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FAWC

    RESIDENCY

    FAWC Fellow Who Wouldn’t Leave Faces Eviction

    Akiko Jackson says she has no other options

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Last year’s Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) resident fellows accused the nonprofit that hosted them of racism. Then the pandemic hit, and several of those fellows had nowhere to go when their residencies were over.

    The center’s board and management agreed to let five of the fellows stay an extra month and a half in FAWC housing, until June 15, while they found other accommodations. Four of the five did just that.

    Now, eight and a half months after that extension expired in June, sculptor Akiko Jackson is still living at FAWC, claiming that she has nowhere else to go and defending herself against an eviction action.

    Sculptor Akiko Jackson, one of last year’s FAWC visual arts fellows. (File photo)

    FAWC offers 20 artists highly coveted seven-month fellowships each fall and winter. In November, soon after Gov. Charlie Baker lifted the state moratorium on evictions, FAWC served her with eviction papers. Her case remains in limbo in Housing Court, behind a backup of cases resulting from delays due to the pandemic, Jackson told the Independent this week.

    “I am unfortunately still here,” said Jackson, who is originally from Hawaii. “I keep quiet and considerate, I stay out of the way during work hours, and I’ve made myself as tiny as possible.”

    No one on the FAWC side of this story, including its attorney, would discuss Jackson’s situation or the reasons behind the decision to evict her.

    Since 2010, according to her résumé, Jackson has gone directly from one residential fellowship to the next, a lifestyle that she said allowed her to work on her art “within a community of peers.

    “It was a sustainable practice because my next commitments always went as planned,” she said. “That was before Covid.”

    Her residency at FAWC was scheduled to end last April 30, and she claimed to have had three short-term fellowships lined up for the following months but declined to name them. Covid-19 restrictions shut them all down, she said.

    When FAWC’s Executive Director Richard MacMillan told her she needed to find another place to live by June 15, Jackson said, she had no options. Her family had all left Hawaii years ago. The $1,000 monthly stipend FAWC gives its fellows ended with a final payment in May. She thought it would be a few uncomfortable months, she said, but that surely by the time the eviction moratorium ended she would have found something.

    But the pandemic went on and on.

    Jackson said she applied for affordable housing but had no luck. “I had no idea it would be this difficult,” she said. “I was at a loss of knowing what to do.”

    According to her website, Jackson has a master’s degree from California State University, Northridge and an M.F.A. from the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University, and has won numerous fellowships and awards.

    She said she applied for the job of visual arts coordinator at FAWC, and offered to pay rent to live at the Brewster Street apartments owned by FAWC. Jackson said her offer was rebuffed with a “robotic no response” from MacMillan, from Lynne Kortenhaus, president of the FAWC board, and from Carol Warshawsky, chair of the board.

    Calls and emails from the Independent to Kortenhaus, MacMillan, and other board members were not answered. The attorney representing FAWC in the eviction case, Michael Pierce, also did not respond to a call or email.

    Jackson was one of the 2019-2020 fellows who made a lot of noise about what they perceived as racist and classist behaviors by FAWC staff. They made these complaints publicly, first at an exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in the winter and later in a long “call for action” sent to FAWC supporters and board members.

    The FAWC responded by increasing the monthly stipend from $750 to $1,000, something MacMillan said had been in the works anyway. And the work center then announced new commitments to increase efforts to diversify and train staff. MacMillan also announced his resignation last year, effective March 1. The current interim director, Margaret Murphy, also declined to comment.

    In February, MacMillan posted a statement about FAWC’s progress in addressing the diversity challenge on its website. The actions listed included the hiring of Damisa Amante Jackson of the Disruptive Equity Education Project (DEEP) of Manchester, N.H. Damisa Jackson will “identify the immediate and necessary actions to improve our culture,” MacMillan wrote.

    Other plans include collecting information from former and current fellows to ensure “all perspectives” are considered. Those concerns are to go to the newly formed Diversity, Belonging, Inclusion & Equity Trustee Committee at FAWC.

    The 20192020 cohort of fellows at the work center. (Photo courtesy FAWC)

    Lydia Hicks, the former FAWC visual arts coordinator, resigned in February 2020, accusing the administration of creating a hostile work environment. On Feb. 25, 2021, she published an essay on Medium, an unedited social media platform, expanding on her case against the nonprofit.

    Hicks stated in her essay that she told one of her bosses at the work center that she felt her life had been in danger when the Provincetown police responded to an incident involving a neighbor’s dog and a FAWC fellow’s dog.

    Asked if it was fair to make such a serious charge on social media, Hicks replied, “I do not believe that social media should be the first line of defense. I decided to write the article after spending the last few years attempting to advocate for fellows, but key figures of the administration refused to address the basic needs of safety. For me, this article is the last line of defense and a cry for help. It is certain that I will be further ostracized for speaking out about this but if it helps them drop this ridiculous eviction charge, then it’s worth it.”

    Berta Walker, a former longtime trustee of FAWC, called Hicks’s essay “fake news.”

    “To be called racist after having a history of openness,” said Walker, “I mean, it’s OK to make mistakes if then you agree to improve, which the Fine Arts Work Center has done.”

    Editor’s note: Due to a fact-checking error, an earlier version of this article misstated the correct name of the Disruptive Equity Education Project (DEEP).

    GALLERIES

    Paul Bowen Washes Back Ashore in Provincetown

    A show of new work reflects his roots here and abroad

    By

    “The beach used to smell like hell,” sculptor Paul Bowen says. He is seated at a workbench in his studio on the top floor of a rugged barn that was once used for storing hay and lumber in Williamsville, Vt. Bowen is recalling a day in Provincetown in the 1980s when a whale washed ashore within shouting distance of MacMillan Wharf. Bowen was then a year-rounder, an inveterate hunter of wooden fragments that were abundant along the backshore and bay, including pine slats used for packing fish. He had come to Provincetown in the mid-1970s for a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship and because of its reputation as an artist colony.

    Paul Bowen in his Vermont studio. The wall-mounted sculptures are Old Root (top) and Wedges Stack. (Photo courtesy Paul Bowen)

    Bowen, a bard in the Celtic tradition, has brought up the beached whale as part of the backstory for Flense, one of the dozen-plus small-scale sculptures of his in a show opening this weekend at Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown. On that day in the ’80s, he was photo-documenting a crew from the New England Aquarium as they performed a whale necropsy. They began by removing the coal black top layer of whale skin, Bowen says, a procedure that is called flensing, the first step in processing whale blubber into oil.

    The material components of Flense are straightforward: four thick bands of coal black fabric, mounted on a wooden board. Bowen’s titles are not to be taken literally — they serve as pathways to richer meanings.

    “When I lived in Provincetown, I didn’t drive,” he says. “I carried each piece of wood by hand, or on my bike, to the studio. I could walk the backshore, pass by hundreds of pieces of wood, and choose maybe two. I’d have a relationship with every piece.”

    Many of those relics came with him to Vermont. “My house,” he says, partially in jest, “is filled to the rafters with wood. I often work on many pieces at the same time. A lot of the work ends up on the wall, on the workbench, on the floor. Because there are all these boxes of wood, inevitably — accidentally — something gets dropped, and often, something better happens than what I have been working on. I will seize that moment and pursue it.”

    Bowen moves on to Dowser, another work in his Merola gallery show. In the process of making it, he turned two separate sculptures into a twinned and layered unit, 20 inches across. The top layer of Dowser tilts upward to the left. It has two ovals: one glides over a partial circle of black, suggesting dark water meeting the horizon line. The other opens to raw wood and “butterfly” shapes, a signature element, alluding to furniture-making before metal joints. Choreographed with a painter’s eye — Bowen was transitioning from painting to sculpture when he studied at Maryland Institute College of Art — the wingspan of the topmost butterfly is painted bright white, animating the surface.

    Materials steeped in history remain Bowen’s creative North Star: the base layer of Dowser is a breadboard from his family home in Wales. “I like that kind of connection,” he says. “The thing you always hope for is to allow the material to make itself the way it’s always wanted to be.”

    Dowser, by Paul Bowen, composed of fabric, wood, oil paint, and gesso, is part of his show at the Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown. (Photo Albert Merola Gallery)

    Bowen’s Welsh origins — he was born there in 1951 — remain a powerful influence. Artist slide shows he used to give at FAWC would open with shots of Colwyn Bay, the seaside resort town where he grew up. Black tar would wash up, often attached to floating pieces of wood, and Bowen’s sculptures once incorporated petroleum-based material, now known to be toxic, that approximates that dense tar. Today, to get opaque blacks, he will hand-paint fabrics, or use a black plumber’s glue. His Merola show, “Tar Flats,” refers to the old practice of fishermen tarring their nets on the beach.

