Poet Laureate Ada Limón Can Imagine
If you close your eyes to consider the bones, sinews, and arteries composing this flexed arm of sand and land, you might see the dunes, the ebbing coast, or the winding trails cleaving the beech trees. You might remember getting lost or feeling overcome by the peculiar light of this place. You might wonder what happens when we’re not looking.
Mary Oliver did. In her poem “Can You Imagine?” she writes of the trees: “…surely you can’t imagine they just/ stand there loving every/ minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings/ of the years slowly and without a sound/ thickening….”
Oliver is one of many to channel the power of poetry in situating us in the natural world; it is a sensibility that also suffuses “You Are Here: Poetry in Parks,” a new project conceived by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón and co-sponsored by the Library of Congress, the National Park Service, and the Poetry Society of America. It follows the April publication of You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, an anthology compiled by Limón of 53 contemporary poets writing about the relationship between humanity and the environment.
Limón, a former Fine Arts Work Center Fellow, will visit the Cape Cod National Seashore on Friday, June 14 to kick off the project, for which she’ll visit seven national parks and use poetry to transform picnic tables into public works of art.
At 10 a.m., Limón will unveil an installation with Oliver’s poem on a picnic table at Beech Forest Trail. At 5 p.m., she will return to the Fine Arts Work Center to talk about the project and read the seven selected poems for each national park. A book signing will follow.
The events are free and open to the public. For more information and to register, visit fawc.org. —Aden Choate
Art and Endangered Nature
Terry Wolkowicz, president of the nonprofit Sound Explorations and educational director of the New Bedford Symphony, is captivated by whales, in particular humpbacks and right whales. She is determined to find a way for blind and low-vision people to share in her delight.
She designed an undulating sculpture that mimics the gyrating movements of whales. The sculpture doubles as an instrument — when you run your hands over it, music plays up and down the scales, metamorphosing movement into music. The sculpture is designed to replicate the desperate moves whales make when they become entangled in fishing gear.
Wolkowicz will be on a panel discussing “Art and Endangered Nature” at the Center for Coastal Studies (5 Holway Ave., Provincetown) on Tuesday, June 18 at 3:30 p.m. She will be joined by Mark Faherty, science coordinator for Mass Audubon Cape Cod; artist and scientist Mark Adams; novelist Heidi Jon Schmidt; and CCS co-founder Stormy Mayo.
Zygmunt Plater, a professor of land use and environmental law at Boston College Law School, organized the panel and will moderate. The panel is part of a series of events called Forum 24, organized by the Provincetown Art Gallery Association to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Forum 49 — a gathering of artists and intellectuals in Provincetown at which they discussed the state of just about everything.
“The thing that struck me about Forum 49 was that there were no siloes,” says Plater. “People did psychoanalysis and poetry and essays and pottery and photography. I wanted to bring that back because I feel like it’s important at a time when Americans get into their own circles and can’t talk to people from other circles.
“I’m hoping the panel won’t be too dark,” he says. “My students come out to Provincetown every winter, and we discuss whale entanglement, and it leaves them in a very dark place.”
Plater notes that, like those who convened for Forum 49, we’re at a precipice. “I’m hoping that the panel will be an opportunity to remind everyone that Provincetown has always helped the larger culture of the United States understand the moment through art,” he says. “Conversations disappear, but if the things are put down into art, that’s how we lead.” —Paul Sullivan
Chamber Music Fest Celebrates Golden Anniversary
It’s been 50 years since pianist Donald Enos, fresh from New England Conservatory, decided to bring more chamber music to his native Cape Cod. He’s since accompanied dozens of string and brass musicians for the Meeting House Chamber Music Festival he founded.
“Every concert is a unique thing — you have to balance everything within that,” he says. “And after 50 years, you have some idea of what really works well.”
The six concerts of this year’s festival, from June 16 to July 22, will include some of “the big pieces,” Enos says, including Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, Schumann’s Piano Quartet Op. 47, and Beethoven’s Trio in E-Flat Major Op. 1, No. 1. But he’s also looking forward to pieces he’s never played, including William Walton’s piano quartet and work by other contemporary chamber-music voices, including Rebecca Clarke and Mark O’Connor, and a debut by Rizgar Ismael.
