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    LYRICISM

    A Strange Third Thing

    The best poems, says Fine Arts Work Center fellow Parker Hobson, have ‘a tender screwballism’

    By

    Parker Hobson, a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, is interested in “what’s still present of the past,” he says. Walking in Provincetown, the poet noticed a plaque at 465 Commercial St. that marks the building as the former whale oil refinery of David Stull, the Ambergris King. “I looked the guy up,” says Hobson. “I found a picture of him on the beach, holding a knife to a whale’s throat.”

    Parker Hobson writes musical poetry and poetic music. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    “Everything in Provincetown has these concentric layers,” Hobson says. “Some are more visible and some are invisible.” A similar layering exists in his hometown, Louisville, Ky., he says. “It’s a complicated place. The city doesn’t know if it’s Midwestern or Southern. It’s not one thing or another, which makes it a strange third thing.”

    He writes a lot of poems about Kentucky. His work is musical, with rhythmic phrasing and carefully paced punctuation. “That’s part of what poetry is,” Hobson says. “When you put words in a line, they’re interacting with each other; there’s a rhythm to it.”

    Hobson, who plays guitar and banjo, majored in music at Davidson College in North Carolina. He spent his early 20s writing songs, he says, before he realized that “poetry was something I was allowed to connect with.”

    A friend gave him David Berman’s 1999 book of poetry, Actual Air, and Hobson remembers feeling his mind “blow open. These were poems that were like my experience of growing up. Berman was making jokes about Judas Priest and talking about cassette tapes.”

    Hobson began writing poems as a way to come up with song lyrics. He was working in Whitesburg, Ky. at a community radio station, WMMT, part of Appalshop, a nonprofit arts collective that Hobson still works for. “I’d get up early every morning and work on poems on the back porch,” he says. Soon, Hobson left his radio job and completed an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Kentucky.

    His poems are written in a stream of consciousness — but the narrator’s thoughts collide with snippets of things other people have said or done.

    “All Snakes’ Day,” published in the anthology Best New Poets 2023, is about his home in the Appalachians. It was the most beautiful place Hobson has ever lived, he says. The house was porous; snakes slithered through holes in the floorboards. Hobson writes: “For the violets left slain by the lawn guy./ For the rabbits who still guard the yard while we sleep./ For my grandfather’s workshirt, clean/ in my closet like the flag of a country/ which no longer exists.”

    “Miracle, in Progress,” published in 2021 in the magazine 32 Poems, was inspired by a drive Hobson often took during his M.F.A. program. At one point, a tire store popped into view in the middle of an empty field. “It seemed so strange,” Hobson says, as if the store had randomly emerged from the ground.

    In the poem, people gather to watch a tire store rise miraculously out of the earth. The narrator talks with his neighbor — someone he had never spoken to before. “Now, buddy,” the neighbor says. “I’ve never said this to anybody, but my uncle was buried with a library book he never returned.” The two characters then sip beers and watch the “miracle.”

    Hobson’s poems are neither reality nor fantasy but a strange third thing: “really boring magical realism,” he says. “So much of what we see and do every day is boring. Part of why we write is to understand our experiences. We’re putting them on the page and distorting them in order to better understand them and ourselves.” For him, surrealism is “making things a little bit strange in order to see what’s really there.”

    Music still plays a big role in Hobson’s creative life. He released a “lyrics-first indie-country” album, Loss Program, last fall. Its 10 songs are titled like his poems, unassuming and quietly humorous. In “No Porchswings on the Moon So Plan Ahead,” acoustic guitar riffs ripple under Hobson’s wavering voice; the album’s last song, “Night of the Living Room,” thumps merrily along to a steady drum.

    The songs explore an idea similar to a theme of Hobson’s poetry, he says: “Living our lives within a soup of overlapping layers of the past.”

    In Provincetown, Hobson is taking a break from music to work on a poetry collection. “I’m pretty iterative,” he says. “I’ll tinker with a poem and put it down for a few months. I’ll pick it up and tinker with it again. Then I’ll look up and a few years have passed.” But there are some things you can see only with time, he says. How does he know when a poem is done? “I’m still figuring that out,” he says.

    He’s been reading some poets here that inspire him: James Tate, Dara Barrois/Dixon, Russell Edson. “My favorite work to read is the kind that you can come back to over and over again,” Hobson says. The best poems, he feels, are surprising, weird, and playful, with “a tender screwballism.”

    “I believe in silliness and goofiness,” he says. “Both are extremely valid ways of being serious.” What he’s after, in his work, is a sense of revelation — things that aren’t what they seem. The mundane made magical. A stream of consciousness that becomes an ocean of feeling.

    “I’m really committed to the imagination,” Hobson says. Of course he cares about the nitty-gritty of his craft: the line, the rhythm, the form, the page. “But not at the expense of the imagination,” he says. “Not at the expense of a little wildness and a little surprise.”

    Imaginations

    The event: A showcase with Zeinab Shahidi Marnani, Ian Page, Parker Hobson, and Matthew Wamser
    The time: Friday, April 4, 5 to 8 p.m.
    The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
    The cost: Free

    STILL FRAME

    An Artist Takes a Moment

    Solitude provides Zeinab Shahidi Marnani with new perspectives

    By

    Zeinab Shahidi Marnani, a visual arts fellow at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center, spends a lot of time in relative isolation. “Seven months is a long time,” she says. She’s been thinking about distance — especially the experience of distancing oneself from what is known.

    This year, as a returning visual arts fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Zeinab Shahidi Marnani is interested in things that “stand outside of time.” (Photos by Emily Schiffer)

    One of her artworks is painted directly onto the floor and wall of her studio in the shape of a piece of paper folded in half. Shahidi calls it an experiment. “When you have a long period of time,” she says, “you can open projects that were always ideas.”

    In this painting, dark swooping marks stand out against the white background, looking like the bottoms of billowing clouds, or the silhouettes of seabirds, or the outlines of gentle waves. Straight, tapering lines appear among them: those are the letter “alef,” Shahidi explains: the first letter in the Farsi alphabet.

    In the foreground: landscapes created with ink and soapy water, a technique called “cloud and wind” in Iran, where Shahidi grew up. Behind it is another of Shahidi’s experiments: a painting on the floor and wall.

