Since Jinkx Monsoon was last in Provincetown for Halloween 2022, she’s achieved many firsts for drag artists and transgender performers: she’s been featured in a record-breaking Broadway-musical run, starred in […]
Arts & Minds
Celebrating the creative and sometimes quirky culture of the Outer Cape.
Browse all Arts & Minds stories below or dive into a topic:
ARTISTS
The Unfurling of a Creative Vision
Sam Feinstein’s development from a Hofmann student to a painter of sublime abstractions
The Sam Feinstein exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum charts his lifelong commitment to abstraction and color. The paintings span his early years in Provincetown as a student […]
THEATER
Queercore Takes a Bow on the Provincetown Stage
Peregrine Theatre returns with Hedwig and the Angry Inch
When Hedwig and the Angry Inch premiered in 1998 at the small Jane Street Theatre in Manhattan’s West Village, the transgender rights movement had little of its current visibility or […]
POT PRODUCTION
‘Reefer Madness,’ the Musical, Plays for Laughs and Makes a Point
Confronting the question, ‘What is public enemy number one?’
The concerned citizens file onto the stage: 12 adult actors dressed as well-to-do parents and respectable high school students. One couple is holding hands. A girl wears the sash of […]
THEATER
A Warning Against Fascism Returns to the Stage
'It Can’t Happen Here — Again,' adapted from Sinclair Lewis, comes to WHAT on July 19
A theatrical warning about fascism and liberal complacency was performed on 21 stages across the country one week before the national election of 1936. The play was It Can’t Happen […]
Arts Briefs
Arts Briefs for July 11, 2024 through July 18, 2024
Aparna Nancherla at Payomet “Maybe she’s born with it — maybe she’s trapped in a societal prison of impossible beauty standards” goes stand-up comic Aparna Nancherla’s riff on that old […]
PHOTOGRAPHY
Portraits of the Artists
Ron Amato’s photographs of Provincetown artists capture a creative community
Nearly everyone who lives in or visits Provincetown knows about its vibrant artistic community. Far fewer know the names and faces of the artists who compose it. “I didn’t know […]
PHOTOGRAPHY
Greater Than Their Parts
In Jefferson Hayman’s ‘pairings,’ framing is as integral as the image itself
Ten apricots, a bunch of grapes, three blueberries, a skull tipped over, a half-empty glass: these subjects would be just as at home on the walls of the Rijksmuseum in […]
DRAG DESK
Varla Jean Takes You Underneath the Wig
In her 27th Provincetown season, Merman parodies her colleague Taylor Swift
Varla Jean Merman has been on television, on Broadway, and, she says, on welfare. She’s been on the front page of the New York Times and, for 35 years, on […]
COLORSCAPES
The Abstract Journeys of Malu Tan
The artist explores a constantly shifting world of raw emotion
A spiral staircase leads to artist Malu Tan’s second-floor studio in North Tryon, an industrial district in uptown Charlotte, N.C. Her building is a converted bomb shelter. The studio is […]
POETRY
Pete’s Beard
Long and white, prone to blowing like a whale’s salty plume it’s the first thing you notice: his panache, his dare his disguise. And then the eyes a quiet blue, […]
POETRY
The Thing Itself
After Dylan Thomas
It was really like that. Autumn brown night washed the avenues and we talked of nothing important, just power and pleasure and paradise. Nothing was, but the slope of her […]
BOOKS
Sociologist Allison Pugh Warns Against ‘Heedless Technophilia’
In The Last Human Job, she explores the value of being seen
Almost half of the four-year-olds in Utah are enrolled in preschool online. They watch animated videos and sing songs to learn “pre-reading,” which education administrators in the Beehive State apparently […]
Arts Briefs
Arts Briefs for July 4, 2024 through July 11, 2024
Stories of a Gay Mormon Dad Claybourne Elder has a shorter commute to perform in Provincetown this year than he did last summer. The Broadway and television star is spending […]
LESS IS MORE
Polly Burnell’s Interior Vision Unearths Complex Worlds
Her paintings are small, but they are inspired by profound experiences
One of Polly Burnell’s most recent paintings, The Whale Dream (5 years before I came here), is of a whale that seems to be ascending from the water toward a […]