“It’s been quite a privilege to be able to play this music here,” says Enos, who’s also performed with the Chatham Chorale and Cape Symphony and is director of music at South Dennis Congregational Church. “Chamber music has some of the greatest music ever written.”
The concerts feature regional favorites plus international performers familiar to regular festival-goers. Those include violinists Joyce Hammann and Irina Muresanu, cellist Sergey Antonov, and cellist Amit Peled, who plays Pablo Casals’s 1733 Gofriller cello on a long-term performance loan.
The festival’s concerts are all at the Church of the Holy Spirit, Episcopal, 204 Monument Road, Orleans. Season tickets — which Enos says typically account for more than half the audience — are $90, single-performance tickets are $25 at the door, and admission is free for those under age 18. Tickets and information: meetinghousemusic.org. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
Jim Vincent: Night Lights
Artist Jim Vincent paints at night. That’s because by day he is the director of Provincetown’s Dept. of Public Works. Before he paints, he studies old photographs. He likes the way historical images allow him to go back in time.
In Commercial Street, Night Scene, Vincent used a recent image of Provincetown’s historic heart, however — one he took right before a snowstorm. The streets are empty, except for one car driving past the Provincetown Public Library. The lighted windows of an art gallery glow warm and yellow, but they are empty framed rectangles, more haunting than inviting.
Vincent studies with Hilda Neily at the Cape School of Art. “She taught me how to see,” he says. But his work contrasts starkly with the light-filled paintings of the Cape School. His is dark and moody. The past seems to set in on his subjects. Bold color is used sparingly.
Still, he says, if he spots Cape School teachers Lauren Byrne and Hilda Neily painting on the side of the highway, where they often position their easels, he’ll sometimes join them; he keeps paints in his car, just in case.
Vincent was the Provincetown harbormaster in the 1990s, but he went back to school to become a counselor and left here first to work with inmates at Bridgewater State Hospital and later at a residential reentry center in Portland, Maine. “The science of how you help somebody who has made mistakes is interesting,” he says. His paintings reflect his fascination with complicated pasts.
Vincent grew up in New Hampshire. He says his mother was “rough around the edges.” For Jan, an acrylic on canvas, he worked from a found photograph that reminded him of her. In the painting, a woman, cigarette dangling from her mouth, turns to look at the viewer with an exaggerated, defiant eye. Her hair looks like she’s been through a windstorm of her own making, and her fragmentary perception of the objects around her seems to be reflected in the quick strokes of pink, yellow, and blue that fill the room.
Eventually, Vincent says, “I needed to be near the water again.” He and his husband moved back to Provincetown two years ago.
An exhibition of Vincent’s recent works, “Adrift Ashore,” opens at the Harbor Dental Office of Jorge Rodriguez at 2 Harry Kemp Way on Friday, June 14 with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. “The guys who work for me say they’ll see my paintings when they go in for a root canal,” he says. —Pat Kearns
Juneteenth on the Outer Cape
Juneteenth is liberation. Juneteenth is remembrance. Juneteenth is connection.
June 19, 2024 will mark 159 years since Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 and announced that the Emancipation Proclamation had freed the 250,000 people enslaved in Texas. This news came two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln had signed and issued the executive order that formally abolished slavery throughout the United States.
Juneteenth, which became an official federal holiday in 2021, commemorates this final enforcement of the proclamation, honors the ongoing freedom fight of Black Americans, and highlights the work that remains in achieving true equality. A coalition of leaders and organizers of color on the Outer Cape are offering the community several opportunities to celebrate.
James Jackson Jr. performs a special Juneteenth cabaret show at Gifford House, 9 Carver St. in Provincetown, on Sunday, June 16 at 7 p.m. Suggested donation is $40 at juneteenthptown.com.
