'DO YOU SEE WHAT I SEE?'

Friday-next Sunday: Some look back in anger, others with a grin. Award-winning painter Sandra Dowd reflects on 35 years of self-portraits with a mixture of humor, resolve, insight and wry self-acceptance. At key turning points in her 70 years, Dowd turned to portraiture to figure out what she was thinking and feeling about everything from childbirth and divorce to a mastectomy and widowhood. After careers as a graphic designer (Washington, D.C.), college art professor (Texas) and technical illustrator (North Carolina), she is surveying her career in a museum-style show set up in her Minneapolis studio, open during next weekend's Art-a-Whirl. Stylistically her work ranges from the defiantly lush "Emerging Artist With Attitude," shown here, to a bemused "Map of Me," which takes the form of a vintage school map. (5-10 p.m. Fri.; noon-8 p.m. Sat.; noon-5 p.m. next Sun. Northrup King Building, 1500 NE. Jackson St., Mpls. 612-706-1747 or www.northrupkingbuilding.com/events.)