    The swooping shape is called “madd”: a symbol that, when placed over “alef,” elongates the vowel sound. On its own, “madd” translates to “high tide.”

    But the point isn’t translation, says Shahidi — it isn’t even to recognize that the mark is part of a language. “I didn’t want to write a poem in Farsi for you,” she says, “and you couldn’t read it.” She just likes the shape, especially arranged in a pattern to represent water.

    The dark marks are made with a liquid material between acrylic and ink, says Shahidi, that her friend Dani Levine, also a FAWC fellow, made for her. “The color is so nice,” she says. “It has a little bit of blue and a little bit of sparkle inside.”

    Shahidi took classes in typography and calligraphy in Iran. There, she says, she’d never make a painting out of the separate pieces of Farsi letters. “Now that I’m here,” she says, “speaking this other language, I’m looking from the outside onto my own.” At a distance, broken down and isolated, language becomes landscape.

    Shahidi was born in 1983 in Isfahan, a city in central Iran. She says she doesn’t remember a time when she wasn’t making art. “I always knew that it was a thing to be an artist,” she says. “All those things that kids do but maybe don’t take seriously — for some reason I took them seriously. Even playing with play dough.”

    Shahidi likes to question mediums. One question: “Why are paintings always flat?”

    Before Shahidi could read or write, she told stories with colored pencils and watercolor. She made storyboards full of people interacting, enacting the drama of the everyday.

    Her parents weren’t artists by profession. But her father made paintings and photographs and as a child had built a projector to play movies at home, and her mother designed and made all of her children’s clothes. Shahidi has kept those clothes — she sometimes thinks of exhibiting them. It was her parents who inspired her to pursue art, she says. “I remember my mom calling me a painter since I was little,” she says. Shahidi studied visual communications at the University of Tehran, and in 2009, she enrolled at Yale University to study sculpture. Now she lives in Tehran and New York City.

    She went through a stage when she made videos. For one documentary project, she filmed artists talking about their art. In a different video project, she says, “I made people tell a story.”

    Then Shahidi made collages out of her videos: characters and scenes overlapped, sewn together “as if the whole film compressed into one single frame,” she says.

    There was another period when she became interested in light and vision. “I made a few camera obscuras,” she says. As a FAWC fellow last year, she cut holes in shoeboxes and invited the viewer to peer inside at a white paper circle. One’s vision warped, and the circle dissevered; the viewers’ eyes conjured new images.

    The work in Shahidi’s Provincetown studio reflects her current interest in the “still frame” — things that “stand outside of time.”

    If stared at long and close enough, this face will have two eyes. For a long time, Shahidi was interested in optical illusions.

    On the wall are three pieces of paper folded in half so that their lower halves jut out from the wall; their upper halves are secured by push-pins. “It’s part of my own process to question everything,” says Shahidi. “Even the medium itself.” She asked herself, “Why are paintings always flat?”

    The folded pieces of paper are painted with ink. One resembles the sun setting over the ocean, sinking, half-hidden, into the crease, and the water, drawn in small black marks on the horizontal part of the paper, bouncing gently in the open air. One shows a door, shut; the lower half of the paper is blank.

    She’s been working on a drawing in ink made by tracing the edge of a piece of cardboard, the lines intersecting and interacting like a two-dimensional hall of mirrors. The lines are the shape that you see when you look at your own nose: the curve down to a small point, the top of the round cheek visible underneath.

    “When you close one eye, you see it clearly,” says Shahidi, closing one of her eyes and crossing the other to demonstrate. “When both eyes are open, it’s a bit more difficult to focus on what you have.” It can be done by crossing your eyes and looking inward, but the image is unclear.

    Darker, bolder shapes emerge from the thin lines. Those are Shahidi’s hairs, she says, drifting into her line of sight. At the beach, looking at the sea, she experiments with her vision. “I never noticed that my hairs are part of the image,” she says. The shapes are also Farsi letters: the letter “eyn,” a shape almost like a capital English “E” in cursive.

    Lately, Shahidi has been exploring ink as a material and water as a subject.

    The result is a drawing that feels intensely personal: the artist’s view of her own nose and hair without a mirror, an impossible distance captured and flattened. A solid black half-circle near the middle of the drawing is the sun, says Shahidi. The viewer can almost feel the heat; the sensation of blinking away light coming from far away. The moment certainly seems to stand outside of time: no story here, just an instant of quiet solitude, drawn out.

    Shahidi is interested in water, she says; not only drawing it but using it as a material. “Ink has a liquid quality that is so different from using a pen,” she says. “Everything is water around me now.”

    On the other side of the small studio, several large sheets of paper lie on the floor. They resemble intricate topographic maps, drawn in pale gray. But Shahidi didn’t draw them. The marbling technique is a traditional one used in Japan, she says: she deposits a drop of ink and a drop of soapy water, then repeats hundreds of times until the landscapes create themselves and fill the page.

    “We have the technique in Iran,” she says. It’s called abr-o-bâd: “The cloud and the wind,” she says it means.

    Shahidi tries to visit the ocean every day to look at the water. “I miss it whenever I don’t go,” she says. She goes in the morning or whenever she needs a moment. “Before I start everything,” she says, “and whenever I’m frustrated.

    “I can’t call it loving something,” says Shahidi about her interest in the sea. “I’ve never thought about it like that.” She considers a moment longer: “It probably is love.”

    STORIES

    The Charged Fiction of Jason Ferris

    A FAWC fellow writes stories of transformation that burn like coals

    By

    Starting a short story, Jason Ferris writes the first sentence, then rearranges the words. “I’ll stare at it and stare at it,” he says, “until finally it has enough of a charge that it explodes into the second sentence.” But maybe the second sentence should really be the first. He switches them. Writing is “a constant struggle to find the music,” he says. “But once I hear that hum, I can follow it through the entire story.”

    Jason Ferris “is trying to express things not easily expressed.” (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    Ferris, a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, has mainly written short stories. The energy of the form, like an opening sentence, appeals to him. “There’s an urgency in the burst of a short story,” he says. “You’re tossing something hot in the air and trying not to burn your hands.”

