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Cape Cod Museum of Art

    MUSIC AND ART

    Garrett Dutton Finds a Different Rhythm

    For this musician, painting is a source of freedom untethered from expectations

    By

    Garrett Dutton is best known by his stage name, G. Love. Since the early 1990s, he’s fronted the hip-hop blues band G. Love and Special Sauce, which maintains an active touring schedule. The band’s 2016 album The Juice was nominated for a Grammy award, and this year marks the 30th anniversary of the group’s debut album released on Epic Records.

    Dutton in a barn on his property that he uses as an art studio. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    Before he forged a path in music, Dutton was immersed in graffiti culture. “There was a lot of tagging and styles that were unique to Philadelphia,” says Dutton, who grew up there and now lives in Orleans. He established his own tag — “Look” — which he perfected by practicing obsessively.

    “When G. Love took off, that became my tag,” he says. “If you walk into the backstage of any small or medium-size club across the world you’ll see my tags totally bombing all the backstage dressers.”

    For a long time, making art was a sidelight to his music career. Dutton performed sitting on chairs or stools, so he began painting them to add some color to the stage. Some fans wanted to buy the furniture, which brought Dutton to thrift shops to replenish his supplies. He started picking up artwork there — “cheesy cat paintings or something,” says Dutton. He would paint over them, frame and all, and use them to decorate the stage at his shows.

    Eventually, he bought blank canvases from art stores as his paintings began selling. “It gradually transformed into more of a legitimate thing,” says Dutton. He had his first gallery exhibition in 2006.

    Dutton’s art gets the spotlight in “It’s All Love,” an exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. The works are titled #lovepaints; they all include the word “love.” Sometimes the word fills the entire surface of the canvas; other times it appears repeatedly like a mantra or a phrase a disobedient schoolboy must write on a chalkboard. It stretches horizontally across some compositions; in others, it’s arranged in loose, vertical rows.

    A painting in Dutton’s series #lovepaints. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    The exhibition includes some of Dutton’s painted wicker chairs and stools on which he scrawled his tag — “Love” — in fluorescent colors amid splashes and drips of paint.

    The connection to graffiti is obvious throughout the exhibition, but it’s most salient in the paintings that feature “love” written once in stylized letters, like a tag covering a canvas. Certain paintings gesture toward abstraction, creating a dialogue between the text as image and the background of the painting. In these works, the language of street art merges with that of historical and contemporary art.

    It’s a territory that Dutton has also explored as a collector. He started attending Art Basel, an international art fair, to perform his music. There he met collectors and artists, eventually acquiring work by contemporary artists rooted in street art, including Maya Hayuk, Shepard Fairey, and Invader. “I was always kind of a collector or a fan at first,” says Dutton.

    A pair of paintings in Garrett Dutton’s series #lovepaints. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    In one painting, “love” is written in light yellow words. The text struggles to stand out against the white ground, which cuts through the letters. Splatters of red paint and globby streaks of darker yellow further complicate this tug of war between the text, the background, and the materiality of the paint.

    Dutton is adventurous in what he does with a single word. In one large-scale piece, the text overlaps and gradually darkens as it moves down the canvas. The words become lyrical, abstracted marks. In some of the black-and-white pieces, Dutton transcends the quick read of spray paint to suggest other materials, like blotchy reproductions from a photocopy machine.

    The immediacy of his marks evokes certain strains in contemporary painting (Katherine Bernhardt and Christopher Wool come to mind), but they’re also a by-product of his younger years doing graffiti.

    A painting in Garrett Dutton’s series #lovepaints. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    “The act of graffiti writing is a quick thing,” says Dutton. “It’s illegal. You have to do it and then get the hell out.” His paintings still contain that fast, physical, and gestural energy — not unlike the energy a musician might channel while performing on stage.

    Dutton sees plenty of overlap between his music and his art practice. “My art has been a creative emotional outlet and a meditation that goes hand in hand with my musical process,” he writes in his exhibition statement. His penchant for the word “love” echoes his sense of purpose as a musician: “My mission as a musician has been to spread love,” says Dutton. But in his art, he finds a degree of freedom that he doesn’t associate with his music career, which in the ’90s involved the pressure of appealing to record labels.

