The Creative Business of Cape Cod Artists
Thirteen Cape Cod artists — painters, printmakers, illustrators, writers, and performers — have been selected by the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod to receive training aimed at strengthening their creative practice as part of the foundation’s Capacity-Building Program.
Members of the group will spend four months in workshops and coaching sessions on topics like developing a business plan. Each participant will receive a $1,000 grant.
The schedule also includes a conversation on writing and talking about art facilitated by Truro-based visual artist Pete Hocking. Multimedia artist and ecologist Mark Adams will co-facilitate a workshop on creativity in the visual arts, and writer John Bonanni of South Yarmouth, co-founder of the Cape Cod Poetry Review, will focus on creativity for authors.
“Because I work with young people, I’m very excited about what I’ll gain from this program and bring back to the people I work with,” says Grace Emmet of Brewster, one of this year’s grant recipients and curator of community education at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Her work is focused on the environment and place-based art making. She says she is eager to learn about a sustainable business model for her creative practice: “An important part of being an artist is knowing how to survive.”

Filmmaker Manx Taiki Magyar of Hyannis, who grew up in Sandwich and owns a video production company, is another participant. Magyar has been working on a documentary on the Asian experience. “It is not just going to be focused on being Asian on Cape Cod but being Asian in America,” says Magyar, whose ancestry is half Japanese. It explores the racial divides in this country and opens up a conversation of what it means to be Asian-American, Magyar says.

Multi-media artist, musician, and photographer Mike Sullivan of Provincetown, whose practice includes creating sculptural headwear made of natural objects, jewelry, and broken mirrors, will also be participating. Sullivan has displayed his work at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, and he can often be found singing at Tin Pan Alley’s piano bar on Commercial Street.

“I’m forever learning as much as I can,” Sullivan says. “It would be amazing to be a full-time artist and be able to keep expanding, learning, and growing, and incorporate business practices so my art is able to sustain itself.”
See artsfoundation.org for more information on AFCC’s grant programs. —Susan Rand Brown
Two Musicians Find Freedom Onstage
Billy Hardy walked into a party in 1992 and saw Beth Sweeney sitting on a stool, playing her fiddle. “I thought, ‘Boy, she really plays in tune,’ ” says Hardy. The party, which followed a folk concert that Hardy had attended with “a gal from Provincetown,” crept on into the night. Hardy needed a place to sleep. Sweeney, who lived nearby, volunteered her pull-out couch for Hardy and his Provincetown gal.

Hardy woke up the next morning and looked through a photo album full of pictures from Sweeney’s life. “I fell in love with her,” he says. The two kept in touch. More than 30 years later, Hardy and Sweeney live together in a house by the bay in Eastham and perform folk music as Billy and Beth.
The duo will perform at Eastham Public Library (190 Samoset Road) on Saturday, Feb. 1 as part of the library’s Winter Music Series. Their program will feature Celtic, old-time, and bluegrass tunes, and the pair will play fiddle, banjo, guitar, Irish harp, and piano, along with Sweeney’s vocals in Irish.
Hardy, who grew up in New Jersey, has lived in his family’s cottage in Eastham since the 1970s. Before he was a professional musician, he worked for the family business, designing and manufacturing women’s handbags. But he says factory work was not for him.
He’d been playing the guitar since he was 12, mostly rock and roll. A friend’s older brother played folk music. “He had a guitar and a mandolin and a banjo,” says Hardy. Intrigued, Hardy started listening to folk music, which, in contrast to other genres, he found to be “more like real poetry.”
In his 20s, Hardy went to the Hillside in Eastham, Buddy Chase’s fabled diner and watering hole (the building now houses the Lobster Shanty). “There was a bluegrass band playing there,” he says. After listening for a while, Hardy says, “I walked up to the leader and said, ‘I’m a whole lot better than your banjo player.’ ” The band hired him.
Sweeney, who grew up in Ohio, began her musical career playing classical violin. When she moved to Boston, she was invited to attend the Boston Scottish Fiddle Club. Fiddling was “freeing,” says Sweeney. “There was a vibrancy that I loved.”
“I think that there’s kind of a magic from having done it for so long together,” says Hardy. Music is inherently connective, says Sweeney. She hopes the audience will feel that connection, too.
“Hours of the day disappear when you’re listening to music,” says Hardy. “You can definitely make an attitude change.”
The concert is free. See easthamlibrary.org for information. —Dorothea Samaha
Winning Time With Actors, Chefs, and Nature
An Emmy Award-winning actor will have dinner with the highest bidder. Top local chefs will give private cooking lessons. Donors are offering time in a Provincetown dune shack and trips to Portugal, France, and Mexico.

Those are among the more than 70 items in the Provincetown Film Society’s fifth annual winter auction, which has become known for its unusual offerings. Last year, says Executive Director Anne Hubbell, the event netted $65,000 for the organization, which runs the Provincetown International Film Festival and Waters Edge Cinema.
The auction list includes meals in Provincetown restaurants and stays in local inns along with art, special event tickets, and gift certificates. Hubbell says that there are many items geared to the outdoors, including fishing and whale-watch trips, a dune tour, birdwatching and clamming with local experts, and that week’s stay in a dune shack.