    Ferris grew up in Leonardtown, Md., near the mouth of the Potomac, and graduated in 2021 from Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, having majored in creative writing, publishing, and editing. During his last two college years, Ferris says, “I wrote one story, then another, and another. I noticed that they all had the same narrative voice.”

    After a couple of years, he thought he was writing a collection. The stories were more cohesive than that, though — they were narrated by the same person and took place over the span of a single summer. Ferris decided to call the stories “chapters.” But that introduced the pressure of novel-writing, he says. In a novel, he says, “you’re luxuriating in the text — you’re swimming in it.”

    Ferris remembered a book he had read in 2020: Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness. Its nine chapters feel like a story collection, he says, but it is considered a novel. In the introduction, it’s called a “work of fiction.”

    “I loved that,” says Ferris. “It doesn’t box you in. It doesn’t circumscribe you.”

    He was writing a work of fiction, he decided. His chapters would be able to stand on their own while maintaining a larger narrative arc. He worked on his project through graduate school at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At FAWC, Ferris continues to work on it. It’s now titled Strangers by Nature.

    In addition to reading Greenwell, Ferris has been enjoying authors Alexander Chee, Justin Torres, and Carmen Maria Machado, but he didn’t start out as a voracious reader. When he was handed children’s books as a child, Ferris remembers feeling distinctly bored.

    “I thought, ‘Nothing interesting happens to these people,’ ” he says. He started writing his own stories, elaborating on the plots he found lacking. “I was a writer before I was a reader,” he says.

    In Provincetown, he’s taking a break from reading. “I had too many voices in my head,” he says. “I needed to turn the volume down and focus on just my own.” Ferris’s narrator has a particular outlook, he says, that shapes everything. Certain themes emerge: identity, relationships, sex, power.

    The story follows a young gay man, an aspiring comic artist, who has returned home to southern Maryland, “a place that’s been shaped by certain types of closeted-ness, certain types of masculinity,” Ferris says. When the narrator’s grandfather, who owns a well-known golf course, dies, the family unit shatters. The narrator, who is unnamed, remains in town, navigating frayed relationships with his family, his ex-boyfriend, and various men that enter and exit his life. “It’s a very claustrophobic book,” Ferris says.

    The main character is like Ferris in some ways. They’re both gay; they’re both from Maryland; they both have family members who are involved in running golf courses. In other ways, he says, they’re entirely different. Ferris wouldn’t call the book autobiographical; it simply borrows from his life.

    In one chapter, titled “An Effort of Opposites,” the narrator remembers tender and tense moments with his Bulgarian ex-boyfriend, Kristian. Sex is described in explicit terms, yet these scenes don’t feel gratuitous or vulgar.

    “When I first started writing stories that were toying with queerness,” Ferris says, “I was afraid to access the sexually explicit world.” In his freshman year of college, he read Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs to You, in which much of the story is told through sexual encounters. “The book opened doors and windows,” Ferris says. “The whole house blew up.” Sex now features heavily in his writing. It’s “where things take place, where change happens,” he says. “It’s where climax happens of the sexual nature and of the story nature.”

    In that same chapter, the narrator remembers Kristian teaching him to say his name with a Bulgarian accent: “Kree…stee…yan — with that Slavic R that sounds a little like an L,” Ferris writes. “It closed a distance between us, no longer foreigners to each other.” Through learning the language, the narrator feels a connection to Kristian that wasn’t accessible through English.

    “I’ve given the narrator an obsession of mine,” says Ferris, “which is trying to express things not easily expressed. Sometimes, it’s easier to say things in a different language than your own.” Ferris, whose partner is Bulgarian, is learning the language. Saying a certain slur word for gay, Ferris says, “I feel a sting, I feel pinched. It has a charge.” But when he says the corresponding word in Bulgarian, it doesn’t evoke the same negative feeling. Speaking a different language is a way to “hold hot coals without getting burned,” he says. He tries to convey this idea in his writing.

    In another chapter, the narrator enters a strange relationship on a dating app with a man who pays for degradation. The narrator sends this man pages from his comic books, where he creates superheroes. The story considers the narrator’s and the man’s desires for transformation: “the superhero story, the queer story, the belief that something powerful lies dormant inside,” Ferris writes.

    Like the narrator’s comic-book heroes, Ferris says, queer characters can transform themselves and transcend their circumstances. “Something that has made someone’s life difficult can suddenly have incredible potential,” he says. Superpowers, or queerness, can give someone family or the ability to make other people feel important, Ferris says. “It’s the thing that makes them special.”

    When his FAWC fellowship ends, Ferris plans to stay in Provincetown for the summer. After years of moving around for school, “this is the first place I’ve been calling home,” he says. What home means, exactly, he’s not sure — he set his stories in his home state to examine that question. “When I don’t have an answer to things,” he says, “that’s when I’m writing.”

    Fellows’ Exhibition

    The event: Artists’ showcase with Cherrie Yu, Edd Ravn, Lucas Martínez, and Jason Ferris
    The time: March 7-17
    The place: Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St, Provincetown
    The cost: Free

    ARTISTS

    Edd Ravn’s Cabinet of Curiosities

    A mud wall, privet berries, and centipede legs turn into art in a FAWC studio

    By

    About six weeks into Edd Ravn’s fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in the fall, he decided to smear his studio wall with mud.

    Edd Ravn gathers material for his art on walks in the dunes. (Photos by Emily Schiffer)

    “I was thinking about the idea of a white wall being this supposedly neutral zone to view an artwork,” he says. “And I was thinking, ‘What would it mean to situate this room and identify it as a place within a larger place?’ ” So, he went out to a pond in the Province Lands, scooped up a bucket of mud, and lugged it back to his studio, where he used it to turn his white wall a rich sandy brown.

    To Ravn, mud is “so evocative and deep and full of possibility.” No two muds are the same — mud from the volcanic soil of Italy is very different from the sandy mud of a Provincetown pond. “If people did this all around the world, you’d have studios of all different colors,” he says.

    A place-based approach to art defines Ravn’s work. He draws on a variety of influences in the paintings, sculptures, textiles, and salt-encrusted tree branches that will be showcased for 11 days starting this Friday at FAWC.