    A painting in Garrett Dutton’s series #lovepaints. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)

    Dutton moved to the Cape from Boston in 2019 with his wife, Kelcey Dutton. The couple now have three young boys. Dutton surfs, records music at Checkpoint East, and has shown artwork at Alias Gallery and Readymade Gallery. The couple’s property, which overlooks a small inlet, is still in transition. It’s a jumble of buildings, including a cottage and a new modern house that the family has not yet moved into.

    Toward the back of the property is a wooden barn crammed with art supplies and surfboards — Dutton’s workshop. The old wooden door is marked with errant bits of fluorescent paint. Unlike a recording studio or a stage, this place is completely his, far removed from the pressures and glamor of a music career.

    Dutton’s exhibition “It’s All Love” at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    “There’s no one watching,” says Dutton. “There are no expectations of anything for me and no end goal other than to make cool-looking stuff. It’s a great way to connect with myself. I love color, and I love the process. It’s a creatively freeing exercise.”

    ‘It’s All Love’

    The event: The visual art of Garrett Dutton (a.k.a. G. Love)
    The time: Through Feb. 16; public reception on Thursday, Jan. 2, 5 to 6:30 p.m.
    The place: Cape Cod Museum of Art, 60 Hope Ln., Dennis
    The cost: $10 general admission

    LARGE SCALE

    Murals That Expand Beyond the Walls

    An exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art features paintings both indoors and out

    By

    DENNIS — When Samuel Tager was asked to curate a show at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, he had been thinking a lot about mural projects in Boston, Lynn, and Worcester. Murals typically have a life outside of museums, which was one of the reasons he was attracted to the artform.

    Esteban del Valle’s mural of Provincetown street musicians at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    “Good mural artists really engage with the public,” says Tager. “They can beautify a place but not necessarily be part of gentrification. They give people in the community a sense of pride in their place.”

    The challenge was to adapt this community-oriented, public-facing artform to the context of a museum, a traditionally more hermetic space. The resulting exhibition, featuring work by five artists, both embraces the conventions of gallery spaces and breaks beyond their confines.

    After considering different ways he could celebrate muralists with a gallery exhibition, Tager landed on the idea of integrating indoor and outdoor components. And so, the show features three artists — Joe Wardwell, Jackie Reeves, and Esteban del Valle — who created commissioned murals flanking the museum’s entrance. Inside the museum, Felipe Ortiz and Sophy Tuttle created site-specific paintings on the walls.

    The large rectangular exhibition space also features gallery paintings by the three artists whose work is outside. Although more suited to traditional exhibition spaces, these paintings reference the murals outside in both their scale and imagery and highlight the way in which mural artists often move seamlessly between a studio practice and public projects.

    The Cape Cod Mural Project is a group exhibition through Nov. 12 at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    Viewed from a distance, the three outdoor murals bring an infusion of color to the museum’s traditional exterior, a prim Cape-style building with white trim and graying shingles. They’re doing what murals do best: reorienting a person’s experience of an outdoor space. Although Tager gave the artists little direction other than offering the same three-panel surface, the murals coalesce around Cape-centric imagery and thematic concerns that address instability and unease.

    Both Wardwell, a Boston-based painter, and Reeves, who lives in Sandwich and works from a studio in Barnstable, address climate change in their work. Reeves painted a group of swimmers from an upward-looking perspective. The viewer doesn’t see the heads of the figures; the composition focuses attention on the depths of the sea floor where miniature houses rest, crumbling and broken. Moving upward, the composition transitions from dark blues to the warm, feverish colors of the swimmers and the hot colors of light hitting the water’s surface. The situation is knowingly ambiguous. Are the figures gasping for air or enjoying a day at the beach?

    “My intention was to create some tension,” says Reeves.

    Joe Wardwell’s mural at “Walls That Connect.” (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    Wardwell’s mural conjures a similar mood, both ambiguous and ominous. Oversized text reading “anything could happen” is superimposed over an image of Provincetown Harbor at sunset.

