Welcome to the New Year. Can it get any better than 2008? Or, more to the point, can it get any worse? The answer to both questions is “yes,” of course. At least one Upper Valley visual art institution is looking ahead to both the best and the worst of times.

With the sort of extraordinary prescience we've come to expect from the Main Street Museum, its chief curator, presiding officer, supreme leader and most humble enabler, David Fairbanks Ford, writes to say that the White River Junction museum has received a $2,000 grant from the Vermont Humanities Council for a planned “Hobo Symposium and Festival” this spring.

“Combined with another equally generous grant (of $2,000) from the Byrne Foundation, these grants now make our dream of a Hobo and Tramp Symposium a reality,” Ford wrote.

The symposium is planned for May and will include slide lectures, a “Hobo Film Festival,” live music, publications, oral history and the museum's ongoing efforts to catalog and exhibit its growing collection of “hobo-iana” (my word, not Ford's, though he’s welcome to it).

Could a symposium on “hobos, wanderers, traveling musicians, lone-wolf visionaries and anyone else who rides around in empty freight cars” be more timely? Who knows how many of us might fit into one of those categories once May rolls around.

“We've been planning this for two years and what perfect (gosh darn) timing,” Ford said in a brief phone interview yesterday. Only he didn't say “gosh darn.” Ford said he noticed a steep increase in the number of hobos passing through White River Junction last year, most of them young people riding the rails.

The Hobo Film Festival is already a living entity that's making its own low-budget tour of the country. For a preview, check out www.myspace.com/hobofilmfest.

The $4,000 in grant money will allow the Main Street Museum to purchase projection and sound equipment to screen films, Ford said. Despite the economy, the museum is doing well, with both visitation and donation on the rise. “People are doing cheaper things and staying home,” Ford said.

If you can't wait until May to experience the Main Street Museum, it's holding its usual First Friday open house tomorrow night from 6 to 8. This month the festivities honor the arrival of the “mounted flying killer jackalope” recently donated to the collection. The museum holds its annual burning of the Christmas trees and Twelfth Night celebration on Jan. 10.

The museum also exhibits “The Wolfson Memorial Laboratory of Colour,” the work and collections of Strafford artist Peter Thomashow, among other delights. The museum is at 58 Bridge St., White River Junction. Call (802) 356-2776.

* A pair of notable shows at the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover are closing soon. “Immanence and Revelation: The Art of Ben Frank Moss” gathers more than 70 paintings, drawings and prints by the longtime Dartmouth studio art professor. And “Coastline to Skyline: The Philip H. Greene Gift of California Watercolors, 1930-1960,” brings together 13 paintings donated by Greene, like Moss a Hanover resident, that define the bold, gritty California style of watercolor painting developed in the 1930s. The museum reopens tomorrow from its winter break and both shows run through Sunday. “European Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art,” continues through March 8.

* Congratulations to the Cornish Colony Museum in Windsor, which announced yesterday that it had received from a longtime donor in Texas a complete set of Maxfield Parrish Edison Mazda calendars from 1918 to 1934. The calendars were widely reproduced in their day, which brought Parrish both exposure and money. Few complete sets survive. Cornish Colony Museum founder and director Alma Gilbert-Smith writes that the calendars “revolutionized the printing industry” as Parrish pushed printers to make ever-more detailed color separations, the better to reproduce the painter's distinctive color palette. The set of calendars is on display at the museum, which is in Windsor's former fire station and municipal building, and will remain there permanently.

The museum hosts “A New England Winter,” paintings, prints and vintage photographs by Cornish Colony artists Willard Metcalf, Stephen and Maxfield Parrish, Henry Prelwitz, Fredric Remington, H.O. Walker and William Zorach, on Saturday. Admission is $6. Call (802) 674-6008.