    The mud wall in Ravn’s studio at the Fine Arts Work Center.

    Art and nature were guiding forces in Ravn’s life from an early age. His childhood home in southern England abutted a forest that he spent countless hours exploring, building “dens,” climbing trees, and making “extremely bad snares,” he says — an experience that led him to develop a relationship with those woods.

    That relationship with the natural world waned somewhat as he got older, he says. He studied art as a profession, first as an undergraduate at the University of Glasgow, then in a master’s program at Yale. While he learned a lot, his art didn’t reflect what he really wanted to make. “I was making what I thought I should be making rather than taking those steps to make the ‘me’ stuff,” he says.

    It was only after he graduated, when he spent four years as an artist’s assistant in New York, that he began to discover the art he wanted to make. His earlier connection to the natural world started to re-emerge.

    Ravn’s studio at FAWC is filled with natural materials. There’s a bucket of privet berries and melted snow on the floor, a table covered in blue jay feathers and horseshoe crabs and golden reishi mushrooms, jars of earthen pigments, and a centipede specimen with its detached legs alongside it. It feels like walking into a Renaissance-era cabinet of curiosities.

    Ravn’s studio table.

    Ravn gathers many of these finds on his walks in the dunes, which are a key part of his artistic process. “Whenever I’m outside, I’m trying to pick up on cues or lessons of things I could bring into the studio,” he says. In New York, he painted only with rainwater, while at FAWC he uses ocean water and melted snow.

    When Ravn collects materials, he usually has no clear idea of how they will become art, he says. Instead, the artistic vision tends to emerge from putting things next to each other. “I’m being constantly infected with the different shapes and textures and forms and histories,” he says. Books of Klallam poetry, Tibetan Buddhist teachings, and postwar Japanese art strewn about the room also contribute to the mixture in Ravn’s brain out of which his art appears. “Often, I’ll be making something, and then it takes me a couple of months to realize where it came from,” he says.

    One example is a collection of ash branches that he displays on his mud wall. They are bent back on themselves, and the ends are bound to the main stem with thin wire, forming dramatic looping patterns. The idea was inspired by Ravn’s mother, who is a basket weaver, but it was after he made the piece that he realized the wire binding technique exactly matches the way that tiny vines in the dunes wrap themselves around branches. “There’s definitely a form of mimicry going on here,” he said.

    While Ravn’s inspiration is organic, his work is not low effort. He will spend months learning and refining techniques like dyeing, bioplastic manufacturing, and bacterial culturing to expand his artistic repertoire. And these techniques can have impressive results — his studio has a sheet of bamboo paper that he modified to look uncannily like the bark of a beech tree. When asked how he did it, he smiles and says, “Top secret.”

    Ravn’s work is a collaboration with the Earth.

    This combination of well-studied techniques and osmosis-like inspiration is clearest in Ravn’s paintings. One is a greenish brown with splotches of purple on the edges, a large burned hole in the center, and creases throughout. The piece was painted, burned, and creased by Ravn, but he created the diffuse pattern by leaving the folded-up painting outside for days to be exposed to the elements. The result, he said, is something that he “wouldn’t be able to do with a brush.”

    Ravn says he is conscious of the environmental impact of his work. When he was in New York, he was shocked by the amount of waste involved in making art. “I have a choice at every stage of my practice to try and be more responsible,” he says, which has hardened his resolve to fight the harmful effects of globalization by collecting or growing his own materials.

    Ravn also searches for sources of inspiration in spirituality. His father is a practicing Buddhist, and Ravn himself studies Tibetan Buddhism. That religion’s conception of interconnectedness plays a big role in his work. He says he was raised in the Church of England, whose ideas about nature play a role as well, and his English, Irish, and Norwegian ancestry has encouraged him to explore those countries’ folk traditions.

    “If someone walked into the studio and they wanted to talk about pagan rituals, or postwar Japanese art, or biodynamic farming, there are so many different routes into the work,” Ravn says. “I’m super interested in the way people view my work, because it takes me a long time to even slightly understand the painting in front of me.”

    Ravn’s work is a collaboration with the Earth. His materials come from the land around him. He will set up a painting, but it’s the sun and rain and wind that give it its visual texture. And natural processes, like vines curling around a branch, become part of the art he makes.

    On a walk to the pond where he collected the mud for his studio wall, Ravn considers where his ideas come from.

    “I think if there was a genesis, it happened a while ago,” he says, as he looks out across the pond. “I don’t know if I’m working with, as some people say, a demon or a muse. It feels like I’m just building upon what’s already set in motion.”

    Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on March 6, stated that Ravn scooped “bucketfuls” of mud from the Province Lands. Ravn says that it was just half a bucketful.

    INTERPRETATION

    A Poet and Translator Celebrates ‘Life Cropping Up’

    FAWC fellow Lucas Martínez uses folk traditions and language as his subjects

    By

    Lucas Martínez arrived in Provincetown with two instruments: a charango, which is a small Andean guitar, and a classical guitar, on which he practices milonga folk songs.

    Fine Arts Work Center writing fellow Lucas Martínez. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    As a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Martínez draws on lyrical traditions that include both sonnets and folk songs, though his poetry sounds distinctly modern. Milonga is a folk genre that was started by immigrants and Indigenous people working in Argentina’s port cities along the Río de la Plata. “They would have these dance parties,” Martínez says, with two guitarists playing and singing in call-and-response. That style inspired the form of some of his poems, along with variations like the payada, “almost like rap battles — off-the-cuff coming up with rhymes,” he says.

    “I wanted to be associated with these songs and culture that I was a part of but living far away from,” he says. “That I could say, ‘This is something I belong to’ in a poem — that was really exciting.”

    But he wasn’t quite satisfied by that idea. What did it mean for a poet to belong to a folk music tradition, he asks. “What legs does it have today, politically, socially, romantically?”

    Martínez also does translations, and in that realm he encountered similar questions. How can translation convey the meter and rhythm of language or preserve its cultural potency?

    For Martínez, these questions aren’t just central to the art of translation or poetry — they are the art. His poems often take the imperfection of translation as their subject. “I’ve written poems that investigate the question ‘How do you write a milonga in English?’ ” he says.

