At the start of the period in which the work in "Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1969-1979" was shot, America remained entrenched in the Vietnam War; the tumult of 1968, its assassinations and aftershocks preoccupied the country's consciousness. None of this political upheaval, however, is apparent on the main streets of small towns across the United States that populate the core of the exhibition at the Haggerty Museum of Art, on display through Sept. 28. Shore'sUncommon Places is a series of vernacular images geographically distinguishable only by the titles describing their coordinates in an intersection of time and place.

The belief that "everybody can create something" embodies the artwork in "DIY: Do It Yourself Series," currently on display in the Community Gallery at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. The "DIY" exhibit presents the work of eight national artists who define the do-it-yourself spirit. The artists use their crafts as a means of personal expression, demonstrating sustainability, individuality, simplicity and appreciation for a community that creates unique material goods. These characteristics . . .

Pop and country music were never entirely isolated from one another. Some of the material sung by the early generations of country recording artists originated on Tin Pan Alley before seeping into the folk traditions of the South. Later, Tony Bennett recorded Hank Williams’ “Cold Cold Heart” and, during the early. . .

Mulder is hiding and Scully is a doctor in a Roman Catholic hospital. When an FBI agent goes missing and the only clues come from the visions of a disgraced Catholic priest, someone in the agency has the good sense to call the old team out of retirement. Scully knows where Mulder lives, and Mulder is the FBI’s only expert in the paranormal, even if they had succeeded in silencing him. That’s the premise of The X-Files: I Want to Believe, a disappointing coda to Chris Carter’s long-running television series. Believe isn’t overly long but sometimes seems that way. It rambles and lacks the tight drama of the show’s best episodes. An interesting idea or two stumble along with the movie as it zigzags down the icy back roads of West Virginia, where strange things are happening in the night.

Shoppers paying the $1.50 entrance fee to 7 Mile Fair were unknowingly paying admission to a concert at an unlikely venue for two local bands, The Trusty Knife and Crappy Dracula. The Trusty Knife has created a local buzz with their unique indie rock, while Crappy Dracula is known for their strange sense of humor and has often been compared to the Dead Milkmen and Flipper. The bands set up under a small makeshift stage in an outdoor stretch between the two main buildings of the fair . . .

Every now and then an artist sparks controversy through no design of his own. It’s a scenario especially endemic to public art, and one with which Milwaukee is uncomfortably familiar. The city is rife with examples of public art that have provoked impassioned outcries from one party or another, whether they’re proposed projects that never got off the ground or ones single-mindedly propelled forward by a will unmatched by that of their most ardent foes. Each occasion yields the potential for an enriching discussion on the significance of public art. Whether or not it has been sufficiently taken up is another matter . . .

Graphic novels have been all the rage for the past 20 years, but Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking Maus, depicting the Holocaust in drawings of Jewish mice and their feline Nazi predators, wasn’t the first original novel told primarily in pictures. Wordless Books examines several little-known artists from the early 20th century who composed “woodcut novels.” The author, who teaches at Vermont’s Center for Cartoon Studies . . .

Cities are like organized religion: richly layered, often paradoxical and uniquely qualified to bring out the best and worst in humankind. A new book edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, titled The Endless City (Phaidon), conveys the oft-contradictory nature of cities, including their innate ability to both quell and incite social and political conflict. At least, that’s the salutary subtext of the book. Its more arrant objective is to lend fire-and-brimstone urgency to the sharp rise in the world’s urban population within the past century. Even the book’s blazing orange cover, inscribed with eye-popping statistics (75% of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050!) is used to convey the apocalyptic immediacy of its appeal . . .

Ideally, an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the middle of summer should capture some of the magic of Shakespeare’s script. Door Shakespeare’s intimate outdoor production captures a fair amount of this magic, and does so in a way so pleasantly unexpected that it actually ends up being one of the more satisfying productions of the summer.

Outdoor theater has a strange kind of life when seen by a small audience in an intimate setting. It’s this sense of intimate immediacy that gives Door Shakespeare its charm. It may lack the funding found in other summer stock, but makes up for it in depth of performance. The company’s production of Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand’s tale of love and valor, resonates beautifully even if it suffers from lack of breadth. A charming, romantic fellow whose appearance keeps him from being romantic with a woman, Cyrano is very popular with everyone he comes into contact with. The problem with the Door Shakespeare’s . . .