Most of the items have a listed value: $220 for a pickleball clinic with tennis-pickleball pro Sophie Amiach; $500 for a limited-edition signed copy of filmmaker John Waters’s vinyl-record single “Prayer to Pasolini”; $1,200 for tickets to RuPaul’s Drag Race Live in Las Vegas; $7,995 for a South Africa photo safari; $14,000 for a Kentucky Derby trip.
But some experiences are simply “priceless.”
One is an opportunity to have actor Kathleen Turner record a voicemail greeting for the winner. There are also chances to have a private dinner with actor Murray Bartlett and a Provincetown food history tour and pizza-making session with Spiritus Pizza founder John Yingling. Local chefs Michael Ceraldi and Claudio Gervasi have donated private cooking lessons.

There are also one-on-one Zoom meetings with Oscar-nominated film producers Amy Hobby and Christine Vachon. “They’ll give advice, listen to pitches, or whatever,” says Hubbell. “These are opportunities you can’t access easily. It’s nice the industry wants to support the organization.”
Bidding runs from Feb. 1 to 10. Visit biddingforgood.com for more information and to access the auction. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
New Film Gets Theatrical Premiere
Strange Kindness, a tense drama filmed on the Lower Cape that was awarded Best New England Film at its world premiere in the Boston Underground Film Festival last year, will make its non-festival debut at Waters Edge Cinema (237 Commercial St., Provincetown) on Friday, Jan. 31.

The screening will be the culmination of a years-long project by Orleans couple Joseph Mault and Leanne McLaughlin. Mault, an award-winning music video producer, is the director, screenwriter, and director of photography; McLaughlin, an actor who grew up performing on local stages, produced and co-stars.
“We want more people to see the film, especially locally,” says McLaughlin. “People who worked on the film are going to be in Provincetown, and we’re enthusiastic and open to talking about it.” (There will be a second screening on Feb. 27 at Chatham’s Orpheum Theater.)
The 90-minute thriller explores themes of isolation, empathy, and violence as it follows a bloodied gunman hiding from a manhunt in a seemingly empty house. Mault began writing Strange Kindness in 2018 and developed it more fully after the pandemic brought the couple, who had been living in New York, back to the Cape.

McLaughlin says that the film, shot over 11 days in 2022 with one camera and a $40,000 budget, wouldn’t exist without support from the Cape Cod community. That included crowdfunding and the use of locations like the Nickerson Funeral Home in Wellfleet, 3 Fools restaurant in Orleans, Orleans Camera shop (owned by Mault’s father), and a house in Brewster that Mault discovered through a construction job.
Tickets for the Jan. 31 screening are $15.50 ($13.50 for seniors and students), including fees, at provincetownfilm.org. See strangekindness.com for more information. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
An Artist Brings Paper to Life
Vicky Tomayko says she loves good paper: its texture, its color, the possibility of the blank empty space. An exhibition of Tomayko’s prints — both new and older works — will be on view at the Wellfleet Adult Community Center (715 Old Kings Hwy.) in February, with a reception for the artist on Sunday, Feb. 2, at 3 p.m. She says the theme for the show, which is curated by Robert Rindler, is “prints, patterns, and pondering.”
Tomayko was born in Detroit and received an M.F.A. in printmaking from Western Michigan University. She came east to teach printmaking at Connecticut College in 1979. In 1985, she was awarded a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center. Now she lives in the woods of Truro. Her art is inspired by her surroundings, which Tomayko says are “really alive.”
One work, Ecological Story, a silkscreen monoprint made in 2021, buzzes with movement. Bees and flies hover and dip across the surface. A caterpillar traverses a landscape of pinpricked color, casting a fuzzy shadow. In one corner, a rabbit bounds deeper into the world.

On long walks with her dog, Odo, Tomayko observes the little things. She’ll read about the wildlife and insects she sees to learn how they live and work. “I get really interested in caterpillars or spiders or flies,” she says. “I like to be so comfortable with a creature that I don’t need a reference to draw it.”
In Tomayko’s works, those creatures live in worlds of texture that are created by repeating patterns. Some of the works in her new show are simply patterns that create volume and form out of two-dimensional flatness.

“Even the inanimate parts of our world are imbued with a kind of vital force,” says Tomayko. “Everything is interconnected. You can’t separate things out and have them survive — they need each other.”
Tomayko’s works are dimensional and complicated. But their empty spaces allow her creatures room to wander. “I sort of have this rule to always leave some space that’s not printed on,” she says. “I want to keep the integrity of the paper. I want people to know that it’s just a sheet of paper. It’s a beautiful sheet of paper, but it’s just paper.”
The show is on view through the end of February. See wellfleetcoa.org for more information. —Dorothea Samaha