    Another piece, Wedges Stack, is named for its multiple layers of triangular shapes, which look as if they were tossed in a game of pick-up sticks and positioned as they landed. The wood, Bowen says, drifted in from the area around MacMillan Wharf, a by-product of pier construction.

    “I may work on things over a very long period of time,” Bowen says. “Certain parts take a long time to get to the place where you’re done. Often, it’s the nature of the wood. Unlike working in marble or steel, wood is a mutable medium, reflecting the history of its own ebb and flow, the contours of the land, the pull of the tides.”

    Bowen lived and worked in Provincetown for three decades. He showed at Long Point Gallery, DNA, and ArtStrand. Since 2014, he’s been at Merola. He and writer Pamela Mandell met at FAWC, when Mandell was an administrator and Bowen was the visual arts coordinator. They married in 2000. They moved in 2005, when year-round living and studio space in Provincetown became unsustainable.

    Welsh Wheel, by Paul Bowen. (Photo Albert Merola Gallery)

    Bowen reconnects with the Outer Cape each summer, teaching at FAWC and the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. Locally, his work is in the collections of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Cape Cod Museum of Art, and, nationally, he’s in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City; and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

    Bowen credits his roots here with anchoring a productive life. “All the good things that have happened to me — materials, career, friendships, and a supportive gallery — happened because of Provincetown,” he says. “My house is full of Provincetown things.”

    Wood as Muse

    The event: “Tar Flats,” artwork by Paul Bowen

    The time: Friday, Aug. 14, through Sept. 2; Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., and by appointment (508-487-4424)

    The place: Albert Merola Gallery, 424 Commercial St., Provincetown

    The cost: Free

    MIXED MEDIA

    Rachel Eliza Griffiths Trades in Words and Images

    Her new book, Seeing the Body, turns loss into epiphany

    By

    Even before her mother, Michele Antoinette Pray-Griffiths, died in the summer of 2014, writer-photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths was shooting black-and-white self-portraits, positioning herself in locations that resonate with history, memory, and anguish. She calls the resulting portfolio daughter: lyric: landscape, and in the preface to her new book of poems and photographs, Seeing the Body, she writes that the images “function as a map of the self and the greater world in which I am both visualized and invisible, as a symptom of grief and identity.”

    The cover shot of the book suggests the scenic images of Henry Fox Talbot, though from a feminist vantage point. Griffiths, interacting with the Southwestern landscape, her white shift signaling vulnerability, attempts a risky ascent from the base of a soaring, nest-like rock formation. “It was like being inside the body of the Earth,” she says, speaking from her home in New York City. “I was sweating and shaking.”

    This twinned self-portrait by Rachel Eliza Griffiths, The Two Elizas, represents her as a writer and photographer. Griffiths calls it a “photographic conversation with Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas.” (Photo courtesy of the artist)

    In another striking image, shot in Mississippi on the side of a road, bordered by a tobacco field, “The Southern dirt is the symbolic image of this country,” she says. “Dancing barefoot as I was, I felt the presence of so many people who worked that field, and why that field is there.”

    Poems in Seeing the Body connect to this haunting presence. “The tree/ trying, alone, to survive our dead/ names in the stripped bark,” Griffiths writes in “Whipping Tree.”

    Seeing the Body was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in June, after the pandemic drove a retreat into interior spaces. Griffiths herself dealt with Covid-19 in late winter, and, until recently, has remained at home. Her original warm-weather plans included a three-week residency in Italy and an August visit to Provincetown, where she has an enduring connection to the artistic community. The book’s virtual launch was presented by New York City’s Center for Fiction. Other recent virtual readings paired Griffiths with such Fine Arts Work Center colleagues as the poets Marie Howe, Reginald Dwayne Betts, and Nick Flynn.

    Griffiths discovered Provincetown two decades ago, around the time she was completing a master’s in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College. The Fine Arts Work Center awarded her several summer scholarships to study fiction and poetry. “I had never been to the Cape,” she says. “The town and the work center welcomed me. I felt like I was home. The energy, the gardens, the smell of the water, the art galleries, the inclusivity of queer and gay and trans and lesbian individuals, all of that was really beautiful to me. I was in my 20s and had found my place, where I could be all of my different selves.”

    Griffiths has since returned to FAWC as an instructor. Her mixed-media workshops combine, like Seeing the Body, writing and image-making. Teaching or not, Griffiths often returns to Provincetown, especially enjoying winter’s calmer pace.

    About finding her reading voice, she says, “In the beginning, it was, ‘This is how I use my body to read my work: I don’t want to overthink it.’ I like to read aloud. The feeling of sharing, in that way, is a very old thing in me. It is as though I am meeting the language again.”

    The pandemic altered that. “Recently, having to read alone to a computer screen, I do think about my voice and try to assure myself that I am not in a room by myself,” Griffiths says. “I try to fill the room with living people I know and love, and also the presence of people beloved to me who are no longer here.”

    Seeing the Body: Poems is a newly published collection by Rachel Eliza Griffiths. The cover photo is a self-portrait of Griffiths climbing a rock formation in the Southwest. (Photo W.W. Norton & Co.)

    The poem “Comedy,” originally published in The New Yorker, is set in a hospital room. Griffiths, visiting her mother, sets the stage with plain speech: “I am here before the nurse brings my mother breakfast.” The tone shifts to visions of her mother’s passing: “This is my mother who flew away/ from my grasp in the tunnel without end.” As in cinema, the misty dreamscape dissolves and we return to the bedside visit. The poem ends with her mother’s resigned directive: “Yeah don’t go write about me like that./ I already know you will.”

    The impending separation and its aftermath are presented as an epiphany. “I don’t pretend to know her thoughts,” Griffith says. “She has her own agency. Although I am not at peace with grieving her and missing her, I feel the daughter and the artist are at peace within me, and this is really significant to how the book came to be. While there is a loss and an immediacy of pain in Seeing the Body, I also tried to show the powerful things about her, the kind things about her, the salty and sweet things about her.”

    While she speaks, Griffith is packing cameras, tripod, and writing materials for a stay in a heavily wooded area upstate. The plan is to create a new set of images, and work on her first novel. Is there a theme? “Not yet,” she says. “I kind of like it to stay messy. I don’t know yet what it is or where it wants to go.”

    Griffiths pauses, a smile in her voice. “There is no book before, and there may not be a book after, but I am excited to be caught up in this new space.”

    our picks for the week of July 30 through August 5

    Indie’s Choice

    By

    Outer Cape Calendar

    An Artist’s Lot

    Nectar by Traci Harmon Hay
    Nectar, by Traci Harmon-Hay, is one of the works up for bid at the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod’s online auction at artsfoundation.org. (Photo Traci Harmon-Hay)

    The Arts Foundation of Cape Cod is hosting an online silent auction starting on Thursday, July 23, at noon through Sunday, Aug. 9, at 9:30 p.m., featuring art by Traci Harmon-Hay, Sarah Lutz, Pete Hocking, and others. There will also be a live auction, streaming from the Chatham Bars Inn on Thursday, Aug. 6, at 6 p.m., with works by Donald Beal, Cynthia Packard, and more. Visit artsfoundation.org to register and bid.

    Into the Woods

    The Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary is offering a few socially distanced activities. Among them is a kayak trip through Nauset Marsh in Eastham on Friday, July 31, at 8:30 a.m., tickets $70-$85 (call 508-349-2615 to register); and a full moon hike on Monday, Aug. 3, at 7:30 p.m., tickets $14, children free (register at massaudubon.org).

    Advice Versa

    The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown is hosting a virtual one-hour poetry workshop led by Nick Flynn that is designed to inspire unexpected and surprising new poems on Thursday, July 30, at 6 p.m. Registration is $10 at fawc.org.

    Ukulele Lady

    The Eastham Public Library is holding a virtual ukulele workshop with Julie Stepanek on Saturday, Aug. 1, at 1 p.m. Ages six and up are welcome. There is also a live-streaming animal show via Zoom on Tuesday, Aug. 4, at 5 p.m. Go to easthamlibrary.org to register; both events are free.

