Cortile Gallery (230 Commercial St.) It’s been 24 hours since the Carnival parade ended, and Provincetown is still looking for a street party. Across from the Cortile Gallery, a Dixieland […]
Art
POSSIBILITIES OF PAINT
The Slipperiness of Realism
A group exhibition of work by former FAWC fellows adds sparks of magic to the mundane
“Anything is possible” is written at the top of a painting by Sam Messer currently on view in “Edge Conditions,” a group exhibition of work by former visual arts fellows […]
NO RETURN
Sara Moran Tells a Story of Survival
Art that imagines a ‘post-apocalyptic Wellfleet’ in multiple mediums
Outside her home in the woods of South Wellfleet, Sara Moran is making a shrine. The broken seat of a wooden chair leans against a piece of wood, which is […]
SCULPTURE
Ellen LeBow Begins Again in Bas-Relief
The Wellfleet artist shapes a personal bestiary in clay
Over decades of artmaking, Ellen LeBow has forged her own path through stages and styles, figurative rather than abstract. The luminous scratchboard drawings she shows at Rice Polak Gallery in […]
LOST AND FOUND
Tom Deininger Turns Chaos Into Catharsis
The assemblage artist finds materials in a ‘dream state,’ then gets down to work
Mounted on the wall at Jeff Soderbergh Gallery in Wellfleet is a large striped bass. From a distance, the fish looks natural and seamless — an iridescent specimen with a […]
LIFE OF THE MIND
Forum 24 Asks, ‘What Is an Artist?’
A symposium explores tradition, transformation, and uselessness
About 70 people crowded into the Robert Charles and Lorraine Bauer Duffy Family Gallery at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum on July 31 to contemplate the question “What is […]
MIXED MEDIA
Working Toward Imperfectionism
Elspeth Slayter layers colors over artifacts and memories
In Elspeth Slayter’s mixed-media works, paint is pressed on paint, layer after layer: a web of yellow covers a block of cayenne red; sky blue buoys are bruised with violet; […]
THE STROLL
Provincetown, Friday Night
Seen and heard on the weekly gallery walk
William-Scott Gallery (439 Commercial St.) Daniel Schwarz says Michael Costello’s paintings at the William-Scott Gallery might be a reference to American poet and critic Marianne Moore’s definition of art: “imaginary gardens with […]
UTOPIA
Abraham Storer Paints the Real Eden
The artist confronts the banality of paradise
In Abraham Storer’s painting Heart, a painfully red disk-shaped object unabashedly occupies the foreground. It’s the top of a large wooden spool. Visible to the left of it: the edge […]
COMPOSITIONS
Two Artists a Generation Apart Find Rhythms in Figures and Forms
Michael Prodanou and Sean Flood each show their big riffs on abstraction
Michael Prodanou’s abstract figures are composed slowly but energetically. First, he considers a nude, making sketches and drawings in charcoal. Later, painting from these sketches, Prodanou moves fast, applying oil […]
SCULPTURE
Ted Chapin and the Art of Complication
Eviscerating machines and critiquing capitalism
Ted Chapin pulls the guts out of machines — “eviscerating them,” he says. That’s how he assembles his intricate wall sculptures, which combine machines like typewriters with natural elements like […]
INTERIORS
Paintings That Reveal Unintended Narratives
Nick Patten holds a mirror to the light and solitude at the Vorse house
On the desk where I spent most of my first winter in Provincetown were tokens that introduced me to this place but only obliquely: a wooden carving of a semi-erect […]
NARRATIVE
Paintings Tell a Kaleidoscopic Civil War Story
In 48 panels, William Ciccariello creates a chilling, indelible novel
The poor thing, he’s seen so much. Death sprawls across the field, bodies lying next to one another like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. How do you walk through a […]
RECONNECTION
An Exhibition Reunites a Family of Artists
Cove Gallery gathers the Shahns — Ben and his children Judith, Jonathan, and Abby
Though often overshadowed by her famous father, Ben Shahn, Judith Shahn, who died in 2009, was the star at Wellfleet’s Cove Gallery, which has promoted her artwork since she first […]
THE STROLL
Wellfleet, Saturday Night
Seen and heard on the weekly gallery walk
AMZehnder Gallery (25 Bank St. #3) At AMZehnder Gallery, Provincetown-based artist Pete Hocking, whose work is also currently hanging on the walls, takes a long moment to consider Patte Ormsby’s […]