    In two poems titled “Accompanied Milonga,” he offers an answer, with stanzas organized in two columns that mimic the musical notation of guitar accompaniment. The first syllables of each line are sequenced to represent a milonga’s typical chord progressions — “mi, do, si, si, re,” for instance.

    Martínez’s interest in poetry came, in part, from songs he first heard in Claremont, Calif., where he grew up in a bilingual family that introduced him to a polyphony of musical traditions. His mother, a professional cellist from Detroit, played classical chamber music. His father, a biologist from General Las Heras, a small town in the province of Buenos Aires, loved South American folk music of all sorts. Martínez was raised on poems, milongas, and tangos with words by Jorge Luis Borges set to Astor Piazzolla’s music and South American folk songs, like “Duerme Negrito,” a lullaby popularized by guitarist Atahualpa Yupanqui.

    At Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., he took a poetry class taught by Mary Szybist. He was having trouble sleeping, and he revisited Yupanqui’s lullaby. One of Martínez’s first sonnets was born in the class, with these lines: “Terrified to find out they’re all leaving you behind/ aren’t you? That they are snipping the nights/ in half and living tomorrows you haven’t dreamt of/ yet?” In the original song, Martínez says, the mother needs her child to sleep so she can work in the fields. His poem responds to a “political reality in Latin America where things like rest or sleep don’t inherently belong to you.”

    With Szybist’s encouragement, Martínez enrolled in an M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Virginia. There, he began doing literary translation. Among his first projects was translating works by Nicole Cecilia Delgado, a Puerto Rican poet and artist in residence at the Virginia Center for the Book.

    Inspired by poets like Evie Shockley, he began writing poems that called attention to their own forms. “If you’re interested in how a poem exists as a visual object on the page, you can translate more than just language but musicality as well, by using visual elements. That became part of my writing.” He started working on collage and visual poems, with slanted stanzas and clippings from other translated works.

    Grammar itself is a protagonist in one of his poems, questioning the failure of language to capture the natural world. “Grammar asks. The Mojave desert./ be more concrete explain The truth,” Martínez writes in a collage poem of translated clippings by Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and others.

    Borges remained an influence, and a contrapuntal poem titled “Considering a Latinate Question” takes a distinctly Borgesian turn. It has four columns that can be read horizontally or vertically, with different meanings conveyed each way. The first two columns are quotations from letters between two translators of Borges, Norman Thomas di Giovanni and Ben Bellit, arguing about how to accurately translate his work. The second two columns are clippings about trees and Argentina from letters between Martínez and his father.

    At FAWC, Martínez is completing a manuscript of mixed media, essays, and collage poetry. “I might be accused of being a formalist,” he says. But the charge would be inaccurate. He continues to work across literary styles, writing sonnets, collage, and free verse. One of the first poems he completed in Provincetown was an ode to David Byrne.

    Martínez has an unromantic approach to writing. “I know people who say, ‘I only write before dusk,’ but I’m not one of them,” he says.

    In a poem titled “Weed,” inspired by the writing of horticulturist Marco Wilkinson, Martínez celebrates that unpredictability. “I like the idea of a weed as a form,” he says. “This life cropping up where it’s unwanted, dealing with a relationship to a place you aren’t always in.”

    SELF-PORTRAIT

    Cherrie Yu Is a Perpetual Student

    In her multidisciplinary practice, a FAWC fellow is inspired by daily routines

    By

    In 2022, when Cherrie Yu was a few years out of graduate school, she landed a year-long residency at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio’s visual arts program in Dumbo, Brooklyn. But upon arrival, she says, she found she didn’t want to make art.

    A still from Daily Diversions by Cherrie Yu.

    Yu, now a visual arts fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, felt burnt out from the fast pace of the previous few years: in 2013, she graduated from high school in China and came to the U.S. to study at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, which led directly to getting an M.F.A. in performance studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Afterward, she moved to New York City and pushed to secure an artist visa to stay in the country. At the residency in Dumbo, Yu placed her creative output on hold. Instead of immediately making art, she says, “I started to do things outside of the studio that felt enriching to my life.”

    In the mornings, she went into Manhattan, leaving her large studio empty. She’d play ping-pong in Chinatown for a few hours, then take a Cunningham technique dance class in SoHo. She was also working for a bookbinder. “I just wanted to be around other people,” says Yu.

    In the late afternoon or evening, she’d return to Dumbo. “When I got back into my studio,” she says, “I was carrying those things with me, whether it was memories or how the experience felt in my body.”

    She arrived in Provincetown for her FAWC fellowship and began editing Daily Diversions, a short film she had recorded over the summer. The video, with no narration, is composed of scenes in which ping-pong players and modern dancers occupy the same gymnasium. They don’t interact; they’re intensely focused on their own activities.

    A still from Daily Diversions by Cherrie Yu.

    The film explores the disconnect Yu experienced. “I always think about moving back and forth between those spaces,” she says. “What does it mean to travel from one community to another, and what kind of things are being carried between them?” The two activities she filmed are studies in contrast: one is pedestrian and accessible; the other is artsy and esoteric. But the viewer is also challenged to acknowledge their similarities: the athleticism and nimble energy inherent in both and their embodiment of discipline and improvisation.

    The film also functions as a self-portrait. Yu grew up playing casual table tennis in Jiangyin, a small city on the Yangtze River near Shanghai. In New York, it was an activity that connected her to the city’s Chinese population. Yu’s development as an artist, on the other hand, happened in the U.S.

    A print by Cherrie Yu referencing dance movements.

    “I started to be confronted by the reality that my artistic voice was shaped in Western institutions,” she says. “I’m trying to figure out how to recognize that in how I choose my tools, what I read, and how I decide to make frameworks for my inquiries.” In the video, the connection between the different cultural worlds she inhabits feels tentative, like an open-ended question.

    Yu’s creative identity also straddles multiple worlds. Majoring in English in college, she was introduced to performance art by two theater professors. In her recent work, she continues to perform but also inhabits the roles of choreographer, director, researcher, and visual artist. Over the summer, Yu directed others to create her film. Here in Provincetown, her energy is more inward-focused: instead of leading large collaborative projects, she’s experimenting with different forms of visual art like printmaking.