The Unitarian Universalist Meeting House, 236 Commercial St., hosts a Juneteenth community cookout and celebration on Wednesday, June 19 from 2 to 5 p.m. The event is free with a suggested $20 donation.
Jazz violinist David Eure and keyboardist Lee Adler perform at Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main St., on Thursday, June 20 at 5 p.m. Tickets are $25 at wellfleetpreservationhall.org.
See juneteenthptown.com and wellfleetpreservationhall.org for additional information. The events are open to all. —Aden Choate
Ruby Wolf Shines in The Featherweight at PIFF
The Featherweight, a biopic about the boxer Willie Pep, who held the world featherweight championship in 1942 and 1950, is the debut feature film from director Robert Kolodny. It will screen at the Provincetown International Film Festival on Thursday, June 13 at 1:30 p.m. and Sunday, June 16 at 4 p.m. Both showings are at the Art House, 214 Commercial St.
The film stars Harwich-raised actress Ruby Wolf as Willie Pep’s wife, Linda. This is Wolf’s first feature film.
Wolf used some of her own family stories to play Linda. Her mother grew up in the Hartford area, where Pep and Linda lived. “I used stories about my mom’s aunt who was the wife of an intense Italian guy in Hartford,” she says.
Willie Pep — born Guglielmo Papaleo — is considered the greatest featherweight boxer of all time; he retired in 1959 with 220 wins under his belt. But after his 72-match winning streak was snapped, he was never the same. Featherweight follows Pep’s comeback. Professional sports comebacks are not always easily charted. Some are motivated by a thirst for competition; some are necessitated by financial mishandling. Pep’s, it seems, was an attempt to rescue his masculinity from crisis. He was chasing faded glory.
There is a film within the film: a documentary crew follows Pep and Linda in the lead-up to the comeback fight. Linda struts around the house, navigating tension with Pep’s kind but disapproving mother, who says he needs a Sicilian wife to take care of him.
“I wouldn’t have my life as a working artist if it weren’t for the artistic community I grew up with on the Cape,” says Wolf. “There were so many people, mentors who were so eager to foster that kind of passion in young people. It really has informed the way I approach art as an actor — that the joy is in creative people coming together with a common goal. It’s a Cape Cod ethos.” —Pat Kearns
Women’s Music Festival Returns to Payomet
The 10th annual Cape Cod Women’s Music Festival returns to the Payomet Performing Arts Center, 29 Old Dewline Road in North Truro, on June 15. At 7 p.m., the singer-songwriter-producer Gaby Moreno, who won the 2024 Grammy for Best Latin Pop Album, will perform the headline show.
“Gabby has brought a whole world of Latin music into Americana and folk music,” says Sarah Swain, a local musician who founded the festival. “She’s breaking barriers and making connections in such a beautiful, loving way.”
Swain adds that Moreno, who is the first UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador from Guatemala and works to support immigrants and other marginalized communities, aligns with the festival’s key mission to help others.
Provincetown singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Zoë Lewis will return to the festival as emcee. The lineup also features local musicians and returning performers, including the Dirty Water Dance Band, a rock-reggae-soul ensemble; Mozelle, an Eastham-based, jazz-blues-R&B singer; folk artist Shannon Davis; multi-instrumentalist Meagan Gillis; and singer-songwriter Sarah Burrill, whose song “Rise Above” has become a festival anthem in the fight against cancer.
All proceeds from the festival help local cancer patients through the Cape Wellness Collaborative, which Swain founded after losing her mother to ovarian cancer. Since 2012, $250,000 has been raised to help support more than 2,500 local cancer patients by providing meals and funding wellness therapies like acupuncture, massage, and yoga.
Swain says that the festival and its collaborative spirit have helped heal her grief while generating local muscle to fight cancer. She says the festival has encouraged audiences to support female musicians, formed relationships between performers, and generated what one friend called “a giant love bomb.”
“All of us have been touched by cancer in some way,” says Swain. “For the musicians, this festival is a way to feel like they’re making a difference. We all have someone we’re holding in our hearts when we’re up on the stage.”
Festival tickets range from $45 to $95. For more information visit payomet.org. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
