Art, Music, and Food for a Cause
Art for the Border, an Outer Cape collective of artists and activists, will host an art giveaway and Latin dance party at the Gifford House (9 Carver St., Provincetown) on Sunday, June 29 at 4 p.m. The event will benefit Latinx in Action, a Hyannis-based nonprofit serving recent immigrants to Cape Cod.
For co-organizer Cynthia Bargar, the event is a tangible way for the community to stand against the Trump administration’s current immigration crackdown. “This isn’t a protest,” she says. “But it’s a way of supporting an organization that is facing all kinds of challenges.”
Latinx in Action offers ESL classes, support groups, a community garden, a food pantry, and meeting spaces — though in recent months, according to founder and director Katia Dacunha, those spaces have felt increasingly empty even as the need for the organization’s services has skyrocketed.
Dacunha says that she has seen members of the community detained by ICE and families split apart. She wants to support those families — and she wants other families to be prepared.
“Most of the people, they just want to do their best to stay,” says Dacunha. To that end, Latinx in Action is organizing a task force to help families review their immigration documents and make safety plans, including helping them designate a caretaker for their children if they are separated from their parents.
Dacunha also says the organization is focused on providing boxes of food to families who no longer have a stable source of income because of ICE detentions. Food is delivered to families that are unable to come to Latinx in Action’s headquarters.
Currently, says Dacunha, the pantry’s stock is low, and the organization tries to serve as many community members as possible. “Everything we collect, we divide,” she says. “If we have 12 oranges, there will be one orange in each box.”
As of this month, Art for the Border has raised more than $15,000 of its $60,000 goal for Latinx in Action.
Those who attend the June 29 fundraiser and donate $50 or more will have the opportunity to choose an artwork donated by one of 15 participating Outer Cape artists. In addition to the art giveaway, the event will include Latin dance lessons with DJ Jaime de Sousa, an empanada pop-up by Provincetown’s The Latin Corner, and performances by Hyannis singer-songwriter Rafael Caires and other local artists. Dacunha will also be present at the event to answer questions.
See latinxinaction.org for more information. —Chloe Budakian
Couch Finds Its Comfort Zone
After guitarist Zach Blankstein was diagnosed with a concussion in 2019, he was told by his doctor to rest and stay on the couch. So that’s where Blankstein and his bandmates hung out and jammed — and that became the name of their Boston-based band.
“We spent so much time on the couch, it felt like the centerpiece of what was happening,” Blankstein says. Now on a cross-country tour, Couch will play at Payomet Performing Arts Center (29 Old Dewline Road, North Truro) on Sunday, June 29 at 6 p.m.
Besides Blankstein, the band includes Tema Siegel on vocals, Jared Gozinsky on drums, Will Griffin on bass, Danny Silverston on keyboards, Jeffrey Pinsker-Smith on trumpet, and Eric Tarlin on saxophone. The size of the group doesn’t hinder their musical flow, Blankstein says — it encourages it. “We have so much fun playing together,” he says, adding that the band plays “pop music with live instruments”— that is, without using any backing tracks. “We have a horn section. There are some jazzy, funky elements incorporated.”
The band’s self-titled debut EP was released in 2021 with five songs. “It was created almost entirely remotely” because of the pandemic, Blankstein says. “The songs were written over Zoom and Facetime. The parts were recorded separately, one layer at a time.” But it’s hard to tell from listening to the album that the musicians were miles away from each other when they created it.
In “Black Bear Lane,” Siegel sings jazzily over an instrumental arrangement so perfectly aligned that one can easily imagine the band on a smoky cabaret stage. In the more pop-and-funk-leaning “Still Feeling You,” the band creates an intricate, echoing wash under Siegel’s layered vocals.
Couch’s most recent EP, Sunshower, was released in 2023, with six tracks ranging from pure funk to indie rock and soul, the sound warm and enveloping as a hug. Part of the band’s effortless harmony is due to their relationships. “We’re just a band of friends,” Blankstein says. “I feel like a lot of groups find each other and become friends after. But we were close friends long before Couch was a thing.”
Tickets are $25 to $45 at tickets.payomet.org. —Eve Samaha
Dreaming and Writing for a Better World
The acclaimed author of more than three dozen books for young readers, Jacqueline Woodson maintains that children’s literature is for everyone. “It’s written to young people, not for young people,” she says, adding that it’s not just an introduction to books but also to ideas and ways of thinking about the world.
A four-time Newbery Honor winner, a four-time National Book Award finalist, a three-time Coretta Scott King Award winner, and a former Fine Arts Work Center fellow, Woodson will return to Provincetown on Friday, June 27 for a conversation with Penguin Books publisher Patrick Nolan in the first of FAWC’s 2025 Summer Salons.
Several of Woodson’s books are written in verse. One of her most beloved works is 2014’s Brown Girl Dreaming, a memoir of her childhood. Written in short poems, the book describes what it was like to grow up as an African American girl in the 1960s and ’70s with a childhood split between South Carolina and New York.
The choice to write Brown Girl Dreaming in verse was deliberate. “I thought it served the purpose for the narrative,” says Woodson. “It’s about memory and how memory comes to us in these small moments with all this white space, all this unknown, around it. It felt like the truest form for that particular story.”
Although she has written four novels for adults, Woodson says that writing for young people is where she has found her voice. “I find young people very interesting in the way that they think about the world,” she says. “I feel like they’re not as jaded as adults.” When readers acknowledge her stories by saying “This is my story, too,” she says, Woodson knows she has accomplished what she set out to do.