    “It could be read in many different ways,” says Wardwell. He lifted the phrase from a song by The Clean and initially thought it was reminiscent of a party atmosphere or a night out, but after experiencing floods in Vermont this summer, he began to associate the phrase more with environmental peril.

    Wardwell’s painting practice, which encompasses both studio work and large-scale murals, is rooted in an engagement with bombastic rock lyrics and the Hudson River School, a politically resonant 19th-century art movement typified by grandiose scenes of the American landscape. Wardwell’s mural at the museum references the movement in its grand scale, sweeping views of the landscape, and twilight colors, but ultimately he provides an acerbic reassessment of American bravado. Here, the billboard-like messaging and sunset colors feel elegiac.

    Felipe Ortiz’s mural inside the museum. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    “It’s impossible to make a water image without thinking about encroaching erosion,” says Wardwell. Provincetown, depicted as a sliver of land sandwiched between sky and water, feels especially vulnerable in this painting — an image Wardwell describes as a “landscape of the new dawn.”

    The Provincetown shoreline also shows up in del Valle’s mural, which he created to celebrate Provincetown’s buskers and in sober acknowledgement of the forces of gentrification threatening that community and the town’s creative identity at large. Del Valle, a two-time Fine Arts Work Center fellow, became acquainted with the town’s musicians while painting a mural, Time and the Town, on the side of the Marine Specialties building. It’s in an alleyway that is a popular spot for street musicians.

    “Busking is another kind of public art,” says del Valle, who feels that these musicians embody Provincetown’s history as a place where artists came together to make art in an organic and “less cleaned up” way. “I find a camaraderie and kinship with these people,” says del Valle.

    Sophy Tuttle’s mural. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)

    His mural at the museum features three street musicians: Will Harrington with his piano; Meagan Gillis playing trombone; and Sharky, on banjo, who came to the Cape from New Orleans at Harrington’s suggestion.

    The musicians play in an off-kilter environment, communicated through del Valle’s use of an unstable diagonal composition and images of unimpressed tourists and a sinking ship. One man looks intently at his phone and a stylish young woman eats oysters while the ship breaks apart and the band plays on. (Here, del Valle was thinking about the orchestra playing on the deck as the Titanic sank.) The artist inserts himself in the scene, his back to the viewer and his arm raised with a martini in hand.

    “I wanted to self-implicate,” says del Valle. “My hands aren’t clean from enjoying the luxuries of Provincetown.”

    Despite setting himself apart from the musicians in the mural, del Valle hews closely to them in the form of the painting, which recalls the energy of jazz improvisation in the careening brush strokes and his virtuosic drawing, which fluctuates between short, staccato-like marks and more open, flowing gestures.

    A gallery view of “Walls That Connect.” Left to right, work by Felipe Ortiz, Jackie Reeves, and Joe Wardwell. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    Inside the museum, the works on view further explore the ambitious scale of murals, but here the spatial conversation references interior rather than exterior space. Tuttle and Ortiz both created site-specific murals, which like other works in the exhibition, reference the natural world. Tuttle’s piece, which celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Mass. Endangered Species Act, consists of three overlapping concentric circles, each dedicated to an endangered animal, which she represents in three-dimensional relief sculptures.

    Ortiz, who shows at Rugosa Gallery in Eastham, also blurs the lines between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space in his colorful mural. At the center of the wall hangs a wooden form that he painted in bright saturated colors. Extending outward and onto the wall are painted shapes echoing the sculpture and the shadows it projects. The resulting image, although the most abstract in the exhibition, recalls the form of a bird. The association isn’t surprising, considering Ortiz’s previous work based on bird migration patterns.

    Taken as a whole, this exhibition challenges boundaries. Ortiz and Tuttle collapse boundaries between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, and Wardwell, del Valle, and Reeves all move between interior and exterior environments and domains both private and public. Tager, who has curated two other exhibitions at the Cape Cod Museum of Art and serves as the executive director of the Provincetown Public Art Foundation, hopes this spirit of breaking boundaries extends to the audience.

    “I thought working with mural artists would be an interesting way to bring in new audience members and new voices,” he says.

