Jim Zimmerman — camera around his neck — greeted me in the lobby of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and led us through the museum’s expansive galleries with the ease of someone welcoming an old friend into his home.
In a sense, PAAM is indeed Zimmerman’s home. Since he was first hired in 1988, Zimmerman has witnessed the organization’s ebbs and flows and has photographed and installed thousands of artworks, in addition to carrying out a multitude of other tasks over the years.
But Zimmerman, who just turned 72, shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. There’s just too much to do.
“It’s the ongoing conundrum,” he says. “If I were to retire from my other activities here, I could start trying to photograph everything in the collection so we could have a complete photographic catalogue. But I don’t know when that’s going to happen because the collection continues to grow.”
In addition to photographing artworks, Zimmerman’s “other activities” include working as the museum’s de facto archivist, exhibition installer, event photographer, gallery lighting designer, and all-around handyman.
“Jim is one of those people who would drop anything to help anybody,” says PAAM CEO Christine McCarthy. “He’s the ultimate team player.”
Zimmerman’s road to Outer Cape Cod was by no means predetermined. A series of happy accidents led him here. He grew up in Pittsburgh; on a high school trip to the United Nations in New York, he wandered into a West Village store and met its manager, John Edwards, whose boss ran another shop in Provincetown. They became pen pals.
After Zimmerman dropped out of Carnegie Mellon University, he moved to Vermont to work with artist Gandy Brodie, who ran a small art school. Brodie had studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown — another serendipitous connection.
After a few years of making ends meet in Vermont, Zimmerman says, “things got pretty lean.” By that point, Edwards had taken over the Provincetown store and moved there permanently. “Gandy had said that if you’re ever going to make it as an artist, you have to go to New York,” Zimmerman recalls. “And I thought, well, I’m definitely not going to go to New York with empty pockets. In the meantime, I’ll go to Provincetown.”
Zimmerman celebrated his 21st birthday on Commercial Street in 1972 and spent the next 15 years working odd jobs, first in retail with Edwards and later as a hammock salesman. Listening to Zimmerman talk about these years is like flipping through a scrapbook filled with the names and images of Provincetown’s cast of characters both famous and infamous — often from before his own time, as he is a devoted student of the town’s history and provenance as a creative haven.
In 1980, Zimmerman joined the Beachcombers, the famed social club for male artists and their supporters that met for weekly Saturday night dinners in their clubhouse on Knowles Wharf. At the time, the Beachcomber veterans still included a contingent who had come to Provincetown to study with the famed portraitist and landscape painter Charles Hawthorne, whose art school incubated a generation of prominent American artists. The old guard would play chess downstairs, Zimmerman remembers, while the younger guys would play billiards upstairs.
One club member was Bill Evaul, who was also the director of PAAM. “At that point I was selling hammocks — and there were no hammock sales to be made in the winter,” says Zimmerman. “So, they knew I was available.”
When a groundskeeping job at PAAM opened in the winter of 1988, it was offered to Zimmerman. Around that time, he inherited some money and put a down payment on a house in North Truro, where he lives to this day. “I grabbed my little piece of paradise,” he says.
The contours of Zimmerman’s duties have remained roughly the same since then. Soon after he started, the museum set up a small darkroom, and he began photographing and cataloguing pieces in the museum’s collection. While the darkroom no longer exists (the photos are digital now), the archiving project continues.
If Zimmerman wears many hats today, he wore even more in the days when the museum had only three people on staff. Through the 1990s, PAAM itself played many roles in addition to art museum, from dance practice facility and performance space to annual Thanksgiving craft fair venue. Zimmerman was there through it all: he set up sound systems, swept the floors, drove across state lines to gather artwork, and measured out craft booths with a tape measure and chalk.
The building was in deteriorating condition by the time McCarthy came on as CEO in 2001 to spearhead a complete renovation. “When it rained outside, it rained inside,” says McCarthy. “Not good.”
Ground was broken for a new facility in 2003 with expanded storage and new climate control systems. As ever, Zimmerman helped every step of the way. Engineers proposed a larger vault for artworks underneath the building but had concerns about flooding. Zimmerman helped with that, too: “They drilled a test well in the front yard and had me drop a plumb line every high tide to see how far down I had to go to hit water,” he says.
As McCarthy expanded the PAAM staff from three to 15, Zimmerman’s duties became more specialized. “He’s been on this ride with me the entire time,” she says. “I could never do what I do without him.”
These days, Zimmerman is focused on photographing and archiving PAAM’s ever-expanding collections. He works closely with Madeleine Larson, the collections manager and registrar, to install and take down exhibitions. He also helps respond to requests about artists whose work has come to PAAM over the course of its history.
“He’s the heart of this place,” says Larson. “He has a lot of institutional knowledge that’s hard to even quantify. If I ever have a question about something in the archives, I can say, ‘Hey, Jim, do you remember that thing from the 1964 members’ exhibition?’ And he’ll say, ‘Of course,’ and then tell me an amazing story of exactly what I need to know.”
What’s next for Zimmerman? He has been seeing a girlfriend “on and off” in New York for the past 51 years. (She was in town for that 21st birthday celebration in 1972.) He says they would like to spend more time together. But he isn’t ready to move on just yet.
“It’s probably time to start working with somebody to teach them what my job is,” he says. “But we haven’t done that yet. I love my job. I don’t really want to go anywhere else.”