    Feed Your Ears

    The Wellfleet Pearl restaurant continues with live music daily (except Monday) from 3 to 5 p.m., no cover. Featured this week: Catie Flynn Band (Thursday, July 30), Boston Naturals (Friday, July 31), Pitchfork (Saturday, Aug. 1), Bruce Maclean (Sunday, Aug. 2), Brandon Manter (Tuesday, Aug. 4), and Jordan Renzi (Wednesday, Aug. 5).

    World Tour

    Great Music on Sundays @5 presents “Marimba and Piano Global Rhythms” on Sunday, Aug. 2 at 5 p.m. This free live-streaming concert, with Brian Calhoon on marimba, John Thomas on piano, and Chanthoeun Varon Collins on cello, includes music from Argentina, Bulgaria, Italy, Romania, and the U.S. For details, go to ptownmusic.com.

    For a Song

    Steeple Street Music Academy in Mashpee is running a songwriting competition called Mash-ville. The entry deadline is Saturday, Aug. 1, and you must be at least 13 to enter. The fees: $25 for your first song, $10 for each additional song. The grand prize: two round-trip tickets to Nashville, Tenn. Winners will participate in a songwriting showcase on Aug. 15. Visit steeplestreetmusic.com for details.

    Drag Picnic

    Marti Gould Cummings in “Picnic in the Park” is coming to Pilgrim House’s outdoor stage from Tuesday, Aug. 4 to Saturday, Aug. 8. Tickets are $35 at pilgrimhouse.com.

    Bracelets for BFFs

    The Truro Public Library is hosting a virtual friendship bracelet-making class with Sophia and Maggie Prickitt on Wednesday, Aug. 5, at 10:30 a.m. via Zoom. Call 508-487-1125 or email [email protected] to receive the link. Materials will be provided through curbside pickup.

    Backyard Boogie

    Wellfleet Preservation Hall is presenting a backyard concert series. First up is Zoë Lewis on Wednesday, Aug. 5, at 7 p.m. (rain date Aug. 6). Tickets are $15 for adults, $7.50 for children 13 and under. Groups are limited to six people; bring a blanket or lawn chair. Reserve in advance at wellfleetpreservationhall.org.

    Puppet Party

    The Provincetown, Truro, and Wellfleet libraries are holding a virtual puppet show, “A Celebration of Imagination,” performed by Caravan Puppets, on Thursday, Aug. 6, at 10:30 a.m. For a Zoom link, email [email protected] with the names and ages of your viewing party.

    Painting With Pete

    One highlight of the online and on-campus classes offered at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill is “Making Pictures,” with Pete Hocking, which will be held live, from 9 a.m. to noon on Monday, Aug. 3, through Thursday, Aug. 6. The four sessions cost $455. Register at castlehill.org.

    Young at Art

    The Provincetown Art Association and Museum is offering several live outdoor classes for kids. Hannah Capra teaches “Little Artists Outdoors” on Tuesdays at 10 a.m. for children 4 to 7, and “Young Artists Outdoors” on Thursdays at 10 a.m. for children 8 to 10; both are $40 per session. Grace Emmet teaches “Plein Air Painting” on Fridays at 8:30 a.m. for children 10 to 15, $50 per session. Go to paam.org to register.

    The Grab Brothers are performing in the “Virtual Music at Mayo” online concert series on Friday. (Photo Grab Brothers)
    The Grab Brothers are performing in the “Virtual Music at Mayo” online concert series on Friday. (Photo Grab Brothers)

    Hold the Mayo

    The Wellfleet Recreation Dept. is hosting “Virtual Music at Mayo,” an online concert series. The Grab Brothers Band performs on Friday, July 31, at 6:30 p.m., and the Rip It Ups get in the groove on Thursday, Aug. 6, at 6:30 p.m. Visit the Wellfleet Rec’s Facebook page for details.

     

    INVESTIGATION

    New Questions About FAWC’s MacMillan Emerge

    Board is silent as director denies involvement in Epstein donations at M.I.T.

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — When accusations of discrimination and failure to address racially charged incidents at the Fine Arts Work Center became public last month, the organization’s board responded with a letter of apology and a “commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.”

    “FAWC as an institution has been complicit with the structural racism that plagues our country,” the board’s letter states. “We deeply apologize for failures to support Fellows, students, and staff (especially BIPOC Fellows, students, and staff) in the past. We are grateful to our Fellows for demanding we do better and for leading us here.”

    That response, however, did not reflect the view of every board member, it is now clear. And it is not possible to assess progress on the 10 specific actions that the board promised to take in its letter — ranging from establishing an “anti-racist working group” to “improving the diversity of the board of trustees” — because FAWC is closed and its administrative and board leadership have stopped responding to questions.

    Meanwhile, Executive Director Richard MacMillan has continued to insist that he was not involved in decisions at his previous position as a top fundraiser at M.I.T. to accept and conceal donations from financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

    M.I.T. whistleblower Signe Swenson: MacMillan “changed his mind a lot.”

    MacMillan told the Independent on June 16 that “I was not mentioned” in the university’s formal review of the Epstein affair, conducted by the Boston law firm Goodwin Procter. In a follow-up interview on June 24, MacMillan said that what he had meant was that he was “not mentioned by name” in the report. In fact, MacMillan, whose title was senior director of philanthropic advising, is mentioned at least eight times in the Goodwin Procter investigation. Moreover, internal emails obtained by the Independent from Signe Swenson, who worked with MacMillan at M.I.T., and from the nonprofit organization Whistleblower Aid, show that he was aware of the Epstein donations and approved of their being disguised to conceal the donor’s true identity.

    In a June 24 interview with the Independent, Swenson described how MacMillan and Peter Cohen, who was then director of development at the M.I.T. Media Lab, came up with a plan to accept multi-million-dollar gifts from associates of Epstein, including Bill Gates of Microsoft and private-equity magnate Leon Black, who owed Epstein “favors.” Swenson said she repeatedly objected to the Epstein donations because he was a known sex offender, but MacMillan brushed aside her objections.

    “I worked under Richard from 2012 to 2014, then worked at the Media Lab until 2016,” Swenson said. “My task was to research and run reports on top-rated prospects — anyone who could give $5 million or above. I would bring those people to Richard. When I went to the Media Lab, I told my boss that there’s no way you can take money from someone without anybody knowing, which is what they wanted to do. Richard and Peter had come up with this way of taking money from Leon Black. He tried to convince me that it was just a small group of people who knew. Because they couldn’t get millions in the door directly from Epstein, they said that Epstein was going to use people who owed him favors. Given what we knew about him, we wondered, ‘What are these favors?’ ”

    In the June 24 interview, MacMillan denied any responsibility for the Epstein affair. “We did get money from him and we sent it back,” he said. “That was a decision I was involved in.”

    MacMillan last week told the Cape Cod Times, which also obtained the incriminating emails and spoke with Signe Swenson, that Swenson was “mistaken.”

    MacMillan at first agreed to a follow-up interview with the Independent this week, but then backed out of the interview on the morning it was to take place.

    Asked what it was like to work for MacMillan, Swenson said, “He changed his mind a lot. He would put Epstein on the agenda, then remove him, then put him back on, then remove him. He would constantly get scared at the last second and take it off. Everything was about keeping secrets, protecting information.”

    Swenson said she ultimately left M.I.T. because she felt “destroyed” by what she was asked to do there.

    FAWC board member Lynne Kortenhaus: “I don’t know that we were complicit.” (Photo Kortenhaus Communications)

    Neither FAWC board president Marty Davis nor vice presidents Alison Ferring and Michael Cunningham responded to requests for interviews. The only member of the FAWC board who would agree to speak about the current state of affairs there was Lynne Kortenhaus, who has been managing the organization’s response to the crisis. Kortenhaus said that FAWC had also engaged a Boston crisis management company, Denterlein Associates, and was working with its vice president, Jill Reilly. Reilly did not respond to a phone message seeking comment this week.

    When asked to elaborate on the FAWC board’s apology for being “complicit with the structural racism that plagues our country” and for failing to support fellows, students, and staff, Kortenhaus said, “I don’t know that we were complicit. All we wanted to get across is that we’re not bad people here. We’ve been working here for 50 years and this is the first time this has ever come up. That’s all our open letter tried to say. I did not want ‘complicit’ in the letter. I heard from people in the community, ‘Why are you apologizing?’ But it’s a sign of the times. What we were trying to do was contain and mitigate the sensationalism of [the fellows’] call to action and take more of a high road.”