    Walls That Connect

    The event: The Cape Cod Mural Project group exhibition
    The time: Through Nov. 12
    The place: Cape Cod Museum of Art, 60 Hope Lane, Dennis
    The cost: General admission: $10

    AT THE MUSEUM

    Margo and Zimiles: Ukrainian Roots Both Subtle and Explicit

    Two exhibitions at the Cape Cod Museum of Art reflect the heritage and resilience of the Ukrainian people

    By

    DENNIS — The Ukrainian flag — unfamiliar to many before this year but now ubiquitous — is an abstract landscape: a brilliant blue sky above the golden expanse of a field of wheat. It’s not just an emblem of Ukraine’s sovereign identity but a kind of minimalist work of art in itself.

    Boris Margo. (Photo by Raymond M. Sato)

    Two current shows at the Cape Cod Museum of Art provide opportunities to engage with Ukrainian-inflected visual culture. A compact retrospective of previously unexhibited works by Boris Margo from the museum’s collection provides a valuable introduction to (or for some, a reminder of) a notable 20th-century Ukrainian-born artist with a long connection to the Outer Cape. A concurrent show by Margo’s nephew Murray Zimiles addresses the atrocities of the 2022 Russian invasion — and the resilience of the Ukrainian people — in a suite of five powerful large-scale mixed-media paintings.

    Margo was born in Volochysk, Ukraine, in 1902 and came to New York via Canada in 1930. He first visited Provincetown in 1940, spending summers living a dune shack with his wife, Jan Gelb, a noted artist herself. During his long career he taught at the Art Institute of Chicago, among other places, and his critically lauded work was collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He maintained a close association with the Outer Cape until his death in 1995.

    Boris Margo, From Meteorites. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)

    While he’s remained a familiar and beloved artistic presence in Provincetown, Margo has been overlooked in most surveys of 20th-century art history. Although his work received a good share of attention when it was first exhibited, his reputation was often eclipsed by his more famous contemporaries: he apprenticed with Arshile Gorky (the Cape Cod museum maintains that Gorky learned as much from his student as vice versa) and shared an apartment with Mark Rothko in the 1940s.

    Margo is best known as a printmaker who also taught printing techniques to other artists, including Milton Avery. One of those techniques, the cellocut, was Margo’s own invention. It involved building a relief on a printing surface through layers of hardened liquid plastic, which allowed for sinuous biomorphic shapes and subtle variations of color.

    Boris Margo, From the Sea. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)

    Margo’s art reflects several of the prevailing artistic currents and styles of his time, particularly surrealism and abstract impressionism. But despite the museum’s assertion, reflected in the title of the exhibition, that Margo’s art somehow reflects a “Ukrainian sensibility,” there’s little in his art that reads as specifically Ukrainian. That’s not the museum’s fault; as Susan Sontag wrote, “A sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about,” much less define visually.

    A self-portrait by Murray Zimiles. (Photo courtesy the artist)

    It’s tempting in the show’s context to read the patches of blue and yellow in the 1952 cellocut From Meteorites as references to the colors of the Ukrainian flag, but the spots of red in the composition make it more likely that the piece is an exercise in the use of primary colors than anything with a nationalistic or patriotic message.

    But Margo’s cellocuts still reward a close look. The technique was particularly suited for a kind of biomorphic abstraction that connects Margo’s work to earlier painters like Paul Klee and Joan Miró while remaining strikingly original and even prescient. (It also turned out to be an outlier in the history of printmaking: the difficulty of the technique meant that few other artists except Jan Gelb made any significant works using it.)

    While Margo’s Ukrainian heritage is more a biographical detail than something overtly expressed in his art, Zimiles foregrounds his uncle’s association with his homeland in a statement accompanying his own show, War in Ukraine, concurrently on view at the CCMoA.

    “My family, like those of so many Eastern European Jews, had a troubled history in Ukraine, fleeing pogroms and wars,” says Zimiles. “Boris was raised in a small town on the Polish-Russian border of what is now Ukraine, where he had intense memories of childhood, parents, siblings, and nature. There he also suffered through the Russian Revolution, not arriving in America until 1930. He hated Russia and refused to return even when honored in a show at the State Museum in Moscow.​”

    And Zimiles makes his family’s historical background explicit in his own work. The five oil and mixed-media pieces in his War in Ukraine series depict the invasion of Ukraine and the horrors of the current conflict on Zimiles’s ancestral homeland.