    “I’m coming back to my artist self in this space with so many other artists,” says Yu. “It feels like a homecoming.”

    Cherrie Yu in her studio at the Fine Arts Work Center. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    Yu’s studio at FAWC is loosely organized into different projects. One surface is covered with prints she has been making. In one of the images, green calligraphic marks reference dance movements. Across the room, Yu has a few small gouache paintings related to Daily Diversions. A book sits on a table: The Politics of Collecting by Eunsong Kim. The center of the studio is divided into two related stations: one with a pile of film stills printed on small pieces of paper, the other loosely strewn with materials like transparent paper and wire mesh that she’s experimenting with as surfaces for projection.

    The studio is a visual representation of Yu’s curiosity. She’s a perpetual student of different art forms — new experiences are what fuel her work. Taking up ping-pong and dance after moving to New York is one example. For other pieces, Yu relies on archival film material, such as the Time and Space Concept Symposium produced by the Artist Television Network in 1978 or Trisha Brown’s dance performances from the 1980s. Typically these are pieces of history she wants to look at or listen to.

    Yu looks through film stills in her studio. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    “Part of my work is to devise different ways to engage with archives,” says Yu. “There’s almost some sort of call or something unresolved in the archives that makes me want to give it another voice.” In some of her video and performance pieces, she directs reenactments of archived events or dances, often adding humorous touches that undercut the seriousness of these historicized cultural affairs.

    For her upcoming exhibition at the Fine Arts Work Center’s Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Yu is again working with archival material. Hundreds of film stills piled on her floor depict different bodily movements or actions. She’s considering ways to project them.

    Yu works in multiple disciplines. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    “What is the world I want to build?” she asks. Since working in FAWC’s print shop, Yu has become fascinated by overlaps between printmaking and video projection. “I’m lifting the action outside of the frame and imprinting the image onto another surface,” she says of her in-progress video installation.

    Although the final form of her upcoming project is not yet settled, Yu trusts the process. She’s been collecting these images habitually — she likens the activity to practicing dance.

    “Before it’s anything,” Yu says, “it’s something you have to do every day.”

    Fine Fellows

    The event: Showcase with fellows Cherrie Yu, Edd Ravn, Lucas Martínez, Jason Ferris
    The time: March 7 to 17
    The place: Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St, Provincetown
    The cost: Free

    UGLY TRUTHS

    Young Writer Seeks Difficulty

    FAWC fellow Jiaqi Kang isn’t afraid to write willfully

    By

    Jiaqi Kang doesn’t like to call their longtime habit — waking in the morning and scribbling recollections of dreams — a “practice,” because that word is “hoity-toity.” But one morning some months ago, after a devastating dream, “I immediately had to write it down,” says Kang.

    Fine Arts Work Center fellow Jiaqi Kang likes to write at cafés. Kang is at work on a first novel, here at the East End Market. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

    In the dream, Kang and a friend were excited and nervous, planning an act of protest in support of Palestine, when the friend suddenly vanished, leaving Kang bewildered and alone. In a previous dream, the same friend was wearing a suit, “which he would never do,” they say.

    Those two dreams became the nucleus of a short story, “Sequence From a Dream,” which Kang wrote in October right after arriving in Provincetown as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. The story is a visceral first-person narrative about protest, connection, disgust, and obsession. Kang’s writing is warm, like the inside of a body, with long, urgent sentences bumping against two-word interjections and no quotation marks to separate dialogue from action. The story is horrifying the way one’s own face becomes horrifying if stared at for too long in the mirror.

    Kang was born in China, grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, and moved as a young adult to Oxford, England, where they received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history and are currently on leave from a Ph.D. program. Kang is the founding editor of Sine Theta Magazine, an arts publication made by and for the Chinese diaspora.

    Kang began writing fiction and showing it to friends to pass the time during the Covid lockdown. They submitted some short stories to literary magazines, most of which didn’t pay. “I did it for the love of the game,” says Kang. A first published story appeared in Jellyfish Review, now defunct. In 2022, Kang won the White Review Short Story Prize for the story “Class of 1985.”

    Some of the stories are so brief they are “basically poetry,” says Kang. “I thought, ‘Why would anyone want to read more than 1,000 words from me?’ ” At FAWC, they’re working on a first novel: a story about someone who goes on strike.

    “I’ve never been in a situation where the thing I’m supposed to be doing every day is writing,” says Kang. A stack of novels from the Provincetown library teeters on Kang’s coffee table. “I love reading novels,” they say. “So, I want to write one.”

    The first draft of a novel is “supposed to be bad,” says Kang. As an editor, Kang finds that hard to accept. “I want it to be perfect in every way.” There are no perfect books though, Kang admits.

    Every day, they try either to write for two hours or to produce 1,000 words. “I’ve been trying to psychologically trick myself into writing,” they say: 1,000 words is 200 words five times, or 300 words three and half times. Slowly but surely, “It’s working.”

    Lately, as a reader, says Kang, “I’ve been looking for difficulty.” They loved The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss and The Trinity of Fundamentals by Wisam Rafeedie — the first a historical novel in which anti-fascist thought and art coalesce as a force for good as Nazism rises in pre-World War II Europe, and the second a work of auto-fiction inspired by Rafeedie’s imprisonment as a Palestinian dissident in the 1990s. Rafeedie’s novel was smuggled out of jail in pill capsules and balls of dough.

    Kang is also inspired by the work of Sarah Ahmed, a British-Australian feminist scholar who wrote, most recently, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Ahmed writes of the politics of emotion — of “affect aliens,” says Kang. “If everyone’s happy, and you’re supposed to be happy, and you’re not, what does that mean?” Ahmed writes, too, of willfulness. “There’s a sense that being stubborn is childish,” says Kang. “Actually, it’s political.”

    At Oxford, Kang and friends participated in an encampment on campus supporting Palestine — “affect aliens” themselves in the face of what Kang calls institutional violence.