    Kortenhaus also said she couldn’t name any specific ways in which FAWC had failed to support the fellows. “Given the times that we are in,” she said, “it would probably be ignorant of us to say we were not complicit. The whole white race is complicit.”

    our picks for the week of July 9 through July 15

    Indie’s Choice

    By

    Outer Cape Calendar 

    Mixed Media Maleness

    Steadfast, by Morgan LaPlante, is part of the “Modern Male II” show at Steve Bowersock Gallery in Provincetown. (Photo courtesy Bowersock Gallery)

    Catch the “Modern Male II” show at Steve Bowersock Gallery at 373 Commercial St. in Provincetown, featuring artworks of all media submitted from across the country. The curators were gallerist Steve Bowersock and journalist Jeanne McCartin.

    Guild Goes Outdoors

    The Eastham Painters Guild outdoor shows will resume on Thursday, July 9, on the lawn of the 1869 Schoolhouse Museum at 2375 Route 6 in Eastham. For the next few weeks, the hours are Thursdays and Fridays from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Masks are required. Find a full summer schedule and catch the virtual exhibit at easthampaintersguild.com.

    Reading de la Cité

    The Paris Hours
    Author Alex George will read from his book The Paris Hours, a virtual Zoom event hosted by East End Books Ptown. (Photo Flatiron Books)

    East End Books Ptown is hosting a free virtual reading with Alex George, author of The Paris Hours, on Friday, July 10, at 5 p.m. The book tells the story of a single day in Paris in 1927. Pre-registration is required; visit eastendbooksptown.com.

    Wherefore Wampanoag

    Nauset Fellowship Unitarian Universalist of Eastham is offering a Zoom screening of We Are Still Here, about Jessie Little Doe Baird and the revival of the Wampanoag language, on Sunday, July 12, at 10 a.m. The film will be introduced by its director, Anne Makepeace. Email [email protected] to register. Informal socializing will begin at 9:30 a.m. 

    In Lucy’s Honor

    Tales of Cape Cod and History at Play is presenting I Now Pronounce You Lucy Stone, a one-woman performance by Judith Kalaora via Zoom, honoring the abolitionist and women’s rights activist, who was the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree. It can be viewed virtually on Monday, July 13, at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at talesofcapecod.org.

    Fire and Ice

    The Eastham Public Library will host “Dragons: Return of the Ice Sorceress,” a virtual storytelling and science event for children held via Zoom on Tuesday, July 14, at 5 p.m. Registration is free at easthamlibrary.org.

    Uncaged Spirits

    Bird in a CageThe Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown is rounding up a gaggle of poets — Marie Howe, Nick Flynn, Robert Pinsky, and Kelle Groom — who will participate in a virtual reading of works inspired by Patty Larkin’s latest CD, Bird in a Cage, on Tuesday, July 14, at 6 p.m. Tickets are $25 and available at fawc.org.

    Liz Goes Local

    The Provincetown Public Library is offering a free virtual cooking program with Chef Liz Barbour, owner of the Creative Feast, featuring a slide show and two recipes using locally grown ingredients. It will take place via Zoom on Wednesday, July 15, at 3 p.m. Pre-registration is required at provincetownlibrary.org, under “Events.”

    Corn on the Cobb

    The Truro Historical Society has planted its Three Sisters Garden on the lawn of the Cobb Archive at 13 Truro Center Road in tribute to the Wampanoag peoples. The three sisters — corn, beans, and squash — represent crops that were essential to many Native American communities. Visit the Cobb Archive on Wednesday, July 15, at 4 p.m. for a live history talk with Marcus Hendricks of the Wampanoags. Email [email protected] to register. The fee is $10. Bring a lawn chair.

    Unforgettable

    The Wellfleet Public Library is hosting “I Remember Wellfleet” online via Zoom on Wednesday, July 15, at 7 p.m. It’s a Wellfleet Historical Society event in which participants share their stories and memories of Wellfleet, including the Strawberry Festival, Fourth of July Parade, and the life of Richmond Bell. To register, email [email protected].

     

    GALLERIES

    Vicky Tomayko Gives the Forms of Nature an Edge

    The printmaker extraordinaire has a joyful new show of work

    By

    Down a long, winding dirt road, deep in the woods of South Truro, lies the studio and home of printmaker Vicky Tomayko. She has lived and worked there surrounded by pine trees, bird songs, and crickets chirping for the past 25 years. Tomayko, a Fine Arts Work Center fellow in 1985-86 who returned to the Outer Cape to stay, would not choose to live anywhere else.

    Printmaker Vicki Tomayko outside her Truro studio with the accordion book about isolation, A Long Way Here, that she created during the Covid-19 lockdown. (Photo Susannah Elisabeth Fulcher)

    “I grew up in a city, Detroit,” she says, “and knew from a very young age that I wanted to live in nature. My mom used to let me garden in the back yard, but it was very much a city back yard with an alley and, beyond that, streets.”

    Much of Tomayko’s inspiration for her prints comes initially from the forms and patterns she sees around her in the natural world. “I walk a lot,” she says, “and images come to me from looking at little bugs on plants and things like that.” In Tomayko’s studio, the perfectly preserved body of a cricket lies on a table. She touches him gently with her finger and asks, “Isn’t he beautiful?”

    Tomayko’s prints, part of a group show opening at the Schoolhouse Gallery on Friday, include images of insects, leaves, blossoms, water plants, and microscopic creatures. Her work in the exhibit carries the enigmatic title “I Don’t Expect You to Understand,” taken from one of the pieces included.

    “I hope not to give away all the mystery,” she says. “I prefer that viewers get what they want out of my work and maybe see something they have never seen before.”

    Discovery is an essential part of Tomayko’s creative process. “When you make a print, except for silkscreen, it reverses,” she says. “So, you start with an image and then, because it’s backwards, there’s something fresh and unexpected, and that inspires you to see something new. Then I react to what happened on the print, what the paper looks like when it comes out. My prints are very layered, and that space between printing, looking, and going through another process works well with my brain. I need that time, and the process is fun for me.”

    I Don’t Expect You to Understand, by Vicky Tomayko, is the piece that gives her exhibit at Schoolhouse Gallery its name. (Photo courtesy Schoolhouse Gallery)

    Tomayko’s openness to experimentation has earned her a reputation for being an innovator. She describes a combination of printing processes that she came up with: “I make a drypoint etching, then take the same plate after I print the black line, roll it up with a solid color, and wipe away, very carefully with Q-tips, everything that I don’t want to print. Then I print the color from the same plate right on top. So, it’s a monoprint, but it’s also an etching.”

    In addition to her own work, Tomayko spends a large portion of her time teaching, and has remained involved at FAWC as the print shop manager and mentor to fellows. Her role as a teacher, Tomayko says, is something she “sorely misses” since the Covid-19 crisis. “Sometimes I teach six days a week, so this is a very different life for me,” she says.

    Tomayko doesn’t see teaching as something that takes time away from her own art. “When I teach, I try to keep an open mind and always do something fresh,” she says. “It’s not a good thing for me to repeat something I’ve already done.” Tomayko is drawn to the beginner’s mindset and an innocent approach to printmaking. Experimenting with her students often opens her eyes to something new that she might then try in her own work.

    For example, the print Take Me to the River, which Tomayko worked on for 18 months, started as a demonstration for one of her classes. “Once you have a couple of ideas, you just keep playing with them,” she says. “I came out with this decorative thing that I just couldn’t solve. It was just pretty, so pretty. So, I kept working on it, because I wanted it to have some substance, some character. Now I’m happy with it.”

    Take Me to the River is a 26-by-20-inch print by Vicky Tomayko. (Photo courtesy Schoolhouse Gallery)

    For Tomayko, there should be many sides to a beautiful picture. “I am very much into color, and try to make my pieces appealing and delightful,” she says. “Yet there are always things in the imagery or in the making of the piece that feel a little edgy and not as delightful as the color might have you suspect.”

    That certainly applies to Paradise, a monoprint in her new show. It’s part of an ongoing collaboration she has had with writer Joanne Barkan and will be published in the upcoming issue of Provincetown Arts. Chris Busa, the magazine’s editorial director (who unexpectedly died last week) asked “if we would do a piece about the arrival of the Pilgrims,” Tomayko says. “My idea was that this is paradise, but that everything in paradise is about to change drastically. And today, for me, that idea is still with us, that we think we can do whatever we want to the animals, the plants, everything.”

    The pieces Tomayko picked for her show at Schoolhouse are intentionally “more joyful,” she says. It’s not about escapism — she believes that now, more than ever, we need to see and learn from the natural world in order to make our own, human world a better place to live in.

