Women Artists at the Cape Cod Museum of Art
According to a 2022 study published in Artnet News, only 11 percent of acquisitions and less than 15 percent of exhibitions at 31 museums in the U.S. between 2008 and 2020 were of work by women artists. In conjunction with Women’s History Month, a new exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art seeks to address that imbalance.
“She Said” includes 32 works selected from the museum’s collection of work by 216 women artists, ranging from midcentury paintings by Betty Lane, Clare Leighton, and Sabina Teichman to contemporary pieces by Lisbeth Fermin, Megan Hinton, Brenda Horowitz, and Anne Packard.
While most of the works in the show are landscapes, like Lorraine LaPointe’s mystically serene cloud-dominated wetlands study, several of its highlights are abstract compositions and portraits, including a densely layered seriograph by Sister Mary Corita Kent; a luminous study of two figures in black and red by Selina Trieff; and a commandingly detailed ink portrait by Ellen LeBow. All the works are accompanied by wall texts written and researched by museum docents.
Also featured in the exhibition is a group of eight-inch-square paintings by members of the Twenty-One in Truro group of women artists who have spent a week working together annually for the past 26 years. “During this time, they support one another in meeting the challenges of leading a creative life,” says material accompanying the exhibition. “By returning to the same location each year, these women artists have had the privilege of seeing and interpreting the Truro landscape over time.” The paintings were acquired by the museum in 2016.
Several public programs will be held in conjunction with the exhibition, which is on view until May 4, over the course of its run, including an opening reception and gallery talk on Thursday, March 6, a panel discussion on women in the arts on Thursday, March 13, and multi-session exhibition-related classes on art history and expressive painting techniques. See ccmoa.org for more information. —John D’Addario
A Novel About Real-Life Climate Change
In Chicago writer and musician Eiren Caffall’s debut novel, All the Water in the World, a group of people escape rising floodwaters by living on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Caffall, who has written about nature and extinction for Writer’s Digest and the Los Angeles Review of Books, will discuss her book with Karen Dukess, founder of the Castle Hill Author Talks series, in a virtual program on Thursday, Feb. 27.
“I wanted an author who would be interesting to talk to as fiction writer but also as nature writer,” Dukess says. “We can talk about the art of the book but also about challenges we’re facing with the climate.”
Caffall’s story is a literary thriller set in a flooded and almost deserted New York City after glaciers melt. The group living on the roof of the museum are on a mission to save its collection that is jeopardized when a superstorm forces them to flee north on the Hudson River. Caffall has said she was inspired by the real-life stories of museum curators protecting their collections from war.
“She’s looking at what the climate crisis means for individuals and families, and for history, art, and saving art,” Dukess says. Kirkus Reviews described Caffall as a latter-day Rachel Carson, the author of the 1962 book Silent Spring, which is credited with launching the modern environmental protection movement. “It’s a fascinating book about how we preserve our relationships as well as our physical treasures in the face of impending disaster,” says Dukess.
Dukess is an author, teacher, and board member at Truro Center for the Arts who began the series of hour-long online chats in January 2021. This season’s programs have included discussions with children’s book writer and illustrator Jackie Morris and Deborah Johnson Taffa, author of the memoir Whiskey Tender. Recordings of previous talks with authors Gabrielle Zevin and Ben Shattuck are available on the Castle Hill website. Each discussion includes time for questions from the audience.
The program is free, and donations are appreciated. See castlehill.org for more information. —Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
Myron Stout’s Form and Process
Myron Stout (1905-1987) was a significant figure in Provincetown’s creative community from the middle of the 20th century until his death. An extensive selection of Stout’s charcoal drawings is currently on view at Peter Freeman, 140 Grand St., New York City.
Stout began spending summers in Provincetown in 1949 while living in New York but left the city to live on the Outer Cape in 1954. He painted in a small studio on Brewster Street and exhibited infrequently. In 1980, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York mounted a retrospective of his work.
Early figurative drawings in the exhibition are representative of Stout’s studies with Hans Hofmann. For Stout, as for many of his peers, the figure served as a subject to work out formal drawing problems. In one drawing of a seated woman, Stout uses charcoal and erasers to build up and break down the image as he strives to find geometric structure within the body and the larger composition.
In his later works, Stout continued to prioritize process and geometric forms. Eventually, he abandoned the figure. His drawings and paintings became increasingly austere, and his mature work is characterized by sharp, decisive shapes rendered in black and white. Although the images appear simple, he arrived at them through an arduous process of negotiation, often working on his images for years.
The charcoal drawings in the exhibition provide a window into Stout’s process, which was more obscured in his oil paintings. In one drawing of triangular forms aggressively jutting upward into a black space, glimpses of erased passages are visible in the white forms, evidence of the artist trying to find the proper shapes in order to best articulate tension in the composition.
In another drawing reminiscent of a checkered floor, the white shapes contain stray marks, signs of Stout working out the drawing’s perspective. This use of perspective is unique in his work, which is mostly flat and emphatically two-dimensional. Here, the picture plane angles slightly downward.
Most of the shape-driven drawings in the exhibition feature dynamic relationships between positive and negative space. Often, the division between figure and ground is unclear.
The exhibition, which opened on Jan. 16, coincides with the announcement of the gallery’s representation of Stout’s estate, and is on view until March 1. See peterfreemaninc.com for information. —Abraham Storer
Learning the Aesthetics of Movement
Leda Muhana and David Iannitelli, who live in Brewster, started the Movimento Project dance company on Cape Cod 10 years ago. Starting next week, they will teach “Unscripted: Personal Movement and the Poetics of Choreography,” a six-week dance workshop at Wellfleet Preservation Hall.
Previously, the couple taught workshops in Wellfleet and Harwich under a different name, “Cool Moves.” This time, Iannitelli says, the focus of their workshop is more specific. “Often, dance is functional or anatomical,” he says. “You don’t see the dancer enjoying their movement. I think that’s an underrepresented dimension of our lives: enjoying what we’re doing for its own sake.” In “Unscripted,” students will pay attention to their bodies as a means of aesthetic expression.
Muhana and Iannitelli will focus on contemporary improvisational techniques as well as structured choreography. Participants will dance to music and to their own recorded poetry and stories. “We’ll have group experiences,” Muhana says, “but we’ll also have individual explorations, individual improvisations, individual proposals.”
The class is open to all ages and abilities: last year, says Muhana, they had students ages 8 to 75. “It’s a democratic space,” she says. “A space for anybody who would like to move and work creatively toward dance composition.” Depending on participants’ interest, the workshop may culminate in a public performance.
Muhana says that the most important part of the six-week session is that the students work from an “intrinsic motivation toward expression.” When someone explores aesthetic movement, “It’s like creating a poem with your body.”
The class costs $75, plus fees, and will take place on Wednesdays beginning March 5 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. through April 16, with no class on March 12. Register at wellfleetpreservationhall.org. —Eve Samaha