    Murray Zimiles, War in Ukraine 1. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)

    Zimiles, who shows at Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown, has previously visited the Holocaust and 9/11 in his paintings. His Ukraine series follows in that tradition.

    “My wife half joked that I should have a theme retrospective entitled ‘Master of Disasters and Catastrophes’ because, in fact, making art has always been the way that I constructively channeled my own rage, grief, heartbreak, and helplessness into a form that moves others,” he writes in his artist statement. They also continue a long historical tradition — which includes Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808 and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica — of work depicting the horrors of war.

    Murray Zimiles, War in Ukraine 3. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)

    Fire appears in every painting in the series, consuming an apartment block in one painting and dividing a landscape — blue sky above, a field of sunflowers below — in another. Zimiles’s compositions have a fluidity that lends them more of an impressionistic or dreamlike quality instead of a precise documentary style. Lines of tanks don’t roll through the Ukrainian landscapes and urban environments in the paintings as much as they undulate menacingly across them.

    For Zimiles, the paintings are a kind of activism. “I want them to keep the suffering of Ukraine and the madness of this desecration right before the public eye,” he says. “That is why I choose to make them horrible as well as beautiful.”

    And he sees the War in Ukraine series as something that connects him to his uncle and their shared heritage. “Boris was not just an uncle to me and my brother — he saved me, taught me, opened my eyes, and gave me daring and love,” he says. “So, when this horrible invasion of his homeland began, I felt something touch me very deeply.”

    A Family Connection

    The event: Boris Margo: A Ukrainian Sensibility and Murray Zimiles: War in Ukraine
    The time: Wednesdays to Saturdays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sundays noon to 4 p.m. (closed Mondays and Tuesdays) through Jan. 29, 2023
    The place: Cape Cod Museum of Art, 60 Hope Lane, Dennis
    The cost: $10; senior and student discounts available; free for children 12 and under

    Editor’s note: Because of reporting, editing, fact-checking, and proofreading errors and oversights, a previous version of this article published in print on Dec. 22, 2022 misspelled the last name of artist Murray Zimiles (not “Zimilies”). The Independent sincerely regrets the error.

    ARTISTS

    Turning Old Clothes into New Fossils

    Erin Woodbrey Explores the Nature of Time

    By

    Erin Woodbrey’s Orleans studio overlooks her garden, now full of late-season vegetables and flowers. The garden provides food, inspiration, and the natural dyes that Woodbrey uses for her prints.

    Woodbrey also makes sculptures, installations, and photographs. “The through line of the work is time,” she says. “I’ve always been fascinated with trying to understand how it materializes, what our experience of time is.” What also unifies Woodbrey’s work is playfulness, an interest in the natural world, and a strong poetic undertow.

    Erin Woodbrey in her studio. (Photo courtesy Erin Woodbrey)

    Woodbrey grew up outside Portland, Maine. She moved to Boston and then Chicago, earning degrees at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

    Woodbrey worked summers at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. After finishing graduate school in 2014, she returned, and not long after poured the foundation for the house she lives in today. She has been showing her work at Provincetown’s Gaa Gallery since 2015, where she is also the director.

    Her newest show includes 11 works from her Fragment series in “Vision 2021: Found, Formed, Fused” at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. The group exhibition features artists who use found or recycled materials.

    Works from Woodbrey’s Fragment series are on display at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. They are India ink on fired porcelain sculptures formed from fabric and wood. (Photo courtesy Erin Woodbrey)

    Woodbrey takes her own clothing, dips it in porcelain, and drapes it over a wooden frame that, along with the fabric, burns away during the firing process. What is left is a sort of fossil. “I’m trying to replicate geological happenings,” says Woodbrey. “There are strata and layers, as well as heat and chemical reactions.”