    Natural Selections

    The event: “I Don’t Expect You to Understand,” an exhibit of Vicky Tomayko prints; part of the group show “Proximate”

    The time: Friday, July 3, through July 19

    The place: Schoolhouse Gallery, 494 Commercial St.; gallery open by appointment only, 508-487-4800 or galleryschoolhouse.com

    The cost: Free

    GALLERIES

    For Duane Slick, the Coyote Is Transcendent

    His paintings spring from the animal’s place in history and art

    By

    Duane Slick
    Duane Slick in his Providence, R.I., studio. (Photo courtesy Duane Slick)

    In his career-long exploration of the coyote in Native American storytelling, painter Duane Slick often takes the image of a coyote head and obscures it. In the process, he explores the nature of representation itself. This is true of each of the 10 new paintings Slick is offering in his solo show, “Arias for a Coyote Opera,” at the Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown from Friday, June 26, through Wednesday, July 15.

    Slick is of Native American descent, a member of the Meskwaki Nation of Iowa through his father’s lineage. His mother is from the Ho-Chunk Nation in Nebraska. The coyote, he explains, is the archetypal “trickster character” in North American tribal folklore. It also has an unusual ecological history on the continent.

    “The character is sort of illusive,” he says, “and the animal itself is what you call an ‘invigorated species’ — when it first had contact with Europeans, its numbers were decimated. But as an invigorated species, it came back and it adapted. The idea is that we can’t really get rid of them.”

    Coyote's Return by Duane Slick
    Coyote’s Return, a 14-by-11-inch acrylic on panel by Duane Slick, was chosen as the logo-image of the 2020 Provincetown Swim for Life. (Photo courtesy Albert Merola Gallery)

    Slick’s paintings will trick you at times. The coyote heads are often camouflaged in layers of paint: impasto mounds, black marks, lines, swirls, and shapes with hints of depth. They offer mere suggestion and shadow, abstract at certain angles before suddenly revealing coyote ears and jaw. Slick creates these outlines by tracing the shadow of a coyote papier-mâché mask, a folk-art object he bought in Mexico. He talks about this process as aiming to “activate” the mask, bringing it back to life from obscurity after Europeans had reduced it to a trinket for sale in a market. In this way, his paintings activate the coyote — as a storytelling symbol and flesh-and-blood species.

    Slick is from Iowa, born in Waterloo and raised in Cedar Falls. After earning his B.F.A. from the University of Northern Iowa and his M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis, he was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown from 1990 to 1992. In those Provincetown years, he met Albert Merola and James Balla, who had just started the UFO gallery (predecessor to the Albert Merola Gallery). Since 1999, Slick has been at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where he was appointed professor of painting in 2005.

    Merola and Balla have represented Slick since the early ’90s, and this will be his ninth solo show at their gallery. “Coyote is trickster and hero,” Balla says in an email, “a magician and creative force — not exactly an alter ego, but rather the prime character in an epic story of life, death, and redemption.”

    A Changing Procession by Duane Slick
    Swirls of thick impasto surround a coyote head in Slick’s A Changing Precession in Red #1. (Photo courtesy Albert Merola Gallery)

    Stories, and the telling of history, are important to Slick. He talks about working from an “untraceable present,” where linear time is forgotten, as is any attempt to conform to a grand “master narrative.” In the paintings, too, history is rendered in hidden layers of paint. In some of them, a gray background proves, on closer inspection, not to be a background at all — just beneath it lies faded worlds of color.

    One of the paintings in the show, Coyote’s Return, was chosen by artist Jay Critchley as the logo-image for this year’s Swim for Life & Paddler Flotilla. It depicts a coyote standing on the backs of two sea turtles. Around the edges are the silhouettes of clover flowers, which the artist traced from flowers he picked.

    The title of the Merola Gallery show comes from the one large (50-by-40-inch) painting in the series, Aria for a Coyote Opera: Naming Your Predecessors, which itself takes inspiration from the Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach. Slick says he shows a segment of Glass’s five-hour work — the song “Spaceship” — to his students at RISD. He emphasizes the mesmerizing union of Glass’s music and Robert Wilson’s art direction and choreography: the performers moving in slow motion and the lighting. “I was thinking about that kind of spectacle,” he says. In the painting, a group of coyote head silhouettes are in a kind of mass, floating together in the center of the canvas, a coordinated performance.

    Duane Slick
    Aria for a Coyote Opera: Naming Your Predecessors is the 50-by-40-inch centerpiece of Slick’s show at Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown. (Photo courtesy Albert Merola Gallery)

    Trickster Treat

    The event: Exhibit of paintings by Duane Slick, “Arias for a Coyote Opera”

    The time: Friday, June 26, through Wednesday, July 15; gallery open by appointment only, Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.

    The place: Albert Merola Gallery, 424 Commercial St., Provincetown, 508-487-4424

    The cost: Free

    our picks for the week of June 25 through July 1

    Indie’s Choice

    By

    Outer Cape Calendar

    Super Bollen

    East End Books Ptown is hosting a virtual book event with Christopher Bollen, writer of A Beautiful Crime, a twisty, Ripley-esque grifter novel, on Friday, June 26, at 5 p.m. Registration is required: visit eastendbooksptown.com for the Zoom link. Signed books are available for purchase.

    Special Ops

    Provincetown’s On Center Gallery invites you to Zoom into a virtual reception on Friday, June 26, at 6 p.m. for the exhibit “Twists & Turns: New Works by Matt Neuman.” Contact the gallery to be emailed a link: 508-413-9483.

    All Stars

    Stream RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, annotated by Mackenzie and Austin, every Friday night at 8 p.m. on the Pilgrim House Facebook page. It’s free, but tips go to a Queer Black Lives Matter charity picked each week. Tito’s Vodka is also matching donations up to $5,000 for the Provincetown LGBTQ Welcome and Resource Center.

    To Your Taste

    While we go through the many phases of Covid, “Taste of the Town” returns, only this time it’s “to go.” Wellfleet Preservation Hall will benefit from any purchase on Saturday, June 27, at over 20 restaurants and food outlets, including Truro Vineyards, Chequessett Chocolate, and Wellfleet Farmers Market. Visit wellfleetpreservationhall.org for details.

    Wild Care will live-stream its shelter animals on Saturday while supporters drop off essential supplies. (Photo Cristalyn Searles)

    Fur Babies

    Wild Care Cape Cod in Eastham is holding a “Virtual Wild Baby Shower” on Saturday, June 27. Here’s how it works: drop off essential supplies such as bleach, paper towels, nuts, and berries between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. and enter a raffle for a gift basket. During the day, there’ll be live-stream segments with some of the shelter’s animals on the Wild Care Facebook page.

    Go Fish

    Live music — what a concept! Steve Morgan and the Kingfish are doing an outdoor concert at Stewart’s Seafood Restaurant & Tavern at 4380 Route 6 in Eastham on Saturday, June 27, from 6 to 9 p.m. There will be plenty of social distancing and ventilation. For details, visit the Facebook page for Steve Morgan and the Kingfish.

    Lea Salonga meets up with Seth Rudetsky for a virtual concert-interview on Sunday. (Photo Raymund Isaac)

    Miss Salonga

    The Art House in Provincetown lives online in the virtual Seth Concert Series, featuring Seth Rudetsky chatting with Broadway musical stars when he’s not accompanying them on piano. Next up: Miss Saigon Tony-winner Lea Salonga, on Sunday, June 28, at 9 a.m., with an encore at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25 at thesethconcertseries.com.

    Indira at the Tent

    Payomet Performing Arts Center’s Live Early Stages presents Wellfleet novelist Indira Ganesan in conversation with Janet Lesniak, executive director of Wellfleet Preservation Hall, on Sunday, June 28, at 11:30 a.m. via Zoom. Pre-register for free at payomet.org.

    Lightbulb Moment

    Camp Lightbulb is doing an online fundraising event on Sunday, June 28, at 8 p.m. There will be appearances by Kit Williamson, creator of EastEnders; Miss Richfield 1981; and author Lev Rosen. For details and tickets ($30-$1,000 at eventbrite.com), go to Camp Lightbulb’s Facebook page.

    Sinking Feeling

    The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown is doing a virtual lecture with Joan Wickersham and Adam Davies, who will speak about their collaborative photographic-literary “Vasa Project” on Tuesday, June 30, at 6 p.m. It involves a warship called the Vasa that sank in 1628 but is nearly perfectly preserved in Stockholm, Sweden. Register at fawc.org.

