A Fresh Look at Nanno de Groot
Pat and Nanno de Groot were an artist couple with deep Provincetown connections. Nanno de Groot’s work belongs to the mid-century. After Nanno died in 1963, Pat made her own artwork until her death in 2018. Her small, quiet paintings of Cape Cod Bay and calligraphic drawings of cormorants exist more readily in local imagination.
In the exhibition “Art of the Garden,” PAAM provides a fresh look at Nanno’s paintings along with other artists’ works that the couple collected. Over 300 pieces were donated to PAAM. The exhibition, running until July 24 at the museum (460 Commercial St.), highlights the collection’s garden-inspired works.
Nanno’s paintings animate the walls of PAAM’s street-facing gallery with images of trees, sunflowers, and vegetables. In his paintings of sunflowers, luscious marks of yellow paint give life to the petals. In Vegetable Basket, leafy green vegetables turn into swirling gestures of impasto paint. His joy in painting is evidenced in Mary Cecil Allen’s Pine Tree, where he digs into the paint to depict pine needles. The stubby tree exudes a playful character. Earlier works, displayed in a rear gallery, are more restrained, favoring flattened forms of figures and tabletop flower arrangements. —Abraham Storer
Edie Puts the D in Dance
Las Vegas-based drag queen Edie returns to Provincetown with a new show, “Edie with a D,” at the Post Office Cafe. Her act, inspired by Liza Minelli’s 1972 musical film Liza With a Z, runs from Thursday, June 9, through Sunday, Sept. 4. This is Edie’s first full summer run in Provincetown in 20 years. Tickets are $35 at postofficecafe.net.
Christopher Kenney, the artist behind Edie, has been dancing since age eight. He spent 11 years dancing with Pacific Northwest Ballet and other companies before pursuing roles on Broadway.
After moving to New York, Kenney tried drag one Halloween. That night, he was offered a job hosting in character at the Universal Grill in the West Village. Edie’s performances eventually led to a role on Broadway and a role as the emcee of Cirque Du Soleil’s Zumanity, a cabaret-style show at the New York-New York Hotel in Las Vegas.
‘me:you’ at Farm Projects
Laura Rose Reiter, a sprightly 83-year-old Eastham resident, recently began writing a series of reflections on life’s fleeting moments. When Susie Nielsen, director of Farm Projects in Wellfleet, met Reiter at her gallery in early 2021, the two began talking about Sophie Calle, the conceptual French artist who mines intimate social interactions in her artwork. This led to more conversations, the result of which is their collaborative exhibition, “me:you,” on view until June 13 at Farm Projects at 355 Main St.
The heart of the exhibition is Reiter’s text: short entries connected to her interactions with people, some of them intimate, such as lifting the eyelids of her dead son to view his eyes one last time, others casual, such as admiring a woman’s sense of style on the subway, then running into her later at a bookstore.
Nielsen created a book with the text, interspersing it with images from Reiter’s archives. In Nielsen uses flowers, fonts, printed photographs, and sculptural elements to evoke the way in which memory is often scattered, decontextualized, and precious.
Marianne A. Kinzer’s Watercolors
Marianne A. Kinzer’s exhibition of watercolors, “Seashore Explorations,” at the Wellfleet Adult Community Center (715 Old Kings Highway), developed from her backyard explorations. Created during the pandemic, they celebrate the wondrous things and places many of us were forced — and privileged — to discover in our close-to-home environs.
The exhibition features three different bodies of work: flowers, landscapes of Truro, and still lifes of natural objects. In one group of still lifes, Kinzer focuses on things seemingly found on the National Seashore: seashells, feathers, a turtle shell, and branches of sumac and beach plum. The resulting watercolors feel diaristic, like a record of Kinzer’s observations in a specific time and place.
In a group of three watercolors from the same place, Kinzer paints the radical changes the seasons bring. The fall painting is a standout: the fiery, orange-red foliage in Pamet Valley dances across the image in an exuberant play of color and light.
And Kinzer’s flower paintings make good use of watercolor as a medium — its sensual fragility echoes the lush ephemerality of flowers in bloom. In Red Flower, Kinzer merges her interest in objects and landscape. Working with complementary colors, she sets the red flower in focus against a summery, green landscape. This exhibition, running through June with an artist reception on June 11 from 2 to 4 p.m., presents a compelling case for painting as an act of sustained looking. —Abraham Storer
MP Landis in Land’s End Debut
MP Landis, a Maine-based painter with Provincetown roots, presents his early works at one of Provincetown’s newest galleries, Land’s End Gallery and Books at 437 Commercial St.
Landis usually creates loose abstract paintings, but the paintings currently on view through July 6 are heavier, both in their material and subject matter. In (Await) #3, a silhouetted figure sits encased in a rusty metal grill. Landis continues working with silhouettes in titled — here, the dripping circles gesture toward his future as a painter of casual abstractions.
Land’s End Gallery and Books is a new venture by the photographer and filmmaker Mischa Richter. Richter, who was raised in Provincetown and recently returned to live full-time here, began the gallery with the intention of producing artist books. The gallery will host exhibitions this summer to raise money for its nonprofit publishing mission, which is to work collaboratively with artists to design, produce, and publish artist books — a process that Richter is gearing up to begin after the summer.
Gardner Brings Grease & Grime to Grotta
Sean Gardner, co-owner of Pop & Dutch in Provincetown and a DJ on WOMR, has been a vinyl collector for 23 years. He will be sharing the fruits of his passion by DJing a party that is, in his own words, “greasy and grimy.”
The party, called Pulp, will take place every Tuesday night during the season at Grotta Bar, in the basement of 186 Commercial St. in Provincetown. Doors open at 10 p.m., and there’s no cover.
“It’s going to be garage rock, spooky R&B, early rock & roll,” says Gardner. “A lot of obscure stuff. I don’t think that description will sell it, but that’s what it is. I’ll play some Bo Didley, Big Maybelle, you know, the stuff the kids are listening to.” He chuckles.
Whatever it is, Gardner promises the party will be “a little out there and definitely fun and sexy.”
Maggie Simonelli at Gary Marotta
Why paint with acrylics when you can paint with pearls? Maggie Simonelli’s six-panel work Love Is a Cloud That Scatters Pearls, which is mostly pink and brings to mind both seashells and an eye-shadow palette, is painted with crushed pearls — as well as encaustic, Japanese coral, oyster shell pigments, metal leaf, and bee pollen.
The work will be on display as part of Simonelli’s show “Water & Pearls” at Gary Marotta Fine Art at 162 Commercial St. The show runs until June 30.
Simonelli’s work blends the decorative with the textural to revalorize the feminine. (Some of her paintings, she notes, are even made with makeup.) The paintings are often somewhat translucent, yet still lush.
