Drawing is a personal art. There’s often not much more than a line of ink or graphite dividing an artist’s idea from the artwork. It is both direct and exploratory. […]
Arts & Minds
Celebrating the creative and sometimes quirky culture of the Outer Cape.
Browse all Arts & Minds stories below or dive into a topic:
BOOKS
The Liberty and Luck Behind the Jewish Golden Age
David Denby’s 'Eminent Jews' is a romp through postwar American culture
Betty Friedan worked so hard she forgot to pee. Norman Mailer was married twice in four days. The only way to get Leonard Bernstein out of bed was to play […]
ARTS FUNDING
Pushing Against the Tide of Cutbacks
Arts organizations tighten belts and turn to private and state sources
Provincetown artist Laura Shabott, playwright Patrick Riviere, and the executive director of the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival were relieved to learn that they had been selected for grants from […]
GUTS
A Photographer Follows the Sea
At his new gallery in Orleans, David Hills shows a rare view of a watery world
Before David Hills began following fishermen, he rarely saw the sea. Born in Iowa City, Iowa, Hills grew up in Houston, where his father, Kent, was a physicist working on […]
ARTISTS
A Rebel Reinvented
An exhibition at PAAM examines the early works of Shirley Gorelick
Walking into the Shirley Gorelick exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, one is “knocked out with color,” as exhibition curator and PAAM CEO Christine McCarthy puts it. Many […]
DRAG DESK
Varla Jean Merman Just Wants to Make You Laugh
After three decades in the drag business, Jeffery Roberson is still learning new tricks
The day after the debut of his new summer show at the Crown & Anchor last month, Jeffery Roberson — the beating heart of Provincetown drag, better known as Varla Jean […]
COMICS
Georgie and Barnacle
Arts Briefs
Arts Briefs for July 10, 2025 through July 17, 2025
Barbara Cohen Captures Four-Legged Frolic A college art teacher once warned Barbara E. Cohen against becoming an abstract painter, advising her that only “realists” can support themselves through their art. […]
CIRCUS
Behind the Buzz
This summer’s Cirque by the Sea production takes sweat, cooperation, and creativity
The mosquito has a monologue. The bees perform synchronized aerials. And the praying mantises fight to the death. What’s the Buzz?, the latest production from Payomet’s Cirque by the Sea, […]
TRADITION
Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going
Kenny Neal brings the swamp blues to Truro
Kenny Neal can’t say for sure which was the first instrument he ever played. It seems to him he’s always been a musician — growing up in Baton Rouge, La., […]
COMEDY
Nothing Is Off Limits for Judy Gold
Onstage and off, she’s fierce about family, politics, and being funny
The astonishing thing about the opening night of Judy Gold’s annual run at the Post Office Café & Cabaret wasn’t that she killed it. She did kill it, resoundingly, but […]
BOOKS
The Alternate Realities of Rosemary Woodruff Leary
Susannah Cahalan unveils a life on the sidelines in The Acid Queen
Susannah Cahalan writes that Rosemary Woodruff Leary is “everywhere and nowhere.” Her point is that the woman who was the fourth of five wives of Timothy Leary — the Harvard […]
THEATER
The Past Resembles the Present in Sacco & Vanzetti’s Divine Comedy
Kevin Rice’s new play addresses America’s history of scapegoating immigrants
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants who joined the early-20th-century anarchist and labor movements in Massachusetts. In 1921, they were convicted of killing a paymaster and a guard […]
POETRY
That Come and Go
Open my eyes with the sun, bright over my shoulder, and uniform clear blue […]
POETRY
Transitions
The air felt like May, but the water said it would rather be March. They negotiated through a fog that rose from the moors and burned off in my lungs. […]