    When Kang arrived in Provincetown, far from a “cradle” of friendships at home, they felt a sense of loss. They’ve never written to purge something, says Kang — except maybe in early stories where they inadvertently came out to themself by writing about lesbians. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” Kang remembers thinking, “if the reason I wrote this was because I’ve secretly been a lesbian this whole time?”

    “Sequence From a Dream” was different. “It’s the most vulnerable and raw story I’ve ever written,” says Kang. “Every time I write a story, I’m learning how to write all over again.” Writing this one scared them. The emotions were real and bad.

    “I’m trying to figure out what I really care about,” says Kang. “Sometimes I don’t trust my conscious self.” Dreams, they say, are a sort of “ultimate revelation,” where ugly feelings emerge without permission.

    Kang printed the story on a Risograph at FAWC and spread the word on social media: they’d exchange the booklet for donations to support Palestinians suffering in Gaza. So far, Kang has sent out 200 copies and raised $3,800.

    “In the past year, my ideas about what writing and art mean have been interrupted by the genocide in Palestine,” says Kang. Here in Provincetown, where Kang says “outside disturbances” are few, “I’ve been trying to reconfigure what it is that motivates me to tell a story.”

    In writing “Sequence From a Dream,” Kang struggled with this question: “Am I making this about myself?” The narrator grapples with the same issue. “We’re not the people who need the spotlight,” says Kang. “But this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about: no matter what you do, you can’t delete your feelings.” No matter, they say, if they’re “ugly feelings, shameful feelings, difficult feelings.”

    Kang has become disillusioned with Oxford. “I used to see the institution as a brick wall and myself as this hysterical, emotional being, thrashing against it,” they say. After being involved in the student-led coalition Oxford Action for Palestine, they’ve concluded that the roles are the opposite.

    They still love art history. But the pursuit of a Ph.D. is losing its allure. “My backup plan is to be a writer.”

    EXHIBITIONS

    Materials, Microbiomes, and Metaphors

    A show of works by Fine Arts Work Center fellows is a snapshot of global contemporary art

    By

    When the visual arts fellows at the Fine Arts Work Cetner show their work at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the community gets an exhilarating peek at what’s afoot at the studios down the street — and in the larger art world. The international mix of young artists who are in Provincetown as fellows come armed with talent, ambition, and a deep knowledge of contemporary art culture.

    This winter’s exhibition, which features seven artists, is marked by a spirit of exploration with an emphasis on process and materiality. Rather than grand, bombastic visual statements, the works are decidedly lo-fi and earthy.

    Covering the rear wall of the gallery is an installation of abstract images by Elena Kovylyaeva. The artist, based in Leipzig, Germany, used newsprint — a cheap, throwaway material — made from the master pages of a Risograph digital duplicator. (A Risograph is similar to the photocopiers common in offices and schools but works more like a screen printer, using spot colors in a process akin to offset printing.) In neat grids, Kovylyaeva captures what seems like the detritus of this utilitarian technology. The images are blotchy and glitchy; abstracted and overlapping; some forms are geometric, others biomorphic; the colors range from black and white to bruised purples and blues.

    A detail of Remnants by Elena Kovylyaeva. (Photo courtesy PAAM)

    Her installation cheekily reimagines abstract painting, dethroning it from its usually lofty place. These images seem to be made by accident, without an artist’s hand, yet Kovylyaeva’s arrangement of the newsprint is precise and considered. In her piece, the accidental and the intentional coalesce, offering a vision of an artist not as a singular genius but rather as one who rearranges and reanimates the scraps of culture, reimagining our understanding of art history.

    Across the gallery, Dani Levine’s large-scale paintings also contend with the history of abstract painting. Her works are labor-intensive explorations of material and form, undergirded with conceptual and political concerns (her work, more than any other in the show, gestures toward grandiosity).

    In Levine’s Menace, a large swirling purple form commands the center of the composition. Like Kovylyaeva, Levine is not a purist when it comes to abstract painting. She incorporates feminist and lesbian symbols, along with popular graphic styles and floral imagery. A close viewing of the painting reveals these details, along with Levine’s athletic use of materials, many of which she makes herself. The purple form is rendered with brushy, painterly excess, while the beige background is matte. A glittering silver line travels through the composition. Levine’s materials articulate the forms within the paintings, but they also exist a priori.

    Menace by Dani Levine.

    Edd Ravn shares Levine’s fascination with materiality. In a series of three watercolors, the constructed image is almost beside the point. Rather, the works exist more as a record of his experiments with materials like raw pigment, New York City rainwater, and nori paste, which he uses as a binder in different ratios to create effects like the washy blue passages in one painting and an impasto nipple-like form in another.

    Ravn’s family has a farm in Yorkshire — his work shows a concern for natural processes. In a scattered floor installation, Ravn displays items like pheasant feathers from back home, bones, and reeds found in Provincetown. He also incorporates rubbery disk-like forms he has created through a process that involves growing microbiomes from his body. Together, the elements suggest a vision that erases boundaries between artificial and natural, scientific and spiritual. Ravn plans to change his display throughout the run of the exhibition. Like his art, the installation will embody themes of decay, growth, change, and instability.

    Artemis by Edd Ravn.

    Zeinab Shahidi Marnani, an artist from Iran, is a second-year FAWC fellow. In her lithograph prints, she uses calligraphic marks and symmetry that recall Persian art, but it seems that the Provincetown landscape has seeped into her imagination. In Manushka, an eye hovers ominously in the sky above what appear to be waves. In another image, two dome-like forms echo each other across a space that is dominated by the water, the sky, and a horizon line.

    Manushka by Zeinab Shahidi Marnani.

    Marnani has two cubes in the exhibition that require the viewer to crouch down and peer through small holes to view an image. In Adam and Eve, the viewer’s eye is reflected and doubled on two angled mirrors. A crude painting of water on the cube’s base is also reflected in the mirrors, creating an illusion of a swirling, watery space over which the viewer’s eye hovers. It’s a clever three-dimensional representation of her two-dimensional prints, and its funhouse amateur quality adds a touch of humor.

