In Donald Beal’s Provincetown studio, in the rear of his Alden Street home, a large painting of two women leaving the water hangs on a central wall. After working on […]
Art
ARTISTS
Heads of Strength and Autonomy
Alicia Henry’s portraits suggest experiences both unique to her community and universal in scope
The Fine Arts Work Center hosted a lush and virtuosic exhibition last summer titled “Glitch Aesthetics.” In it were two heads by Alicia Henry, crudely cut from stained fabric, their […]
WOMEN’S WEEKEND
In Perpetual Pursuit of a Creative Life
Natalia Zukerman will lead a workshop on unlocking difficult stories for Women’s Weekend in Provincetown
Natalia Zukerman has taken a “long and winding road,” to where she is now, she says on the phone. Primarily known as a piercing singer-songwriter and stalwart touring musician, Zukerman […]
ART AND ACCESS
The Art of Buying and Selling Artists’ Work
A passion for art and a dedication to artists are often more important than profit
“I wanted this room to be quiet,” says Gail Bell, sitting in her Wellfleet living room. Outside the windows, traffic and pedestrians flow along Main Street, but she has created […]
MUSEUMS
Sky Power Paints With Abandon
The artist’s vibrant pictures reveal a lifelong pursuit of new horizons
Sky Power points to a loosely defined shape in her painting Interior of a Landscape. It could be a boat floating in water: an orange rectangle rising from a half-moon […]
MOTHER’S DAY
An Artist’s Maternal Legacy
For Breon Dunigan, it’s not just about the art, ‘but how you artfully do things’
Sculptor Breon Dunigan comes from a long line of local artists. Her great-grandparents were the first in her family to move to the Outer Cape, drawn by Charles Hawthorne’s Cape […]
IN THE STUDIO
Julia Felsenthal Finds No Place to Hide in Her Paintings
The artist and writer explores ‘the ever-changing present’ in her watercolor seascapes and portraits
Julia Felsenthal likes to paint the same thing over and over again. In her Orleans studio — a small room in her house overlooking Pleasant Bay — stacks of watercolors […]
MUSEUMS
Will Barnet’s Search for Meaning
An artist and teacher used form to evoke deep feeling in works inspired by the natural world
Far from the heroic scale and subject matter of works by many of his contemporaries, Will Barnet’s flat, crisp compositions often depicted women (and their cats) in domestic spaces. Born […]
MUSEUMS
A Fresh Perspective on American Modernism
A Boston exhibit shows how Provincetown printmakers forged new creative territory
“The Provincetown Printmakers,” currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, makes a case for the significance of a group of mostly women artists who forged new directions […]
ARTISTS
Deb Mell Takes What She Knows and Spits It Out
Paintings and sculptures weave together stories and materials in an artist’s orbit
Deb Mell’s uncanny artwork often leaves one wondering. Her paintings are populated with recurring characters — half animal, half human — rendered in meticulous black-and-white marks. They float through spaces […]
ARTISTS
Experiments in Form and Speculation
Sichong Xie makes art ‘almost exploring something that’s impossible to reach’
In 1975, after driving east from Los Angeles, the Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader set sail across the Atlantic Ocean in a small boat. The performance piece was never […]
ARTISTS
Diane Messinger’s Operatic Narratives
The artist mines history — and her own experience — in a series of powerful figurative paintings
Over the past several months, Diane Messinger has been attending live broadcasts of performances from the Metropolitan Opera at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (WHAT). This month, her fellow opera fans […]
ARTISTS
Capturing Winter’s Turbulence on Canvas
Elizabeth Flood experiments with perspective in her second FAWC fellowship
Elizabeth Flood’s tempestuous paintings and ink drawings capture the striations of history, violence, extraction, and sublimity that accumulate in a landscape over time. So, it makes sense that after bearing […]
ART HISTORY
The Artistic Legacies of Mary Hackett
The self-taught Provincetown painter continues to hold an important place in local artists’ memories
When artist Susan Baker showed her work at the Fine Arts Work Center in 1974, Mary Hackett, then in her late 60s, attended the opening. The next day, Baker visited […]
ARTISTS
An Elegantly Colorful World of ‘Slightly Bad Taste’
Mark Joshua Epstein finds ‘arguments and romance’ in his unconventional paintings
Mark Joshua Epstein is not afraid of excess. In his paintings, saturated hues and whimsical patterns bump up against asymmetrical frames. Some pieces jut out from the wall in precisely […]
