‘Density’s Glitch’ at FAWC
The Fine Arts Work Center is hosting a group exhibition, “Density’s Glitch,” opening Saturday, May 28 from 6 to 8 p.m. and running until Aug. 28 in the Hudson D. Walker Gallery, 24 Pearl St. in Provincetown. The show features 17 artists, all past FAWC visual arts fellows, selected by curators Angela Dufresne, Cash (Melissa) Ragona, and Andrew Woolbright. In this intergenerational show, recent fellows including Austin Ballard and Autumn Wallace join fellows from the past, including Duane Slick and Sarah Oppenheimer.
A panel discussion, “Circuit Glitch: How Density Betrays Us (Again),” will involve the exhibition curators, who are artists themselves, and will be moderated by Eva Respini on Friday, May 27 at 7 p.m. Respini is the Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the ICA/Boston and recently co-commissioned and curated the Simone Leigh exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion for the 2022 Venice Biennale, which won the Biennale’s Golden Lion award.
Joel Janowitz Takes on Provincetown
Three Provincetown institutions will display Joel Janowitz’s paintings and prints in June. The Outer Cape landscape figures prominently in Janowitz’s paintings of swimmers, sunbathers, and hammocks.
The Provincetown Arts Society will feature his work at the Mary Heaton Vorse house, 466 Commercial St., from May 26 to July 10 in an exhibition titled “Joel Janowitz & Friends by the Sea,” curated by Gene Tartaglia with Chris McCarthy. Other artists include Mark Adams, Jefferson Hayman, David Hilliard, Diana Horowitz, Richard Saja, and the collaborative duo Kahn & Selesnick. The opening reception is Friday, May 27 from 5 to 7 p.m. An RSVP is required; email [email protected]. Viewings are available Wednesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to noon or by appointment.
In tandem with this exhibition, the Schoolhouse Gallery, 494 Commercial St., presents Janowitz’s work alongside that of Provincetown painter Philip Malicoat from May 27 to June 28. His work will also be featured at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St., in an exhibition of recent gifts to the institution curated by Christine McCarthy, on view from June 4 to July 24.
WHAT’s Annual Auction
The Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater will open its annual “Be Part of the Scene, Act 2 Auction” to raise money for its summer season on Thursday, May 26, at 10 a.m. The auction continues live online through Friday, June 10 at 8 p.m. Visitors to the website can bid on lunch with state Rep. Sarah Peake, tours of local shellfish farms, the opportunity to host a clambake by the Handsome Oyster Co., a summer’s worth of washes from Olde Cape Carwash in Orleans, and a personal voice recording from actor Jonathan Freeman as Jafar from Disney’s Aladdin.
“Be Part of the Scene” is the theater’s main fundraising event of the year. WHAT director of media and community relations Susan Blood said in an email that she hopes the auction introduces patrons to new businesses and donors to new customers. A link to the virtual auction and a schedule of shows at WHAT this summer are at what.org.
Season Opening at Off Main Gallery
Wellfleet’s Off Main Gallery at 75 Commercial St. begins its season with an exhibition of five artists responding to the natural world, “using both images and materials from what is around us,” according to gallery director Robert Shreefter. Matthew McFeely and Suzanne Ouellette both work representationally, McFeely focused on building sparse compositions with flowers while Ouellette composes her softly touched still lifes with images of fruit, vegetables, and kitchenware.
Dianne Longchamps’s mixed-media works and Heather Pilchard’s icy-blue painting, Watering the Garden, represent the natural world through a lens of abstraction.
Michael Morgan’s poetic ceramic object, Apotheosis 1, merges archeology and the Japanese art of Kintsugi (golden joinery) to reflect on his Philadelphia neighborhood, Kensington, a center of the national opioid crisis. This assemblage, merging pieces of mugs into a nonfunctional cup, is part of a series, Kensington Apotheosis, where he builds objects from broken shards found by digging along a 200-foot alley at the back of his house, which functioned as a dump from the mid-19th century to about 1920. He titled the series Apotheosis, “as these constructions made from discarded bits of the past take on new life.”
