One thing I love about the Outer Cape is how, more often than not, the person working at the grocery store, gas station, library, restaurant, hardware store, or coffee shop […]
Arts & Minds
Celebrating the creative and sometimes quirky culture of the Outer Cape.
Browse all Arts & Minds stories below or dive into a topic:
QUEER ‘I’
A Town Two Streets Wide
Reflecting on identity, connection, and Mary Heaton Vorse
“If Provincetown were wiped out — my house and my town gone — I would be as vulnerable as a hermit crab without its shell,” writes Mary Heaton Vorse in […]
Arts Briefs
Arts Briefs for April 28 through May 4, 2022
Artists of ‘Exquisite Core’ Unite for Ukraine Relief Watching the war in Ukraine unfold, Eugene Zhukau was struck by how everyday people, including artists, were having to turn into soldiers. […]
ARTISTS
For Christine Niles, Bigger Isn’t Better
Capturing Provincetown’s light in small paintings
Christine Niles’s narrative challenges the myth, mostly believed by nonartists, that artists are born and not made. “I always enjoyed the arts, but I didn’t feel myself drawn to them […]
CRYPTO-CONOMY
Valuing the Intangible and the Non-Fungible
For Outer Cape artists, NFTs mostly don’t live up to the hype
To those unfamiliar with cryptocurrency and NFTs, the term “non-fungible” sounds more like a type of mushroom than an economic term. But the buzz around non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, has […]
CLOSE LISTENING
A Thousand-Year-Old Text Enters the Auditory Realm
J. Keith Vincent’s new abridged translation of The Pillow Book
A thousand years ago, Sei Shōnagon set down on paper her wry observations of court life in Kyoto, the capital of Heian Japan. What was awkward to Sei? “The back […]
BOOKS
A Walk in Thoreau’s Shoes
Ben Shattuck finds transcendence in the people met along the way
Beginning in the Cape’s dunes, Ben Shattuck’s Six Walks is a meditation on nature in Henry David Thoreau’s footsteps. Desperate to escape recurring nightmares, Shattuck turns Thoreau’s Cape Cod into […]
Arts Briefs
Arts Briefs for April 21 through April 27, 2022
Erna Partoll ‘Captures Time’ A show celebrating Erna Partoll runs through May 7 at Berta Walker Gallery, 208 Bradford St. in Provincetown. At age 90, Partoll says, “Painting is capturing […]
WRITERS
Vedran Husić Is Searching for Meaning
The returning FAWC fellow writes of love and grief
“This place will always be a part of my life, more so than I ever imagined,” says the writer Vedran Husić. “The work that I’m doing here is so meaningful […]
BOOK REVIEW
Landscape as ‘Poetic Space’
How artists and thinkers influenced America and its politics
Considering the origins of the Cape Cod National Seashore in 1961 doesn’t usually bring Ralph Waldo Emerson, the 19th-century transcendentalist, to mind. Or artists, either. In local imagination, the origin […]
ALBUM REVIEW
Just Listening With Mike Flanagan
His new album with Lisa Bello is a tribute to ‘third musketeer’ Justin Waithe
If you walk into Provincetown’s Tin Pan Alley or The Club in the evening, you’re likely to hear Mike Flanagan’s fingers on the piano or the sound of his saxophone. […]
FAMILY HISTORY
From Ukraine to Provincetown
Today’s news echoes a family’s century-old story of flight
The picture at right is a family photo. It was taken in 1898 in Kyiv, Ukraine and is the original cabinet card — a thin photograph mounted on a 4¼-by-6½-inch […]
Arts Briefs
Arts Briefs for April 14 through April 20, 2022
A Book Full of Broadsides Poems seen on street signs and paintings posted on boardwalks — hundreds of these “broadsides” have been released “in the wild” since Truro poet Elizabeth […]
VISUAL ARTIST
Taking Time and Trusting the Process
Austin Ballard weaves art and craft together
Austin Ballard creates undulating forms of rattan and clay that writhe and roll like kelp. The sculptures, which take weeks, and sometimes months, to complete, feel almost figurative; whether they […]
WRITERS
For H.R. Webster, the Poetical Is Political
Writing as “an act of radical imagination”
H.R. Webster has a poem provocatively titled “Failure.” “I have made fun of the way language/ is always finding its own end,” she writes. “I have made fun of these […]
