Listening to a World of Creativity
Since the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod’s Creative Exchange podcast was launched four years ago, it has spotlighted eminent Outer Cape artists and cultural figures. The fifth season of the podcast premiered on April 23 with an interview with Truro’s Mark Adams, the foundation’s 2023 Artist of the Year.
Adams, who is also the first-ever scientist/artist-in-residence at the Center for Coastal Studies, is a painter, printmaker, naturalist, cartographer, and writer who explores topics like climate change and the relationship between art and the natural world in his work. In a statement accompanying the release of the podcast, he explained how its interview format is conducive to starting a larger dialogue. “I like doing these conversations, especially if it can spur a response and make people think a little bit about art and the environment,” says Adams.
Others featured in future podcasts this season include designer and artist Oren Sherman of Truro and performing artist Jonathan Hawkins of Provincetown, as well as musicians, visual artists, and arts administrators from elsewhere on the Cape.
New episodes of the podcast are released every Sunday and are freely available on Spotify, Apple Music, and the Arts Foundation website. See www.artsfoundation.org for information.
Keith MacLelland at Gallery 444
Most of Wellfleet-based artist Keith MacLelland’s works are inspired by buoys: quintessential Cape Cod objects, which are themselves richly painted. “They’re magical,” says MacLelland. “I think of them like Easter eggs. We go out hunting for them after storms. There’s a joy I get from finding them.”
In his paintings, currently on view at Gallery 444 (444 Commercial St., Provincetown), MacLelland repeats the cone-shaped buoys on a flat background. While he plays with shifting scale to achieve a subtle sense of space, the works are generally more about surface and pattern (as reflected in “Patina,” the title of the exhibition). The buoys are covered with patterns, some of which are designed by MacLelland himself. Others are gleaned from domestic surfaces, like wallpaper or cloth napkins.
“A lot of the patterns I use remind me of the home,” says MacLelland. As a “Cape kid,” he says the buoys also convey impressions of his childhood in the local landscape: “I’m painting my experiences and memories.”
During the exhibition, MacLelland will set up a studio in the gallery where he will work on new paintings, which involves stenciling and spray painting, for an audience. “I’ll be working and sharing the process and offering an open-studio artist experience,” he says.
There will be an opening reception on Friday, May 5 at 5 p.m., and the exhibition will be on view until May 31. See gallery444ptown.com for information. —Abraham Storer
Hearing Voices at The Playground
In Jim Dalglish’s new play, The Playground, the main character, Joan, is a former college professor and mother of a young boy who has followed her mathematician husband to New York City after he takes a job at a hedge fund. She then finds herself absorbed into a life of privilege on the Upper East Side surrounded by other wealthy women with children at a playground in Central Park. But things may not be as comfortable as they seem.
Dalglish will present a staged reading of the play at the Truro Public Library (7 Standish Way) on Saturday, May 6 at 2 p.m. He says he was inspired to write The Playground after reflecting on his own time in New York City.
“I spent a lot of time watching different kinds of people and eavesdropping on them,” he says — particularly the wealthy women of the Upper East Side. The play has a strong element of social criticism as it surveys the ethics of hiring undocumented people as au pairs and nannies and invites the audience to reflect on the ways they raise their own children.
Joan, who is played by Anna Botsford, tells her story in an attempt to understand the decisions she makes. “One decision in particular haunts her,” says Dalglish. She is also haunted by the voices of people she interacts with; they are done as audio voiceovers that Joan hears in her mind. Botsford performs the entire 90-minute show on stage by herself. “She’s fearless,” says Dalglish.
The reading is free. See trurolibrary.org for information. —Dorothea Samaha
Music and Art at Wellfleet Public Library
A concert featuring three cello sonatas from three different centuries will be presented at the Wellfleet Public Library on Saturday, May 6, 3 p.m. Cellist Emma Hays Johnson and pianist Carl Banner will perform Brahms’s Sonata No. 2 in F (1887), Henriëtte Bosmans’s Sonata for Cello and Piano (1919), and Natasha Senanayake’s Cello Sonata (2023).
The concert is the first in a monthlong series at the library produced by the Takoma Park, Md.-based Washington Musica Viva, a nonprofit chamber music organization run by Marilyn and Carl Banner. Other concerts will include chamber music for alto saxophone and piano on May 12; piano quartets by Brahms and Schumann on May 20; and an evening of music and poetry on May 26.
The series is dedicated to longtime Wellfleet resident Paul H. Banner in recognition of his service to the library and community. The concerts coincide with “Remnants,” an exhibition of art by Marilyn Banner on view through May 26. Banner’s sculptures, mixed-media drawings, and collages reflect themes of the female body, nature, power, and spirit. There will be a reception for the artist on Saturday, May 13, 5 p.m.
The concerts are free, and seating is limited. See wellfleetlibrary.org and dcmusicaviva.org for more information. —Eve Samaha
Two Artists, Many Stories, at WHAT
A new show at the Gallery at WHAT (2357 Route 6, Wellfleet) this month features work by two very different Outer Cape artists with unexpected themes and formal qualities in common.
North Truro-based Donna Mahan works with found objects to create sculptural pieces that reflect the artist’s journey down “unknown paths,” according to her statement. In Mahan’s work, textiles and pieces of glass and metal combine to form open-ended narratives in mixed media pieces that capture the changing quality of light.
Working in the two-dimensional mediums of collage, painting, and drawing, Provincetown artist James Ryan also brings together disparate elements to “build up and break down narrative” in his colorful assemblages and canvases. His pieces in the WHAT show all incorporate the color pink, echoing some of the materials that Mahan uses in her sculptures.
The exhibition opens on May 5 and is on view until May 25. See what.org for information.