    Black India ink is applied to emphasize the textured surface. The result resembles charred wood. “I like the cracks — the evidence of the time and temperature that the fabric went through,” she says. For the process to work, the materials must be totally organic: plastic and polyester melt. Woodbrey says she’s become more aware of the sustainability of the clothing she buys as a result.

    Two Weeks in October (Sixteen Containers Used to Hold Liquids) is a 24-by-36-inch shadowgram by Erin Woodbrey. The ink is derived from spinach. (Photo courtesy Erin Woodbrey)

    Last year, she took an online course on shadowgrams — prints that use photosensitive emulsions made from spinach, beets, or cabbage to track light passing over found objects. There are a few laid out under a window in her studio, following “the way the shadow goes across them over the course of the day.” The results are often unpredictable

    Also in Woodbrey’s studio are large, deconstructed books, the pages layered with plaster so that they resemble swollen appendages. Encased in this hard shell, the words and ideas in these books are preserved, in a sense, but inaccessible. In another corner of the studio are clusters of single-use plastic containers that Woodbrey has covered in ash, plaster, and gauze and mounted, upside-down, onto tomato cages made from steel wire. The effect is haunting.

    A sculpture from Woodbrey’s Carrier Bag series. (Photo André van der Wende)

    One wall of Woodbrey’s studio hosts a seemingly random collection of objects — an inverted plastic laundry basket, light fixtures, black plastic tubing, an old paint tray, long cables, and a wooden pedestal. They are laid out in an almost scientific manner — cast-offs waiting to be incorporated in her future work.

    “I’m interested in the meaning embedded in objects and how they form our experiences,” says Woodbrey. “We’re developing all these technologies, and there’s a certain point where the technology starts making us. I’m interested in that reciprocity.”

    Works in progress in Woodbrey’s studio. (Photo André van der Wende)

    Woodbrey wants viewers to be participants in her work — understanding takes time and curiosity. “I want it be confusing. I’m OK with that,” she says. “Sometimes my work can be a bit opaque, but I hope that grounding it in objects and things makes it accessible.”

    For Woodbrey, it all comes back to the garden, which has taught her “the interconnectedness of all things” — the pace a

    nd rhythm of nature. “Last week, I watched the migratory birds fly through. I think a lot about listening to things, looking closely, and slowing down to focus on the moment.”

    What’s Left Behind 

    The event: Works by Erin Woodbrey, part of “Vision 2021: Found, Formed, Fused”

    The time: Through Nov. 14

    The place: Cape Cod Museum of Art, 60 Hope Lane, Dennis

    The cost: General admission, $10

    Off the Grid (Thurs.)

    By

    In conjunction with the exhibition “cARTography: Envisioning Cape Cod,” Joseph Garver, curator emeritus for the Harvard Map Collection, will give a talk, “The Cartography of Cape Cod: Reading Between the Lines,” on Thursday, Aug. 19, 4 p.m. at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, 60 Hope Lane in Dennis. Tickets are $12 at ccmoa.org.

    Auction Block (Sat.)

    By

    The Cape Cod Museum of Art will hold a virtual auction on Saturday, Aug. 14, 7 p.m. Fifty works of art will be offered by artists including Jane Lincoln, Richard Neal, Suzanne M. Packer, Rowland Scherman, and Paul Schulenburg. Visit ccmoa.org to browse.

    Native Perspective (Thurs.)

    By

    Wampanoag historian Linda Coombs presents “400 Years of Wampanoag History: Indigenous Perspectives on Historical Realities,” a talk at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, 60 Hope Lane in Dennis, on Thursday, July 29, 4 p.m. It is part of the exhibition “cARTography: Envisioning Cape Cod.” Registration is $12 at ccmoa.org.

    Mapping Cape Cod

    By

    “cARTography: Envisioning Cape Cod,” is an exhibition, curated by Samuel Tager, of historic maps at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, 60 Hope Lane in Dennis. Running Wednesday, June 30th through October 3, the exhibition takes a multifaceted approach. It features maps on loan from the collection of Orleans resident David Garner, as well as “an immersive installation by a local contemporary artist and cartographer,” Mark Adams. “Our Story” conveys the Native American perspective on the mapping of Cape Cod. There will also be two recently restored art deco murals. The museum is open Wednesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sunday, noon to 4 p.m.

