MA president since 2018.

The AFT- MA is the smaller of two statewide teachers union — behind the 117,000 member Massachusetts Teachers Association — and has members in districts in Boston, Chelsea, Lowell, Salem and more. Delegates also re-elected Brant Duncan as the union’s Secretary-Treasurer.

Tang, who started out as a middle school social studies teacher in Boston Public Schools, will be the first person of color to hold the AFT-MA presidential position. She has served as the BTU president since 2017 and was also the first person of color, first openly queer person and first woman in over thirty years to serve in the top BTU position.

In her campaign for the position, Tang cited priorities including a “strong presence” at the State House and in local communities, a “strong member-driven voice for change” in partnership with organizations like the MA Education Alliance, and helping locals “build power internally and externally.”

The incoming president is a Harvard graduate, a current Vice President of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, and co-founded Teacher Activist Group-Boston, Boston Education Justice Alliance and MA Education Justice Alliance.

Tang also serves within many boards and councils, including the United States Commission on Civil Rights Massachusetts State Advisory Council, Citizens for Public Schools, Private Industry Council and the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance.

Outgoing president Kontos cited “incredible victories” in recent years, including passage of the Student Opportunity Act and the Fair Share Amendment, protections throughout the pandemic, and strengthening local contracts.

“Jessica has been a strong partner to me over the past six years, and her deep commitment to organizing and member voice will help move our growing union forward,” Kontos said.

When New Hampshire’s Democratic candidates for governor gathered for a forum at Exeter Town Hall Sunday afternoon, the top topics were affordable housing, abortion rights, climate change, Education Freedom Accounts, and Republican gubernatorial candidate Kelly Ayotte.

Left unmentioned?

Inflation, illegal immigration, anti-Israel protests roiling Granite State college campuses, and the other GOP candidate for governor, former state Senate President Chuck Morse.

The topics were selected in part by the organizers, students from New Hampshire high schools like Oyster River High, Raymond High, and Phillips Exeter Academy. But the three candidates were able to add their own topics, and it was clear they wanted to talk about Ayotte.

“We have to call Kelly Ayotte out for what she stands for,” former Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig said. “She is the most dangerous threat to New Hampshire that we have ever seen.”

And, Craig added, “We need to make sure we put forward a candidate who can beat her, and I’m telling you, I can.”

Craig, the current primary frontrunner according to the most recent polling, fielded students’ questions in front of a crowd of around 100 people, along with Executive Councilor Cinde Warmington and former New Market town councilor Jon Kiper.

Kiper, the least well-known of the three candidates, was the first to speak. He said his campaign is “all about housing.”

“Every year that we don’t focus on housing as Democrats, we are losing young people and that’s our base,” Kiper said.

Asked by student about laws affecting the transgender community, Kiper said he opposed any restrictions on sex-change medical procedures and called the issue a GOP “smoke screen so we don’t talk about the real issues of property taxes and housing and homelessness and opioid addiction.”

NH Democratic candidate for governor Cinde Warmington speaks at a candidate’s forum in Exeter, N.H. on May 5, 2024

Warmington was the second to speak. She took the opportunity to promote her political bona fides as the lone Democrat serving on the state’s Executive Council. Asked about updates to New Hampshire abortion laws under GOP Gov. Chris Sununu, Warmington said she has gone “toe-to-toe” with him “on the danger of his abortion ban.”

(Sununu signed a law in 2022 allowing abortion for any reason during the first six months of pregnancy, and bans them — with exceptions — after that.)

Warmington also claimed “Republicans have made it perfectly clear that they do not want to run against me.”

“In fact, when the governor was asked about this race on the radio, and asked about the Democratic primary, his answer to the question was ‘Warmington will be formidable,’” she said. “He knows that because I am the only person in New Hampshire who ever goes toe-to-toe with Gov. Sununu.

“He doesn’t go down and talk to the legislature. He only talks to the press when he wants to. But every two weeks, at that council table, there I am asking the tough questions.”

Warmington also said public education “is under assault” by Education Freedom Accounts, a New Hampshire program offering families state funding should they choose to enroll their children in a non-public school.

Warmington was later quizzed about her time in 2002 working as a lobbyist representing Purdue Pharma, producers of the opioid painkiller Oxycontin. She defended her work and said she “argued that doctors should be the ones to make the decision about what patients receive.”

Craig focused much of her remarks on her time serving as the city’s mayor and said her chief concern as

NH Democratic candidate for governor Joyce Craig speaks at a candidate’s forum in Exeter, N.H. on May 5, 2024

 governor, like Warmington and Kiper, would focus on affordable housing.

She told the roughly 100 attendees at Sunday’s town hall that Manchester “today has one of the hottest job markets in the entire country.”

She also expressed her opposition to the state’s EFA program.

“As governor, I will ensure that our public tax dollars go to our public schools and on day one,” Craig said. “I’m not opposed to parents having a choice of where they send their kids to school.

“What I don’t agree with is providing public dollars to go to private or religious schools.”

Craig later pivoted back to her experience as Manchester mayor, and her 2017 win over former Mayor Ted Gatsas.

“I also took on a very popular four-term incumbent Republican when I became mayor of Manchester, so I know what it takes to get through the tough elections,” she said. “I’ve done it, I have a roadmap, and I plan on doing it again.”

While it didn’t appear to make much impact on the audience, Kiper had a proposal that’s likely to get some attention in Concord. He wants to pay the legislature.

“What I propose is 500 bucks a week for just the six months that the legislature is in session,” Kiper said. “This will enable working class folks to run and serve as state representatives if they want to.

“It is really less than $5 million a year.”