    MOST UNHAPPY FELLOWS

    FAWC Is Accused of Discrimination and ‘Complacency’

    Board apologizes for being ‘complicit’ with racism and vows to do better

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — This should have been a banner year for the Fine Arts Work Center, one of the town’s most important cultural institutions, with its faculty of renowned writers and artists and board filled with prominent philanthropists. It began last fall under a new executive director with impressive credentials, including high-level fundraising at M.I.T., and with a cohort of 20 new arts fellows notable for its diversity.

    Now, the Work Center is reeling not only from the cancellation of its entire summer program because of the coronavirus but also from accusations of discriminatory treatment, including racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, and general insensitivity. The visual arts coordinator resigned in protest. And the board has responded with an apology and promises to do better.

    “The FAWC as an institution has been complicit with the structural racism that plagues our country,” the board writes in a letter posted on its website this week. “We deeply apologize for failures to support fellows, students, and staff (especially black, Indigenous and people of color fellows, students and staff).”

    At the same time, it appears that some of the issues raised by the unhappy fellows have been festering for years because of strained relations with FAWC’s neighbors. It is not clear whether these issues are rooted in racism.

    This winter’s Fine Arts Work Center fellows, accompanying an article that introduced them in the Independent, Oct. 23, 2019. (Photo Courtesy FAWC)

    Hurt feelings on both sides have unleashed a torrent of accusations and counterclaims, revealing how the seven-month residency where artists have retreated to work quietly since 1968 has not been peaceful this year.

    The only fellow who would speak on the record about any of the accusations being circulated anonymously, writer Kevin Fitchett, said the FAWC staff are “not evil racist people.” The issue, he said, is that “America is a racist place, and they were complacent.”

    The police responded to four noise complaints in the fall, according to Police Chief Jim Golden. Neighbors were calling the police for trivial reasons, said Fitchett, including, in one case, fellows congregating to watch the sunset on a flat roof.

    Tom Thompson, a neighbor who has been accused of harassing the fellows, refused to comment.

    The FAWC fellows led off a long list of complaints sent on June 8 to trustees and the Work Center staff with the neighbors’ actions. The accusations included “failing to be present for, intervene in, mediate or protect fellows against policing and a frequent police presence on property as weaponized by the neighbors, even after multiple appeals and pleas by fellows to take tangible actions….”

    Another set of complaints related to fellows’ requests to stay on the FAWC campus after their fellowships ended in April. Executive Director Richard MacMillan had already allowed them to stay six extra weeks until June 15. But five fellows, Autumn Wallace, Hanna Pylvainen, Esther Lin, Akiko Jackson, and Fitchett, still needed housing, they said.

    MacMillan denied the extension. Some of the five had left by June 15, but at least one remained. That fellow, who asked not to be named, cited Gov. Charlie Baker’s emergency order banning evictions during the coronavirus pandemic.

    Another of the charges in the June 8 letter is that Lydia Hicks, the visual arts coordinator, resigned because of discrimination. She was the only staff person of color at FAWC, the letter states.

    When asked for examples of racist and discriminatory behavior that led to her resignation, Hicks responded, “In introducing the fellows to the trustees last fall, Bert Yarborough [a trustee] inaccurately said that Antonius [Bui] was from Vietnam. In the same presentation, Bert mixed up Anina Major with Autumn Wallace. Anina is a sculptor from the Bahamas, Autumn is a painter from Philadelphia; they were our only two black femme visual artists this year. Antonius is not from Vietnam, they were born and raised in America. Bert also consistently misgendered Antonius [who uses ‘they’], and when Bert did remember to use appropriate pronouns it was often with an exasperated ‘theeey.’ ”

    Hicks also cited MacMillan’s connection to the M.I.T. scandal involving large donations from Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender, who had been officially disqualified as a donor. Joi Ito, M.I.T.’s Media Lab director, resigned after the New Yorker revealed how he and others knowingly accepted Epstein’s money anyway.

    MacMillan worked at M.I.T. for 11 years before being hired by FAWC in March 2019.

    On June 15, FAWC submitted a full-page ad to the Independent, for publication in this week’s edition, titled “An Open Letter to Our Community and Our Provincetown Neighbors.” Because MacMillan refused to answer questions about the letter, or to speak to a reporter under any circumstances, publisher Teresa Parker rejected the FAWC ad.

    Late Tuesday, MacMillan did finally respond to questions about his involvement in the Epstein affair at M.I.T. The university hired a law firm to conduct a formal review of Epstein’s donations, he said. In its final report, MacMillan said, “I was not mentioned.”

    The FAWC board’s apology letter lists specific actions, such as formation of a “fellows council” of the board of trustees to hear grievances, and says FAWC will develop protocols for how the Work Center responds to interactions with local law enforcement. It also vows to expand diversity on the board of trustees, especially regarding genderfluid communities, people of color, and low-income members of the community.

    FAWC board president Marty Davis did not respond to requests for comment. But Davis’s wife, Alix Ritchie, defended FAWC’s record on discrimination, saying, “Provincetown is a very white-bread place. But as hard as you work, you’re never perfect and that’s my sense —

    they are committed to doing a better job.”

    Fitchett said the board’s letter sounded good, but that, in his experience, the FAWC staff has made promises like that before and not followed through.

    “It’s really about structure and complacency,” he said.

    VIRTUAL ARTS

    Charting Courses on the Outer Cape

    Brush up your skills during a time of crisis

    By

    It wouldn’t be summer on the Outer Cape without courses. And, fortunately, though indoor courses in art and writing are not in the offing at this stage of the coronavirus crisis, there is no dearth of virtual or outdoor options.

    brush-making at Castle Hill
    Glenn Grishkoff’s online brush-making course is being offered at Castle Hill. (Photo Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill)

    Kiah Coble, curator of adult education at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, says that PAAM’s adult courses this summer are about half-and-half online and outdoors. “I am impressed by how quickly teaching artists rose to the occasion,” Coble says. “I was expecting cancellations, but almost everybody wanted to figure out an alternative.”

    Instructors of online Zoom classes have taken two approaches: some are opting for the usual six-hour blocks, while others are choosing shorter sessions and allowing students to work independently. They can share the work they’ve accomplished for critique and hoped-for admiration by sending in photos or holding it up to the computer camera.

    Though students in adult online classes are generally responsible for their own art materials, they’ll receive at-home silkscreen kits for Vicky Tomayko’s Introduction to Silkscreen Printing, running from July 27 to Aug. 7. Even so, materials aren’t usually a problem, says Coble: “The biggest barrier to participation is technology, such as access to the internet or a computer.”

    Outdoor (or “plein air”) classes taught by John Clayton, Mary Giammarino, Pete Hocking, Aaron Michael Thompson, and Kath Macaulay through August will take place at the beach, in PAAM’s lawn and sculpture garden, or around Provincetown. These are capped at five participants to allow for ample social distancing, so early booking is recommended, and participants must wear masks.

    Paint plein air at PAAM
    Mary Giammarino, who painted this oil landscape, will be teaching a plein air course at PAAM in August. (Photo Mary Giammarino)

    Outdoor art classes are allowed in phase two of Gov. Charlie Baker’s reopening, as well as indoor art classes for children, though Tessa Bry Taylor, PAAM’s curator of youth education, feels it’s still too risky and that state guidelines for arts instructors are not especially clear.

    Instead, PAAM is offering its children’s Art Reach program virtually this summer, from July 8 through Aug. 12. “The program is focused on exploring different mediums,” Taylor says. “Each week they take on a new project.” Materials are provided for pickup or delivery, and children can also be creative with objects found around their kitchen or on the beach.

    There are also plein air workshops in landscape and watercolor painting for middle school and high school students coming out soon, as well as outdoor “art adventures” for smaller children. “As a parent of two very small children,” Taylor says, “I am even more desperate for this kind of program.” She sees the value in “creative tactile play” and getting children familiar with social distancing in preparation for school.

    While Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill only has online adult programming for the time being, plein air classes are planned for its Edgewood Farm campus during August, Executive Artistic Director Cherie Mittenthal says. Its diverse selection of Zoom classes is focused on materiality, in a time when we spend so many hours in the intangible internet domain.

    Glenn Grishkoff, for instance, provides materials for his brush-making class (July 20 to 24), and Anna Poor provides blocks of soapstone for her stone-carving class (Aug. 3 to 7). Patricia Miranda is teaching a class on egg tempera on Aug. 17, a good way to use up your overstocked quarantine rations. Clay classes this summer are focused on demonstrations or hand-building, as not everyone has a wheel at home. For those not yet suffering from screen fatigue, there is also a website-building class for artists with Jesse Freidin from July 27 to 31.

