While Anna Poor’s connections to the Outer Cape are deep and varied, a group of women artists, writers, and activists she has known and worked with over the years have played a particularly important role in her experience and development as an artist.
“I live in a little plywood house in Truro that my grandfather built for my grandmother to stay in during the summers,” says Poor, who splits her time between Boston and the Outer Cape and shows locally at Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown. She also teaches at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. “I never knew anything other than to be an artist,” she says.
Poor grew up surrounded by artists. Each summer, her family visited Truro, where her grandfather, the artist Henry Varnum Poor, purchased an old captain’s house on the Pamet River. Her grandmother was Bessie Breuer, a journalist, novelist, and playwright, and her aunt Anne Poor, from whom she inherited her grandfather’s house, was an artist who served as an official art correspondent in the U.S. Army during World War II, working in the Pacific theater.
“My aunt was a wonderful painter, and we were very close,” says Poor. Anne Poor created hauntingly delicate landscapes and still lifes and was deeply involved with the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, which her father started in Maine with three other artists in 1946. Locally, she created a fresco at the Colony in Wellfleet, the modernist cottage community on Chequessett Neck Road. And although Anne Poor was more oriented toward New York City and Maine than the Cape, she often visited journalist and feminist Barbara Deming and her partner Mary Meigs in Wellfleet — and brought young Anna along with her.
Deming and Meigs lived at 350 Pamet Point Road in Wellfleet with writer Marie-Claire Blais. Their work as individuals encompassed visual art, political activism, and writing. “I was young then and kind of peripheral,” says Poor. “I remember sitting in a corner and feeling like there was always work being done on an easel somewhere. People were talking about what they were writing, and there were hot debates. It was extraordinarily thrilling. I can’t say that I’m really that influenced by them in terms of their artwork. It was more about how they lived and the dedication to their lives.”
Deming, who died in 1984, was known for her activism on civil rights and women’s and lesbian issues. “I just adored her because she was such a strong woman,” says Poor. “She wore pants and she had long legs and she was just an extraordinary person.” Meigs, her partner, came from a wealthy Washington, D.C. family. “From letters my aunt wrote and things I have heard over the years, she never had to work for a living,” says Poor. “So, I don’t think she had the passion or the need or the confidence to show a lot.”
Nonetheless, Meigs’s ethereal paintings made an impression on Poor. She recalls the “big, beautiful Cape landscapes” that Meigs created and owns one of Meigs’s works that was given to her by her aunt. “It’s an ink wash of a big vase of flowers,” says Poor. “It’s a really nice painting.”
After leaving Wellfleet, Meigs lived with Blais in Quebec and Key West. Both Meigs, who died in 2002, and Blais, who died in 2021, became literary figures: Meigs wrote her first novel, Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait, when she was 60 years old, and Blais, who wrote her first novel at age 20, was nominated for a Nobel prize and gained canonical status in the French-language literary world.
“I just loved being around these older women who were so independent,” says Poor. “Maybe it was a pattern that started in my youth.” Poor followed in their footsteps and became an artist in her own right. While in school at Mass. College of Art and Design, she worked in a sculpture foundry — an experience that brought her to Castle Hill, where she met its founder (and fellow sculptor) Joyce Johnson. “She was very skeptical of me when we first met,” says Poor. “I had to work hard to prove myself.”
Her efforts paid off. “In the 1990s, Joyce and I really became solid friends,” says Poor. “I started hanging out with her and helping her as she got older.” Poor recalls joining Johnson on outings to the dune shacks, which Johnson helped maintain. “I was a little like a puppy dog,” says Poor. “She’d put me in her truck and we’d hang out and dig sand away from somebody’s dune shack and put logs under it. I was up for anything.”
Poor identifies “scrappiness” as one of the unique qualities of these women artists. “They were confident to live alone and do what they had to do,” she says. “Joyce built her own house in a hollow on Cabral Farm Road in Truro from stuff she found at the dump and part of a dune shack. It had a pump and no electricity. She heated it with a wood stove. She had a sculpture garden and created this whole little world — her own oasis. She was totally self-sufficient and worked like a dog. I grew up with that sort of thing. My grandfather built his own house. If he needed a doorknob, he made a doorknob. He made the plates we ate off of. He made everything. Joyce was in that vein — she had that ‘can do’ attitude. She brought out the strength in me that you can do it. You can figure it out.”
As Poor began to figure things out herself and grow as an artist, she started to build a community of peers on the Outer Cape.
“I have this whole bunch of companions that are contemporaries, like Tabitha Vevers, Breon Dunigan, and Irene Lipton,” says Poor. “As an artist, this is the life that you’ve chosen — or perhaps it’s the life that has chosen you. It is who you are, and everything you do is dedicated toward that simplicity and focus of vision. There is no wavering. That’s what I really love about my contemporaries. We all do it, and we haven’t given up, and to lesser or more degrees, we’ve all had to take side jobs — teach, or do construction, or whatever. But the art is the central thing.”
This sense of community, a kind of sisterhood, is something that Poor identifies as an integral part of local culture and history.
“The Outer Cape is unique in that there’s such a strong tradition of women,” she says. “I don’t feel that so uniquely and strongly in Boston or in New York. It’s just amazing, and there’s no apology. You can be who you want to be. It’s a strong, supportive feeling that you’re not by yourself.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on March 16, incorrectly identified the artist in the photo of the large landscape painting as Anna Poor. It is Anne Poor in the picture.
