Art That Celebrates Power and Resilience
Izzy Berdan, curator of an exhibition at the Provincetown Commons this month commemorating Juneteenth, has strong opinions about “America’s second Independence Day.” The Texas native talks about growing up in the Lone Star state, where enslaved people were the last in the nation to learn they were free. Juneteenth commemorates the day, June 19, 1865, when the U.S. Army rode into Galveston to announce that slavery had officially ended two years earlier with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
“I have a personal connection because I come from the area where it took place,” says Berdan. “And I also have frustration and anger because I had no knowledge of it growing up.”
Berdan has channeled that anger into activism, working with a diverse group of Provincetown residents since 2020 to create Juneteenth events. This is the first year that Provincetown’s celebration will include an exhibition by visual artists.
“I want this to be an art show where artists feel they have a voice in representing where we are in our current state politically and give them the opportunity to make political art if they want to,” says Berdan. “The other part, too, is wanting to reach out to multiple facets of our community, both queer and BIPOC spaces.”
More than two dozen works by six artists are in the show. They include muralist and creative designer Serge Gay Jr.; illustrator Theodoor Grimes; multimedia artists LaNia Sproles, Derrick D’Von Woods-Morrow, and Victor Jeffreys; and Berdan, who mentions Grimes’s lush and colorful Japanese manga-inspired illustrations as among the can’t-miss works in the exhibition.
“The work leans into the beauty of trans art and nonconformist self-expression, mashed together with sexuality and all thrown in your face,” Berdan says. “The aesthetic choices and composition are really beautiful to look at.”
The show, “Power, Joy, and Resilience,” opens at the Commons (46 Bradford St., Provincetown) with a reception on Friday, June 13 at 5 p.m. and runs through Monday, June 23. See juneteenthptown.com and provincetowncommons.org. —Katy Abel
Peter Chao’s Tactile Textiles
Peter Chao grew up in a fishing town on Keelung Peace Island in Taiwan. Today, he lives in Provincetown part-time and makes fiber art inspired by the seascapes of both communities. His exhibition, “Waves and Signals,” currently on view in the Hatches Harbor Room at Seashore Point (100 Alden St., Provincetown), features two related groups of pieces, both made through the process of punch needle, a traditional rug hooking technique. Works in the series, which are made from wool and acrylic yarns, are lush combinations of surface, materials, and color.
Chao’s “Signals” pieces draw on the meanings of maritime signal flags. “The maritime signals, with a symbolism expressing complex messages through simple forms, remind [Chao] of the Chinese characters he learned in childhood,” according to notes accompanying the exhibition.
Rectangles and grids are foundational to Chao’s works. Their titles are cautionary and communicate a narrative. My Nets Have Come Fast Upon an Obstruction consists of a white horizontal rectangle sewn within a larger blue rectangle. Here, as in other works, different artistic traditions come together: the labor of traditional craft is combined with the geometry of minimalism.
The “Waves” pieces examine the visual language of surf. These monochromatic works have three different types of stitches, each of which has its own directionality and degree of relief. Their layering is unique to each work and contributes to a reading of the crest, the curl and foam, and the pull of receding water.
Within the “Waves” series are subsets of works in black, white, and red that highlight the visual component of Chao’s tactile medium. Despite their relief, the black waves flatten in their absorption of light. In contrast, the topography of the white waves reads as more pronounced in their reflection of light. The color in Red Wave 1 is intensely saturated and bridges the “Wave” and “Signals” series.
“Waves and Signals” is on view through June 28. See peterchao.art. —Chet Domitz
Reed Foehl Makes Something out of Nothing
Yes, he says, Grammy award-nominated songwriter Reed Foehl went to music school — “in my living room” in his childhood home in Dover, where Foehl’s parents held a rehearsal for their four-piece bluegrass band every Thursday. Their first and only album, released after 25 years of playing together, was called 1,000 Thursdays.
“Music was all around me,” says Foehl, who now lives in Pownal, Vt., where he writes and performs folk and Americana. He will play on Saturday, June 14 at Wellfleet Preservation Hall with his band, which includes Jeff Berlin on drums and Putnam Murdock on bass and electric guitar. Local singer-songwriter and “washashore cowgirl” Monica Rizzio will open.
For Foehl, songwriting “is everything.” He keeps voice memos and notebooks (which he says he often loses) full of ideas. Most of his songs are stories of everyday life: “Love, death, all these common themes that happen to us, that we suppress.” While everybody is going through something, he says, “I try to get it out — it’s like therapy for me.” His sixth studio album, Wild Wild Love, was released in May 2022.