     

    Brush Up

    By

    The Cape Cod Museum of Art is offering two online painting classes on Friday mornings beginning May 21st. Join instructor Julie Blanchard for a beginner-to-intermediate watercolor class from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., or if acrylics are more your style, join instructor Odin Smith for an intermediate-to-advanced class from 10 a.m. to noon. Registration is $150 for watercolors, $175 for acrylics, at ccmoa.org.

     

    Brush Up

    By

    The Cape Cod Museum of Art is offering two online painting classes on Friday mornings beginning May 21st. Join instructor Julie Blanchard for a beginner-to-intermediate watercolor class from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., or if acrylics are more your style, join instructor Odin Smith for an intermediate-to-advanced class from 10 a.m. to noon. Registration is $150 for watercolors, $175 for acrylics, at ccmoa.org.

     

    Truro ‘Visions’ and ‘Revisions’ at Cape Museum

    By

    For the past 22 years, Twenty-One in Truro, a group of women artists, have convened annually for a fall retreat in their namesake town. Now, an exhibit of their work, “Visions/Revisions,” will be at the Cape Cod Museum of Art at 60 Hope Lane in Dennis from Thursday, April 22nd through August 1st. There will be a free reception on Thursday, April 29th from 4 to 7 p.m.

    The show is about shifting perceptions and interpretations over time. The featured artists are Heather Blume, Michele Dangelo, Jane Eccles, Maryalice Eizenberg, Susan Hollis, Martine Joré, Jane Lincoln, Jerre Moriarty, Rosalie Nadeau, Kate Nelson, Carol Odell, Julie Olander, Suzanne M. Packer, Sarah Fielding Ricci, Jo Ann Ritter, M’Lou Sorrin, Lorraine Trenholm, Christine Velesig, Linda Young, and Joyce Zavorskas.

    Figures of Abstraction

    By

    Deborah Forman teaches “Perspectives on the Provincetown Art Colony,” a virtual course via the Cape Cod Museum of Art, on Tuesdays beginning April 27th, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. Forman aims to trace conflicts between the traditionalists and modernists, the impact of Hans Hofmann, and the golden years of abstract expressionism in town. Registration is $85 at ccmoa.org.

    ARTISTS

    Jane Lincoln Has Had ‘Enough’ of Gun Violence

    Her paper creations are powerful and visceral

    By

    “Enough is enough, and it’s time for us to take action,” said U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse after the March 22 shooting at the King Soopers grocery in Boulder, Colo.

    At the time, Jane Lincoln was preparing for her show, “Enough,” at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. Hearing Neguse’s words was eerie, she says — almost like déjà vu. The yearning for action was why she embarked on the project in the first place.

    A detail from SunTrust Bank, the first work that Lincoln made in her “Enough” series. (Photo courtesy Jane Lincoln)

    “Enough,” with 43 mixed media works, is on view from Thursday, April 8 through May 30. Originally, it included 41 pieces. But after the March shootings in Atlanta and Boulder, Lincoln had to make two more.

    Lincoln grew up in New Hampshire. Her father was a nuclear physicist with NASA, and her mother was a librarian. In the ’80s, she studied color theory with Henry Hensche in Provincetown. From 2009 to 2011, she got a master’s degree through a combined MassArt/Fine Arts Work Center program (that has since been discontinued), studying with Jim Peters in Provincetown. Her thesis was about the grid.

    “Grids were the first totally abstract art. They’re everywhere,” Lincoln says. Their structure fascinates her.

    Lincoln was originally a representational painter. “Early on, I was tagged as the ‘cranberry queen,’ ” she says, because her favorite subjects were cranberry bogs. But a series of “personal puzzles” she created — based on Sudoku grids — drew her into the abstract. Another series, called “color zones,” is made of painted paper on archival boards with fluorescent paper on the back, creating a sort of halo effect. She also makes abstract white line wood block prints that evoke Provincetown for her — a place she loves.

