The centerpiece of Mark Adams’s newest exhibition was born from the gift of a sail.
Adams says the artist Jimmy Lee Curtis often gathers materials to repurpose from thrift stores and estate sales, and he came across a 45-foot-long nylon sail. He offered it to Adams, the retired National Park Service cartographer who is now the scientist/artist-in-residence at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown.
Adams unrolled the sail and saw something special. “It was exactly the size of a small North Atlantic right whale,” he says.
With that, Adams developed a show connecting art and marine science. A life-size painting of a right whale on Curtis’s sail will serve as the centerpiece of an installation titled “Replenishing Refuge in Cape Cod Bay and Stellwagen Bank — What Can the Arts Do?” at the Crown & Anchor in Provincetown. The exhibit, with works by Adams and other artists, focuses on “what art and performance can do to help visualize ocean science,” he says.
Adams’s love of “working big” extends to both the whale painting and the dance floor of the Crown’s Paramount Room, on which he is installing a 25-foot-long map of Cape Cod Bay and Stellwagen Bank. The map will be dotted with images of the marine life found throughout this part of the ocean, which is “the spring home to a third of the right whale population,” he says.
Adams wants to use this map to illustrate how Stellwagen Bank is really just an extension of Cape Cod. “It’s one big marine habitat,” he says.
By using art and science to capture the scale of the natural world, Adams hopes to bring people “outside of themselves.”
“Everybody is susceptible to an experience of wonder from nature,” he says.
The space will also be decorated with letterpress-style painted banners illustrating aspects of marine biology and oceanography. One design depicts a gull eating a marine snail, which in turn is eating algae. This banner is labeled “trophic cascade,” the term for how the decline of top predators causes declines in prey species by allowing smaller predators to flourish. If the gulls were to die out, the snails would run rampant, and the algae would be destroyed.
Another banner shows human hands gripping a small shark and a line of pines on the horizon with “sharks are older than trees” written across the top. The posters are educational but not didactic; information is paired seamlessly with artistic expression.
The show will also feature Siren by Annie Lewandowski, a composer, performer, and senior lecturer at Cornell University. It’s an audio art piece composed of whale songs that she recorded. Adams and a team of Cornell students are going to use fishing nets and other detritus collected by the Center for Coastal Studies Marine Debris Program to construct a space in the back of the exhibition room to listen to the piece. The goal, Adams says, is to juxtapose the whale song with the debris in which so many of them become entangled and die.
During the official opening of the exhibit on Friday, April 5, Cornell student Isaac Newcomb will present a DJ set he made that incorporates whale recordings and other ocean sounds in a dance track. Visitors will have a chance to dance on Adams’s map of Stellwagen Bank.
The exhibit space will also host “flash talks” — five-minute presentations from Center for Coastal Studies scientists about their work — on Thursday, April 4. In these talks, the scientists will offer personal stories about their work.
“It won’t be a lecture on science,” Adams says. “It’ll be storytelling about their experiences.”
Adams hopes the show serves another purpose: introducing new spaces for art in Provincetown.
“In order to have artists’ projects and collaborations with scientists, we need alternative spaces for this kind of work,” he says. Galleries are often too small, he points out, and there are only so many museums in town. The managers of the Crown & Anchor “were gung-ho as soon as I suggested this.”
The show could be “a model for inviting other artists to work with the larger spaces in town,” says Adams, “and get the art out of the gallery.”
Dances With Whales
The event: A show by Mark Adams and others highlighting the connection between art and marine science
The time: April 3-6, approximately 4 to 9 p.m., and by appointment
Where: Paramount Room, Crown & Anchor, 247 Commercial St., Provincetown
The cost: Free
