Castle Hill’s Upcoming Season
The Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill has announced its 2022 summer program, with a 50th anniversary gala planned for July 23.
The center is offering 140 summer workshops, nearly all in person, including staples such as plein air painting and introductory wheel throwing, and more offbeat courses like copperplate photogravure with Lothar Osterburg, improvisational quilting with Ed Johnetta Miller, and Suzy Becker’s graphic medicine, an emerging field of narrative treatment.
Castle Hill will host the 15th annual international encaustic conference June 3-5 and the Provincetown Dance Festival Aug. 19-27. The encaustic conference includes a juried exhibition, demonstrations, lectures, and a keynote address by the artist Michael David on June 4. The dance festival will stretch over two weekends, with performances by artists from the Boston Ballet, classical Indian dancer Priya Bangal, and contemporary dance artists Lilah van Rens and Jade Manns from New York.
John P. Bunker, a botanist and author, will deliver a lecture on urban nature on July 13 and Antonia Angress will discuss her debut novel, Sirens & Muses, on July 20. Reginald Dwayne Betts, a poet, lawyer, and 2021 MacArthur fellow, holds the Woody English Distinguished Artists and Writers Chair and delivers a poetry reading on July 26. Poet John Yau reads on Aug. 31.
Musical offerings include the Nadia Washington Quartet on July 1, Oysters and Opera on Aug. 2, Zoë Lewis & the Souvenirs on Aug. 10, and PoemJazz with Robert Pinsky on Aug. 17.
Castle Hill’s gallery space will host nine exhibits over the course of the season. Paul Bowen and Robert Henry have a show from June 28 to July 8, followed by an exhibition of works by Wes Brown, Deborah Dancy, and Julia Talcott July 12-22. Installation artist Judy Pfaff will show work Aug. 16-Sept. 2.
Maura Cunningham’s Portals at the Commons
In Maura Cunningham’s recent work, she uses paint sculpturally, the figures contending with the physical presence of the material. It’s no surprise that Cunningham studied sculpture at Mass Art. In her show “Leaving the Harbor of the Known,” running May 17 through 29 at the Provincetown Commons, 46 Bradford St., Cunningham explores the idea of Provincetown as “a place of portals,” according to a press release.
The figures and boats in her paintings are made diminutive not only by paint but also by the sublime Provincetown landscape, suggesting the town as an immersive place where the individual encounters “dazzling impermanence” and “the mystery of being alive.” An opening reception will be held on Saturday, May 21 from 4 to 6 p.m. —Abraham Storer
Provincetown International Film Festival Honors Guadagnino, Yang, Slate
The Provincetown International Film Festival (PIFF), which will run from June 15 to 19, has named Academy Award-nominated writer, director, and producer Luca Guadagnino as the 2022 Filmmaker on the Edge. His 2017 film Call Me By Your Name won the Gotham Independent Film award for Best Feature. Film Independent also gave Guadagnino and the cast of his Suspiria remake (2018) the Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award.
This year, Guadagnino presents a documentary about cobbler Salvatore Ferragamo, founder of a namesake luxury brand. Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams premiered in Italy at the Venice Film Festival in September 2020. Guadagnino will be at the festival on Sunday, June 19 to accept his award; John Waters will present and interview him.
Bowen Yang, whose credits include Saturday Night Live and The Lost City (2022), will be one recipient of the PIFF Next Wave Award, which honors dynamic, distinctive voices in film. Fire Island (2022), in which Yang stars alongside Margaret Cho and Joel Kim Booster, will be one of the festival’s special screenings. The film, directed by Andrew Ahn, follows the foibles a group of gay friends on their yearly vacation.
Comedian, author, and actress Jenny Slate (I Want You Back, Obvious Child) will also receive the Next Wave Award. She most recently co-wrote and starred as Marcel in Marcel the Shell With Shoes On (2022), based on a children’s book she published with the film’s director, Dean Fleischer-Camp, in 2011. Marcel is a one-inch-tall seashell on an earnest quest to reconnect with his family. It screens at PIFF preceding an official release from A24 on June 24. Slate and Yang will receive their awards in a ceremony on June 16.
This year’s spotlight selections include a 4K restoration of John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972). Sarah Jones’s Sell/Buy/Date (2022), co-executive produced by Meryl Streep, premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March. Bryan Cranston, Rosario Dawson, and Ilana Glazer join in Jones’s documentary exploration of the intersections of race, gender, and power in the sex industry. Girl Picture (2022) is among the festival’s foreign film selections. Finnish director Alli Haapasalo provides an intimate glimpse into a close friendship between two girls as they become young women.
PIFF’s narrative features also include Emily the Criminal, starring 2017 Next Wave Award-winner Aubrey Plaza. Zhang Yimou, who directed the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, brings One Second (2020), a story of set during China’s Cultural Revolution. Local fare includes short films Cheeky-NFT-Dance from artist and Provincetown Community Compact founder Jay Critchley and A Better Half from former Mary Heaton Vorse resident Marco Calvani. Adam Golub and Sylvaine Alfaro bring documentary short Reggie Cabral: Larger Than Life Terrorist about the former Atlantic House Inn owner who welcomed artists and writers into the ranks of A-House regulars.
Festival passes will be available for purchase at provincetownfilm.org after May 27. —Abbey Dwight
Sue Post at Farm Projects
In Sue Post’s current show of woozy abstract paintings at Farm Projects, 355 Main St. in Wellfleet, the Truro-based artist plays with the structure of the grid to explore color, light, and her immediate surroundings.
In an accompanying text, she likens painting to “a recording of a day, an entry in a diary” and details her visual references: trees, views out windows, photographs, and the “observation of the light coming through Venetian blinds and wooden shutters in my son’s bedroom window.” Although references to objects are not recognizable in Post’s paintings, the experience of observing light comes across forcefully. The interlocking stripes masterfully calibrate color and value to convey shadow and light.
In What It Is, Post alternates lush bands of yellow paint with washy blue stripes. Dark blues cut into the composition, the image seemingly woven together with strips of paint. The reference to textiles and weaving continues throughout the exhibition. Her edges seem to fray in some pieces, and the painter’s hand is evident in the loose brushwork.
The largest piece in the show, I Love You, came from a series of body-sized paintings, each of which she associated with a different member of her family, this one with her husband. The handsome gray and green painting radiates an internal light. In one corner of the exhibition, Post experiments with external projected light, illuminating a canvas with a rotating series of quotidian images from her natural surroundings: her garden, clothes hanging out to dry, raindrops in her driveway. Although visually dissonant with the rest of the work, the video conveys a similar intimacy and humility as the paintings. The show runs May 7-23. —Abraham Storer