The exhibition opens with a reception on Saturday, May 28 from 6 to 8 p.m. and runs until June 16. —Abraham Storer
The Peng! Collective’s NFTs at Twenty Summers
Twenty Summers hosts a conversation with designer, activist, and researcher Jelka Kretzschmar, graphic designer Dominick Mouroz, and writer and performer Rebecca Nea Alemee Meyer on Saturday, May 28, 3 to 4:30 p.m., about the Peng! Collective’s Golden NFT Project. All three are spring residents at Twenty Summers and members of the collective, a self-described “explosive concoction of activism, hacking, and art battling the brutality of our time.”
The group, founded in Berlin in 2013, uses technology and media to “advocate for and with the marginalized and provoke dialogue through creative practices and modern tools,” wrote Kretzschmar, Meyer, and Mouroz in an email to the Independent. “Besides our ambition for working inclusively and fighting turbo-capitalism,” they continued, “we explicitly want to dismantle sexist, racist systems.”
The collective launched the Golden NFT project in October 2021 to raise 628,453 euros to buy a so-called golden visa for a family of five Afghan refugees. The golden visa program allows people to move through the Schengen area of Europe if they make a substantial investment in real estate, stocks, or government bonds in certain European Union countries. To become eligible for the visa in Spain or Portugal, for example, an applicant can buy real estate with a value of at least 500,000 euros.
On the project website, goldennft.art, the collective states that “those who have no money are arrested at the external borders and detained in camps; those who are rich can easily buy their residence permit with a golden visa.” Though the golden visa doesn’t guarantee citizenship in the country where the investment is made, it can put recipients on a path to permanent residency and later citizenship.
Sixteen artists contributed NFTs to the project. When an NFT — or nonfungible token — sells, 10 percent of the proceeds goes to the golden visa fund.
The project did not initially succeed. “It’s a pity we’ve failed, but we haven’t given up,” wrote Kretzschmar, Meyer, and Mouroz. They say that some of the “lucrative hype” around NFTs has died down since the project’s outset.
Still, they wrote that they hope to raise more money during their time at Twenty Summers. They said they hope to develop a contingency plan that moves the family to a safe space as they navigate entry into the European Union.
Saturday’s event is part of Twenty Summers’ and the Fine Arts Work Center’s “ART | FUTURE” program, exploring the future of art in a world still rapidly digitizing and globalizing. It takes place at Twenty Summers’ Hawthorne Barn at 29 Miller Hill Road in Provincetown. Registration with a suggested $20 donation and more information is available at 20summers.org. For more information about the Peng! Collective, see pen.gg. —Abbey Dwight
Summer 2022 at the Art House
Summer at the Art House, 214 Commercial St. in Provincetown, kicks off with singer-songwriter Zoë Lewis in two performances of her new “mini musical memoir,” A Slice of P-Town, on Friday, May 27, 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, May 28, 6:30 p.m. Lewis, who has penned two musicals, 10 albums, and various songs for Broadway, Netflix, and film soundtracks, is accompanied by Parker Ousley on cello and Roxanne Layton on recorder. Drag entertainer Qya Cristál makes a guest appearance.
Included in the Art House summer lineup is a concert series at Provincetown Town Hall. The first performance features six-time Tony Award winning Audra McDonald on Sunday, May 29, 6:30 p.m. Seth Rudetsky accompanies McDonald on piano and Melissa Ferrick, who performs Saturday night at the Art House, opens on Sunday at town hall. Some proceeds from the town hall concert series benefit Sandy Hook Promise, an organization dedicated to preventing gun violence.
Tickets for Lewis’s concert are $35 at provincetownarthouse.com. Visit the website for the full lineup of summer performances featuring Bianca Del Rio, Judy Gold, Chita Rivera, the Indigo Girls, and more.