    Mittenthal says she was unsure of the appeal of online classes at first, since “we are so tactile as artists,” but she’s pleased that people are “taking risks.” The second round of the Yellow Chair Salon, a four-month online artist residency program with Michael David, will start in October. Fellows craft PowerPoint portfolios of their work to share with their peers as well as guest critics. Mittenthal says that Castle Hill’s fall residency program is still up in the air.

    The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown is offering a large selection of online writing workshops through its 24 Pearl Street program. These include a workshop on poet Rainer Maria Rilke by Mark Wunderlich, starting June 22; a flash essay workshop with Jill Talbot, starting July 6; and a workshop on pleasure and pain in poetry with Traci Brimhall, starting Aug. 3, among many others.

    Many classes involve online lectures and independent writing, but also have “live” Zoom elements such as student meet and greets and virtual readings. In addition to workshops, FAWC is running a series of virtual events with their fellows and faculty, such as a “quarantine dinner conversation” with Marie Howe on June 23.

    Finally, the Provincetown Independent is offering a free five-week journalism workshop for high school and middle school students from July 1 to Aug. 5. Participants will create pieces for publication in this newspaper.

    Prospective students should sign up early for online classes. It also must be noted that these courses (except for the journalism workshop) are not free: at PAAM, they range from $50 to $400, based on the number of sessions and whether it’s online or plein air; courses at Castle Hill start at $165; and courses at FAWC cost between $400 and $600.

     

    LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

    When Ads and News Collide

    By

    This week we were confronted with a tough choice at our less- than-nine-month-old newspaper. We were offered a full-page ad that we decided we had to turn down.

    Full-page ads, you might have noticed, are not that easy to come by, especially in the current economy. We’re working extra hard to find ways to keep the Independent alive and growing through the financial crisis, and we depend on advertisers to see why it makes sense for them and for the whole community to support local newspapers. Many of you have done just that.

    Last week we began to think about how to report fairly and thoroughly the events taking place at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where a group of fellows and others have raised serious questions about management and its responses to issues of diversity and discrimination. We asked for interviews with people on both sides of the situation, including FAWC’s executive director, Richard MacMillan. He agreed to talk with us on Monday morning. (We had trouble finding people who would talk on the other side as well.)

    Meanwhile, FAWC’s marketing and communications department wrote to say they would like to buy a full-page ad in this week’s paper. Though the deadline for reserving space had passed, we agreed.

    On Monday we received the text of the ad — an open letter to the community about the ongoing controversy. No one from FAWC had at that point agreed to talk to us except MacMillan. And then we were told that he had changed his mind and would not be interviewed.

    We explained that we saw our job as reporting news fully and impartially, and that we couldn’t do that if people refused to talk to us. FAWC’s communications director said he understood and was sure that MacMillan would make himself available.

    It didn’t happen. Instead, we were told later that day that MacMillan “wanted to get out in front of the story” and that letting the letter speak on its own was how he would do that.

    So we felt we had no choice. Because buying space in a newspaper to promote one side of a controversy while denying that newspaper a chance to ask questions freely and follow up on the answers is not serving the community’s best interests.

    We turned down FAWC’s full-page ad, but we didn’t stop asking questions. MacMillan did finally respond late on Tuesday, right before our deadline, with an incomplete answer to our questions about his involvement in a fund-raising scandal at M.I.T. The law firm that was hired by the university to investigate the matter filed its report, he told us, and “I was not mentioned.”

    Clearly, that’s not the end of the story.

    ARS INTERRUPTUS

    FAWC Cancels Entire Summer Program

    PAAM and Castle Hill wait to see how crisis evolves

    By

    Castle Hill, Truro
    A clay studio sits empty at Castle Hill in Truro. (Photo courtesy Cheri Mittenthal)

    PROVINCETOWN — The Fine Arts Work Center notified participants in its summer workshops by email on April 29 that the entire program had been postponed until 2021 due to the coronavirus. FAWC’s week-long workshops in creative writing and visual arts, led by renowned faculty, attract students from near and far and are an important funding source for its prestigious winter fellowships.

    “It was a monumental decision, very difficult for everyone,” Richard MacMillan, FAWC’s executive director, told the Independent. “But as more and more information became clear to us, we realized that we just couldn’t, in all confidence and fairness, keep people hanging.”

    MacMillan estimated that over half of the staff and students come from out of town, some having to plan flights from overseas.

    Though FAWC’s decision may have come first, other Outer Cape arts organizations are grappling with similar scenarios.

    Kiah Coble, curator of adult education at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, said, “We have officially rescheduled or put online all our workshops for May and June. We’re waiting to see how things evolve, and what the C.D.C. recommendations and local bylaws are for July and August.”

    Though PAAM has not yet canceled or postponed summer classes, plans are being made for what they might look like, with smaller classes (capped at five students), social distancing, mask-wearing, and increased sanitation.

    Coble said that the health of students and staff is the top priority. “If there is a possibility that we can do classes in a capacity that feels safe, I absolutely want to do it,” she said. “I don’t want to decide to cancel the summer program, then realize there was an opportunity to run small courses.”

    The decision for PAAM is not as fraught as it was for FAWC. The majority of teaching staff are year-rounders. And PAAM, as an exhibiting museum and membership organization, is less reliant on revenue from classes.

    On the other hand, Cherie Mittenthal, executive director of Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, estimated that 60 percent of her organization’s revenue comes from classes. When Castle Hill canceled classes through July 3, including its annual encaustic conference in Provincetown, it took a big hit, but staff has not been furloughed thanks to a Paycheck Protection Program loan.

    “We are still debating where we are going to land, but the current plan is, while taking into account the advice of the state and governor, we are not going to cancel everything for the summer,” Mittenthal said. “We are going to strongly modify our program and create specialty classes that can hopefully happen throughout July, and definitely August, as well as the fall.”

    Mittenthal said that safety measures may include decreasing class sessions to four a week, limiting their size, requiring masks and gloves, sanitation measures, and doing landscape and sculpture classes outside. After acquiring its Edgewood Farm campus in 2016, Castle Hill does not lack space. If all else fails, it may do online classes only, although these would be carefully crafted and cost less.

    But numerous unknowns remain. “Will people feel comfortable enough to come?” Mittenthal asked. “Nobody knows the answer yet.” Short-term rental availability is also a consideration. “We are taking it month to month. Obviously, we don’t want to plan and then have to cancel.”

    MacMillan’s decision to cancel was a combination of courtesy for staff and students and heeding scientific advice, he said. “We can’t police social distancing,” he said. “We are not health care people.”

    Enrollees at FAWC have been given the option of a total refund, deferring until next year, or writing off tuition payments as gifts. MacMillan said that about 15 percent have made a gift, while 60 percent have asked for a refund. FAWC, too, has not had to lay off staff, thanks to a PPP loan.

    But he didn’t downplay the gravity of the situation. “The summer program is designed to develop revenue to support the fellowship program,” he said. “Loss of this revenue jeopardizes the fellowships. It’s a domino effect.” He added that no final decisions have been made about the fellowship program.

    In the meantime, FAWC will continue to engage its artists. The 24 Pearl Street Online Writing Workshops are being revamped to include more interactive and real-time elements.

    “I felt we needed to move on and take the time to reinvent the experience so that we don’t lose people,” MacMillan said. “You can lose people by waiting, you can lose people by not being transparent, and I felt we had been waiting long enough.”

    SCULPTURE

    Akiko Jackson Creates Art for a Time of Grief

    The FAWC fellow finds a home in Provincetown

    By

    Urns by Akiko Jackson
    The installation urns, by Fine Arts Work Center fellow Akiko Jackson, is made from ceramic and metal, approximately 10 feet by 10 feet. The urns, traditionally used to hold cremains in Japanese homes, are here exaggerated in size. (Photo courtesy Akiko Jackson)

    Akiko Jackson is a second-year visual arts fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her first fellowship year was 2013-14; the day she returned, this past October, Jackson says that Bob Bailey, the center’s facilities manager and one of her favorite people, called out to her.

    “Hey, Akiko,” Bailey said. “I think it’s time for you to set down some roots here.”

    “You must have read my mind,” Jackson replied. “I actually want to stay here as long as I can beyond the fellowship. I really love it out here.”