The conversation on June 27 will begin at 5 p.m. at the Fine Arts Work Center (24 Pearl St., Provincetown) with a reception in the FAWC courtyard and will include a moderated question and answer session. Tickets begin at $25 and are available at fawc.org. —Antonia DaSilva
A Musical Tribute to Broken Hearts
When singer Lauren Jade performed on Carnival cruise ships, people commented on how much she looked like a young Gladys Knight. It happened so often that her bandmates incorporated hits by the seven-time Grammy Award winner into her act, and a mentor later encouraged Jade to create an entire Knight tribute to perform in clubs in Puerto Vallarta.
Jade eventually began to apply her theater training to Knight’s songbook and focused on the stories in the lyrics. “I’ve listened to these songs since I was 10 but never understood their true meaning,” she says. “I went from song to song and thought, ‘Oh, my God, Gladys has gotten her heart broken so many times. I’ve gotten my heart broken, too.”
For Jade, Knight’s “Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye)” recalled memories of a relationship that turned toxic. The decision to relate experiences from her own life through Knight’s songs was the genesis of the “Midnight Train” tribute show that she’s bringing to Provincetown for a weeklong run at the Pilgrim House this week.
“The story is about me experiencing love for the first time, getting my heart broken, then finding love again and the courage to find myself,” Jade says, noting those feelings are universal. “This story can be for anyone. If you’re gay, straight, Black, white, man, woman, or however you identify, everyone has gotten their heart broken.”
Jade began planning the show after reconnecting this past spring with her former Carnival shipmate Yaron Spiwak, who regularly performs in Provincetown. (The two will also collaborate on a Dionne Warwick-Burt Bacharach tribute brunch show at Pilgrim House on June 29.)
Jade’s set list at the Pilgrim House will include songs like “Midnight Train to Georgia,” “If I Were Your Woman,” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” The show will also incorporate recorded tracks recreating vocals by the Pips, Knight’s backup group.
“Midnight Train” runs through July 3 at Pilgrim House (336 Commercial St., Provincetown). Tickets are $40-$75 at pilgrimhouseptown.com. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
A Collective Portrait of the Struggling Artist
The first show of Readymade Gallery’s 2025 season, “Portrait of the Artist as an Endangered Species,” presents artists as lenses through which viewers can take stock of cultural, political, economic, and environmental situations and then comment on them — or rebel against them.
Curated by gallery owner Nick Lawrence, who runs Readymade as a satellite of his New York City gallery Freight + Volume, the show includes 24 local and international artists and spans multiple media and styles. Its title is a reference to James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which the main character, Stephen Dedalus, rebels against the conventions of early 1900s Ireland.
Wellfleet artist Tabitha Vevers questions the role of the artist in her mixed-media piece Double Self Portrait. A film negative face peers through the open window of an old film holder as a disembodied eye looks out from the flat face of a nearby hammer. Which is the artist here — the endangered figure peering through the window or the hammer threatening to smash it?
Christina de Miguel, whose self-portrait depicts the artist wearing a T-shirt and jeans with an arrow going through her head and a drip of red paint on her forehead, argues that it is the artist who is at risk. Lawrence says the piece is central to the idea of the show. “It has the angst of an endangered artist, playful, but also punk,” he says.
Other artists in the show take a more subtle approach to the subject. A small painting by Mary DeVincentis depicts a cartoon-like scene of a figure lying in bed with feet sticking out and butterflies and other insects fluttering around. Its title implies that the insects are paying homage to their savior. But it’s open to interpretation whether this is meant in seriousness or satire.
Portrait of the Artist as an Endangered Species runs through July 27 at Readymade Gallery (11 Cove Road, Orleans.) See readymadegallery.com. —Antonia DaSilva
Richard Whitten’s Art of Play
In Richard Whitten’s painting Jump Ball, a white ball suspended in mid-air casts a round shadow on the game surface. The game itself — a sort of obstacle course, with deep black holes to sink the ball into — is a vision in lurid color. The whole painting, oil on wood panel, is only eight by seven inches.
“They’re practically pocket-sized,” says Whitten of his series of small works, which he calls “games.” They’re so small, he says, “they’re like toys.” (Another piece, Circle Square Game, measures only about four by four inches.)
An exhibition of new work by Whitten is on view at William Scott Gallery (439 Commercial St., Provincetown) from June 27 to July 9, with an opening reception on Friday, June 27 at 7 p.m.
Whitten, who was born in New York City in 1958 and currently lives and works in Providence, R.I., says his paintings are inspired by the “dexterity games” of the pre-Game Boy era: those little boxes fixed with ball bearings behind glass that players would manipulate in an attempt to land a ball in a hole.
His paintings, says Whitten, are a form of “intellectual play.” He imagines viewers entering the gallery and catching sight of one of the paintings out of the corner of an eye. “The lure that hooks them,” he says, is the fact that the paintings — which appear to fold, curve, and otherwise extend from the wall in three dimensions — are actually flat.
“They should hopefully be somewhat mesmerized by them,” says Whitten. “They’ll flatten them out in their mind.” In the paintings that include balls, “I suspect they’ll want to try to visually push the ball into a hole,” he says, “and they’ll find that they can’t.”
For Whitten, too, the paintings offer an opportunity to play. His paintings — many of which reflect the influence of geometric abstraction from the 1970s and ’80s — allow him to experiment with color and dimension. “They roll out really fast,” he says. “Ideas just sort of tumble out.” Their mind-boggling dimensionality offers “a visual conundrum or a riddle.”
But mostly, they’re fun. “The paintings are a simple pleasure,” says Whitten. “Playing is probably one of the great pleasures of life.” —Dorothea Samaha