Foehl’s songs, lifted by the serene, smiling sound of acoustic guitar and moved forward by gentle percussion, conjure images of sunlight on wide floorboards; small, impermanent beds; and broad, open landscapes. The music travels. It takes the listener along, as if by the hand. His voice is deep and easy, his lyrics uncontrived.
Like any dedicated songwriter, Foehl says he’s always on the “eternal search for the best song — it’s never-ending.” No song is perfect, he says: to be satisfied, “You just have to love it.” And songwriting is something he says he “has to do.” It’s his main objective “to keep creating something out of nothing.”
Tickets are $30 plus fees at wellfleetpreservationhall.org. —Dorothea Samaha
A Retelling of a Century-Old Scandal
In 1919, the U.S. military conducted a covert sting operation — approved by then-Assistant Secretary of the Navy and future President Franklin D. Roosevelt — in which 14 sailors in Newport, R.I. were recruited to seduce civilian men as well as their fellow shipmates in an attempt to “prove” the prevalence of homosexual behavior among Navy personnel. Fifteen men were subsequently arrested for “scandalous conduct” and held aboard a decommissioned prison ship in Newport Harbor, where several were left for months without trial. Some were eventually sentenced to decades in prison. The events became a national scandal when a shocked public learned about both the “immoral” activities that members of the U.S. military were participating in and the methods used to entrap them.
Now known as the Newport Sex Scandal, the story is the subject of Scandalous Conduct: A Fairy Extravaganza, a three-channel video installation by artists Matthew Lawrence and Jason Tranchida. It is on view through this weekend at Stanley, the new exhibition and event venue at 494 Commercial St. in Provincetown, as part of this season’s Twenty Summers programming.
Lawrence and Tranchida say they began researching the story six years ago and have developed workshops, lectures, and performances. Their 67-minute video, which premiered last fall in Newport, plays out over three screens in the Stanley space. The piece incorporates a recreation of vaudeville numbers from The Strange Adventures of Jack and the Beanstalk: A Fairy Extravaganza, a lavishly homophobic musical that the Navy actually staged in 1919 in Newport while the 15 “fairies” who had been arrested for their behavior were still being detained on the prison ship.
“I guess the big thing right now is how timely the piece is becoming, even more than it was when we started it a few years ago,” says Lawrence, adding that issues like due process, queerness in the military, and government policing of sex lives are as much in the spotlight today as they were over a century ago. “It’s also funny.”
Scandalous Conduct runs continuously this weekend between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Saturday, June 14 and Sunday, June 15, with an artist talk on Saturday, June 14 at 1 p.m. Admission to the video installation is free, but registration for the artist talk is required and a $20 donation is suggested. See 20summers.org and scandalousconduct.com. —John D’Addario
Todd Alsup Is Crazy for Madonna
In 2020, Todd Alsup collaborated with pianist Jon Richardson at the Crown & Anchor in Provincetown to create a show celebrating Elton John and Billy Joel, which they repeated the following year. Every summer since then, Alsup has returned with a solo show built around a specific artist’s catalogue. So far, he’s covered the music of George Michael, Elton John, and Donna Summer. This season, Alsup is paying homage to Madonna.
“Todd Alsup Sings Madonna (An Immaculate Re-Conception)” will be performed in the Crown Cabaret at the Crown & Anchor (247 Commercial St., Provincetown) on Fridays and Saturdays from June 14 through Sept. 20. The hour-long show was created with DJ Jeremy “Matthew J.” Earhart.
Alsup, who grew up in Waterford, Mich. and currently lives in New York City, describes the show as “a one-hour musical dream where the songs flow into each other nonstop.” In his past shows, he’s interspersed monologues and personal stories into the music. But this time, he says, “I’m letting the music tell the story.”
Madonna has been “such a trailblazer and a lightning rod,” says Alsup. But “because she’s known for so many different things, I think she often gets underestimated as a songwriter.” Alsup, who will sing at the piano for most of the show, says that he wants the audience to walk away thinking, “I’ve never heard ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ that way before.” His music-making style — rooted in the work of classic singer-songwriters like Stevie Wonder and Billy Joel — gives Madonna’s lyrics more room to shine.
Alsup says he has two other goals in mind for the show: “I want to have fun making music, and I want the audience to walk away having had a nonstop blast.” General admission tickets are $35 plus fees at onlyatthecrown.com. —Eve Samaha