The Ledyard Gallery in Hanover's Howe Library opens “20 Plus,” a selection of illustrations from design projects from the 20-year history of Chuck Gibson Design, a Hanover graphic design firm, on Saturday. A reception is planned for next Saturday, Jan. 10, from 2 to 4 p.m. Call (603) 643-4120.

* On Monday, Norwich Public Library opens “Regarding Diversity, Part III: Kerala, India,” the latest in a series of documentary photographs by Scott Miller and interviews by Wynne Washburn. Miller and Washburn spent four months living in Kerala in 2007, documenting everyday life and interviewing the people of Kerala about their tradition of religious tolerance among Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Jews. A reception is planned for next Friday, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Call (802) 649-1184.

* Collective: The Art of Craft in Woodstock opens an exhibition of shearling clothing by Susan Bradford with a reception tomorrow from 4 to 6 p.m. Call (802) 457-1298.

AVA Gallery and Art Center has opened registration for its greatly expanded roster of art classes for children and adults. Call (603) 448-3117 for more information or for a brochure on the education program.

“Outside,” a show of recent plein air oil paintings by Strafford's Micki Colbeck is up and running in the Lebanon Co-Op Cafe Gallery through Sunday.

* “A Brief Excursion into the Realm of the Abstract,” work by Adam Belanich, is on view in Hanover in the Hopkins Center's Barrows Rotunda, through Monday.

* Hanover's Spheris Gallery exhibits “The Kahlo Legacy: Contemporary Women's Self-Portraits,” work by Susan Hauptman, Tina Newberry, Sophie Jodoin and Anna Schuleit, through Tuesday. Call (603) 640-6155.

* Randolph resident Jan Fowler shows oil and watercolor paintings at Gifford Medical Center through Wednesday.

“Portfolio 2008” is on view at Two Rivers Printmaking Studio in White River Junction through January. The studio is in the Tip Top Arts Building on North Main Street. Call (802) 295-5901.

* “Document,” an exhibition of new paintings by Gary Hamel, is at Red Roof Gallery in Enfield. The show consists of 24 large paintings that document the history of Orange, Hamel's hometown, and Mount Cardigan. Call (603) 632-5143.

* The Hotel Coolidge's Zollikofer Gallery hosts “Watercolor Medley,” a show of watercolors by members of Grace Ellis' painting groups.

* “Paintings by George Lawrence,” a solo show of work by the Tunbridge artist, is at Tunbridge Public Library. Call (802) 889-9404.

* “Anything Goes,” an exhibition of paintings by Woodstock's Mary Fox Church, Jennifer Dembinski, Joan Oppenheimer, Nancy Ross and Kay Wood, is at the Quechee Inn at Marshland Farm. Call (802) 295-3133.

* The Ledyard Gallery in Hanover's Howe Library exhibits “Places, Near and Far,” acrylic paintings by contemporary folk artist Alice Moir of Hanover. Moir's work is now also in the pockets and wallets of Howe Library card holders throughout the Upper Valley. Her painting of the library is on the library's new membership cards. Call (603) 643-4120.

* Valley Regional Hospital in Claremont holds a holiday art show in its lobby gallery. Call (603) 543-5610.

* Amanda Dowd-DeRoy exhibits recent work in pastel at Citizens Bank on South Main Street in Hanover.

* Cooler Gallery in White River Junction hosts “Coastlines,” featuring Judith Hoerstring's semi-abstract paintings of Alaska's Cook Islands and Cooler owner Gaal Shepherd’s pastels of the southwest coast of Ireland. Call (802) 295-8008.

* Northlight Digital in White River Junction has put up another exhibition of photographs by Collamer Abbott, who photographed Vermont and New Hampshire in the 1950s and '60s for the Valley News and other publications. Northlight is in the Tip Top Media Arts Building on North Main Street and the show is in the Tip Top CafÐ.

Art Notes appears in the Valley News every Thursday. Notices must arrive two weeks prior to the Thursday before an event. E-mail can be sent to artnotes@vnews.com.