    Temporarily, at least, that wish may become a reality, though not under the best of circumstances. Jackson, whose solo show, scheduled to open on April 3, was canceled due to the Covid-19 crisis, is currently completing her last month of residency. She’s sheltering in place with the other fellows, while the work center’s common areas are closed, as is much of the town. With most of her future plans canceled or postponed, Jackson has nowhere to go at the end of April.

    Akiko Jackson
    Jackson took this selfie in her Fine Arts Work Center studio with a laptop.

    “Everyone is sequestered in their apartments and studios for the duration,” FAWC Executive Director Richard MacMillan told the Independent. “Once the seven-month fellowship ends, the residences will be open to them through June 15. They’ll be able to live in their apartments and work in their studios.” MacMillan added that he intends to meet personally with each of the fellows to ease their transition.

    “A situation like this consumes your mind,” Jackson says. “It makes you wonder — how can I work during such a time? People often say of difficult times that this is when we need the arts the most. And that’s true. But it is also true that artists are crippled by the hard times.”

    Jackson intends to use whatever time she still has here to work in her studio. “In the studio is where I allow myself to be in a different reality,” she says. “I didn’t expect, though, how difficult it would be not to be able to stand near a friend, not be able to hug one another. This physical separation adds to my psychological isolation.”

    Jackson grew up in Kahuku, a rural community on the northern coast of Oahu, in Hawaii. “My formative years were there, my accent is from there, my spirit is from there, and my memories and longing will always be from there,” she says. But she adds that she moved away from Hawaii many years ago and no longer has close family there or a home to return to. Her upbringing in a lower socioeconomic household and community, Jackson says, made her value intangible things like loyalty and friendship, good food, laughter, “and the uncomfortable things like sharing hard stories and grief together.” She feels that she has found those intangibles at the work center and in Provincetown. “The six years of being away from P’town, experiencing a lot of adversity and heartbreak in other places, made me remember how important it is to have solid friendships you can count on,” she says.

    Akiko Jackson drawing
    This “hair drawing” by Akiko Jackson, sculpted from wool and foraged ropes, nets, and plastic detritus, was exhibited at PAAM earlier in the year. (Photo courtesy Akiko Jackson)

    In her art — for the most part, large-scale sculptures and installations in black — Jackson seeks to confront difficult memories. “My thoughts are consumed by how vulnerable we are when faced with death,” she says. “Because we don’t talk about this frequently, or at all, there’s a certain kind of discomfort we often can’t tap into. A few years ago, I witnessed my grandmother’s death, alone. I carry a lot of pain from that experience.”

    Jackson, whose mother is Japanese, incorporates symbolism in her sculpture from ancient Japanese rituals and shrines to commemorate the dead. “In one installation,” she says, “I’ve incorporated forms reminiscent of butsudan doors, which protect a person’s ashes, a family’s ancestors, food offerings, and such.”

    She has also been working on “drawings” sculpted from wool, ropes, nets, and plastic detritus collected on local beaches. “I use wool to create versatile forms, referencing the transformation of an old tradition of creating fabric into a contemporary process for sculpture,” she says. “Working with Japanese traditions passed on to me by my mother, I’m pressing, rubbing, hitting, and tangling to create soft sculpture by bonding many loose hairs together.”

    In Jackson’s sculpture, hair frequently becomes a metaphor for the embedded histories we carry with us. “Hair is the outer layer, a protective surface, and a signifier of the body in my work,” she says. “Pain, suffering, loss, and mourning are all very real, but they are the invisible realities our bodies carry.”

    Jackson was introduced to the problem of cast-off debris by the Center for Coastal Studies early in her fellowship. “I had a visceral response to seeing the enormous quantity of cast nets, ropes, hand lines, trolling, plastics, cordage — all death traps released into our oceans,” she says. “Being from an island, I have a lot of memories of cleaning the beaches from this manmade destruction. Imagine swimming in the ocean and your foot or body gets caught in some kind of invisible cloud. It’s incredibly scary to me, and it’s part of my paralyzing nightmares. There’s a term for it — ghost nets. You become entangled, suffocate, ripped to shreds. This is what happens to life in the ocean.”

    Jackson says that her time in Provincetown has been remarkably productive. “Feeling at home is the best fuel for my work,” she says. “I’ve come to realize at this time in my life, that is a rare privilege I haven’t had in many years.”

     

    FICTION

    Hanna Pylväinen Explores Her Northern Roots

    The FAWC fellow returns to Provincetown to finish her second novel

    By

    Hanna Pylväinen’s research has taken her around the world, from the suburbs of Detroit to the wildest reaches of the Arctic Circle.

    Fine Arts Work Center writing fellow Hanna Pylväinen is seen here on one of her yearly research trips to Sápmi, a region of northern Scandinavia, viewing a fjord landscape. (Photo Katie Vida)

    A second-year fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Pylväinen is using her time in Provincetown to complete her second novel, The End of Drum-Time. Though she was scheduled to give a reading at the work center on Wednesday, April 1, it was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, like the other fellows, she remains there, sheltering in place.

    The book is set in 19th-century Sápmi, the northern region comprising parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, sometimes known as Lapland, that is home to the Sámi people, who have their own languages and culture. The novel reimagines historical events involving the reformist minister Lars Levi Laestadius, who preached extensively among the indigenous Sámi reindeer herders of the region. Though largely fictionalized, the book is organized around the Kautokeino Rebellion of 1852, when a group of Sámi rose up against the local Norwegian authorities.

    “The book starts with a repentance and ends with a rebellion,” Pylväinen says. “I’m investigating the beginnings of a new religion and its growing pains. In what ways did the Sámi people use this new form of Christianity to band together?”

    Pylväinen’s second book feels in many ways like a direct continuation of her first novel, We Sinners, which was published by Henry Holt and Co. in 2012. Drawn from Pylväinen’s own experience, We Sinners explores the stories of a contemporary Midwestern family of Finnish descent, the Rovaniemis. They belong to a strict religious sect that evolved from Laestadius’s original movement — no alcohol, no movies, but much grace and belonging. Though the main concerns of We Sinners are how to live within such a tight-knit community — and how to leave it — the book’s beautiful final chapter departs from the Rovaniemis’ present and imagines a young woman at the very beginning of Laestadianism, thousands of miles away and more than a century earlier.

    “In doing research for the first book, I knew almost straightaway that there was so much more material that I had to write another book about it,” Pylväinen says. “I was looking into the fundamentalism I’d grown up in, but I had no idea what I was getting into, or the number of obscure books I was about to own, or how much I’d come to love traditional Sámi music.”

    She may not have realized how much she was about to travel, either, or how tightly her life would become tied to the northern Sápmi region. For the past decade, about once a year, Pylväinen has traveled to Sápmi on research grants, staying with a family of reindeer herders who have become close friends. Spending time in this remote place and following the dictates of nature and the movements of the herds has offered her new insights into her own history, as well as the writing of her books.

    “I’d been told growing up that the religion I was raised in was Finnish,” she says. “But until I started to really look into it, I didn’t realize how much of this religion’s early days were with the Sámi. The preacher who started it himself was half Sámi. I’m thinking about the role that the Sámi played in creating a new kind of Christianity, and what they managed to preserve via the Christianity of their church.”

    Pylväinen says that while the Sámi way of life among the herds was in many ways new to her, there was something deeply recognizable in it from her own past. “The way they spoke was so reminiscent of the religion I grew up in, it kind of freaked me out at first,” she says. “There’s a real emphasis on the importance of what is felt. Intuition is knowledge, emotion is knowledge, nature is knowledge. It was something ineffable, but something essentially Sámi. It managed to survive, cross an ocean, and make it to the Detroit suburbs.”

    For Sámi reindeer herders, today as in the 19th century, nature plays a crucial role in culture and survival. The End of Drum-Time opens with an earthquake, and throughout the book, natural events continue to shape the lives of the characters. From the mystical beauty of the northern lights to the brutal realities of animal husbandry, the natural world played a vital role in helping Pylväinen think about the novel and its structure.

    “In writing my first book,” she says, “I thought plot had to come from character — it had to be ingrained in who the character was. In this novel, I’m telling myself plot comes from reindeer. The physical world has to be what moves it. So much of what I think about in Sápmi and when I’m working on the novel is our desire to control and to imagine we have control over nature. We imagine if we do x, y, or z we’ll get the right results. But the lesson in Sápmi is always that we don’t have control.”

    Pylväinen says Provincetown has been an ideal setting to work on her book. “Here in P’town, you’re closer to an extreme form of nature,” she says. “That helps me with my novel, because every time I forget about the role of nature, my novel suffers. I have to keep bringing it back.”

     

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