    In her East Falmouth studio, Lincoln explains the creative process for “Enough.” She started making the pieces in January 2019. She’d been working with punctured paper for the show “Pushing Forward,” at the Kingston Gallery in Boston. Then, the SunTrust Bank shooting in Sebring, Fla. happened. She realized she was making what looked like bullet holes.

    Pulse Nightclub is a 20-by-12-inch work by Jane Lincoln. The shooting happened in Orlando, Fla. on Sunday, June 12, 2016. 49 people were killed, 53 injured. (Photo courtesy Jane Lincoln)

    She made SunTrust Bank first — it’s 8 by 12 inches, with five angry orange holes. Since then, she has made Sandy Hook, Pulse Nightclub, Virginia Tech, and others.

    For the background, she uses black pastel paper, which is thin enough to puncture, but thick enough to hold up. On two sheets of this, she glues smaller pieces of colored paper in mirror images of one another. Then, using a hammer and large nail, she pokes holes in one of the sheets. It’s done on a grid. “As you can see, I like grids,” she says.

    The black paper rips and frays to reveal the color underneath in a way that’s visceral. Indeed, there is something almost violent about Lincoln’s artistic process. It’s a real contrast to her sweet, friendly demeanor. When being photographed for this article, she insists on not smiling too much, reflecting the seriousness of the subject.

    Making the pieces requires obsessive information gathering, she says. All of them are 12 inches wide, because “they should all have the same attention,” she says. The height depends on the number of victims. On the labels, in addition to the name of the shooting, the place, and the victims, she includes the day of the week. That detail is important to her.

    King Soopers, for example, consists of 10 holes in a black background. The holes are red, yellow, and white — the colors of the King Soopers logo. “The composition goes with the sequence of events,” she says. Two men were killed outside, represented by two yellow holes. Then a police officer was killed, represented by a white hole. Inside, seven people were killed, represented by red holes for women, yellow holes for men.

    Massage Parlors consists of eight holes, seven that are hot pink to represent the women who were killed in Atlanta, and one that’s lilac to represent the man who was shot dead with them.

    One could argue that there is something dehumanizing about representing human lives lost by holes in paper. But maybe that’s the point. The total number of victims defies empathetic comprehension. The smallness of the works — something that doesn’t come across in photographs — evokes the fragility of human life.

    As an exhibit, “Enough” is indeed powerful, but its strength is in its implied limitations: the numbers must stop growing.

    Bullet Points

    Jane Lincoln in her East Falmouth studio. (Photo Saskia Maxwell Keller)

    The event: “Enough,” an exhibit of artwork by Jane Lincoln

    The time: April 8 through May 30; reception Thursday, April 15, 4 to 7 p.m.; hours, Thursday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sunday, noon to 4 p.m.

    The place: Cape Cod Museum of Art, 60 Hope Lane, Dennis

    The cost: Reception, free; regular hours, $10; seniors 62+, $8; teens and students 19+, $7; members and children 12 or under, free

    Chosen Few

    By

    “Insight,” a national juried exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, 60 Hope Lane in Dennis, opens Thursday, March 18th and runs through June 20th. Of the 523 artworks submitted by 272 artists across 30 states, only 65 were selected. The juror, Grace Hopkins, is a photographer and director of Berta Walker Gallery.

    By

    https://provincetownindependent.org/event/11862/

    “Man on the Marsh,” an exhibit of paintings by Ed Chesnovitch, is on view at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, 60 Hope Lane in Dennis, through February 7th. There will be a virtual winter reception on January 7th, with registration at ccmoa.org.

    The exhibition is inspired by the marshy landscape of Scorton Creek in East Sandwich, where Chesnovitch lives. “The marsh can be both invigorating and peaceful, mysterious and magnificent, placid yet teaming with energy and life” writes Chesnovitch in his artist statement. A place of renewal, it is also full of “odd smells and uncanny gurgling sounds.”

    The works are oils, pastels, and mixed media on canvas. Chesnovitch is highly influenced by color theory, writing, “The late afternoon light of a cold October day pouring across the golden marsh grass, or the quiet hush of an early morning bathed in soothing pinks … it all thrills me.”

     

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