    The photo and video artists in the exhibition also forgo slick aesthetics for something that feels more homespun. Carlos Zerpa displays his video UN/SAFE on a Toshiba TV/VCR covered with wire fencing and thorns. He directed the seven-minute film, collaborating with animators and poet Karen McCarthy Woolf. The story unfolds with surprising visual and narrative twists. It addresses race, immigration, and American mythology through images that incorporate hand-drawn elements with archival footage.

    Ian Page’s photographs are the most confounding works in the exhibition. In a pair of images from a project titled Election Day Wienerschnitzel, obscured dark objects foreground banal settings. In one picture shot from a car, the main subject is a bit of blue sky framed by a palm tree and the edge of a building. In the other, houseplants and a clear plastic tarp take center stage. The images evoke the placelessness of contemporary life and feel like the peripheral spaces one might get a glimpse of on a Zoom call.

    Page’s other work is a sculpture. Since 03 is made from another type of detritus: wallpaper print rollers. Page arranged the rolls, which are covered with patterns of tiny pins, into a grid. Its rigid, imposing form and spiky surfaces put the sculpture in an adversarial relationship to the viewer.

    Since 03, a sculpture by Ian Page, at the FAWC visual arts fellows show. In the background are works by Cherrie Yu (left) and Elena Kovylyaeva (right). (Photo courtesy PAAM)

    Cherrie Yu’s video piece Daily Diversions encapsulates the exhibition’s spirit of improvisation. Like Zerpa’s short film, it’s a work in progress. The video features pairs and trios of women dancing in nondescript gymnasiums alongside table-tennis players engaged in games (Yu draws from her experience as a choreographer and player of table tennis in this work). The dancers’ movements are synchronized, and in some of the scenes they move while positioning and repositioning wooden boards. Their actions become a sort of living sculpture, while the table-tennis players become a metaphor for the creative process: one that’s disciplined but also responsive, dynamic, and playful.

    Down to Earth

    The event: The FAWC visual arts fellows’ group exhibition
    The time: Through March 23
    The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.
    The cost: General admission: $15

    FELLOWSHIP

    Ten Poets, Writers, and Translators Welcomed at FAWC

    Winter fellows are also visiting artists in the Provincetown Schools

    By

    The Fine Arts Work Center’s 2024-25 fellows have been in Provincetown since Oct. 1 — their orientation wrapped up last week with a thrift-shopping expedition, bonfire, potluck, and the board of trustees’ annual fellows luncheon, says Fellowship Director Thierry Kehou.

    Painter, printmaker, and cartographer Mark Adams speaks to the FAWC fellows about coastal geography and the glacial and ocean processes that helped form the Cape. (Photo by Thierry Kehou)

    Monthly “FAWC Fridays” will begin on Nov. 1. “We invite visiting artists and writers to give talks and readings,” says Kehou. “Our fellows are highly encouraged to attend those events.” Along with a lineup of nationally recognized artists, FAWC Fridays include live music and catered food. They will continue until February, when they’ll be replaced with “Fellow Fridays” — opportunities for solo exhibitions and readings by the fellows occurring every other week.

    This winter, some fellows will also be visiting artists in the Provincetown IB Schools as part of a longstanding partnership with FAWC. “The fellows are invited to partner with classroom teachers,” says FAWC Executive Director Sharon Polli. The fellows and teachers collaborate on short-term residencies from January through April, culminating in a showcase of student work. “They can be visual art, printmaking, painting, drawing, or poetry,” says Polli.

    Every year, she says, students submit poetry to the Cape-wide “Voices of Peace Poetry Contest.” Their poems focus on peace and activism. “We’ve had many winners,” Polli says, “who have worked with fellows and have gone on to become Cape-wide youth voices calling for peace and engagement.”

    The fellows enjoy a sunset sail on Cape Cod Bay aboard the Bay Lady II. From left: Lucas Martínez, Cherrie Yu, Kai Conradi, Acie Clark, Dani Levine, FAWC Administrative Director Naya Bricher, Carlos Zerpa, Edd Ravn. (Photo by Joshua Willis)

    Brief profiles of this winter’s 10 FAWC writing fellows follow.

    Acie Clark, from Florida and Georgia, is a trans poet, assistant professor in the Film, Theatre, and Creative Writing Dept. at the University of Central Arkansas, and a teacher at the Interlochen Summer Arts program. They are working on their first collection of poems and have published or forthcoming work in Shenandoah, Foglifter, Passages North, and The Massachusetts Review.

    Kai Conradi, from K’ómoks territory in Cumberland, British Columbia, is a fiction writer and poet. Conradi is a recipient of funding from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts and has been published in Poetry, The Malahat Review, Grain, PRISM, and Best Canadian Stories. They are working on a novel and a poetry collection.

    From a small town in Maryland, Jason Ferris, a fiction writer and essayist, is hard at work on his first novel. He holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been published in Rivercraft, Essay, and Carve magazine. His writing was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize, and he was a finalist in the 2021 Carve Magazine Prose and Poetry Contest.

    Kevin Fitchett, from Negaunee, Mich., is a returning fellow from 2019-20. According to his statement on the FAWC website, his novel-in-progress “follows a mediocre, almost-divorced narrative poet on his Winnebago pilgrimage to Augusta National.”

    A poet from Louisville, Ky., Parker Hobson has been published in Best New Poets, 32 Poems, and Denver Quarterly. He’s also a musician — his album Loss Program was released last month. Hobson works as a radio and multimedia producer for the nonprofit Appalshop, “a media arts collective based in the coalfields of East Kentucky,” according to his FAWC statement.

    Jiaqi Kang is from Geneva, Switzerland and now lives in Oxford, England. They are the founding editor-in-chief of Sine Theta magazine, an international creative arts publication “made by and for the Sino diaspora,” according to Kang’s FAWC statement. Kang’s work won the Wadham Rex Warner Prize in 2021 and the White Review Short Story Prize in 2022. They have been published in Joyland, The London Magazine, and TOLKA. While in Provincetown, they’re looking forward to “reading, walking, cooking, and writing little stories.”

    C. Mallon holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s especially interested in the relationship between the sounds of words and their meanings. According to her FAWC statement, her narratives focus on purgatorial places, characters damned and haunted, and landscapes arresting and hostile. Also, sometimes, “the transformative spirit of a good dog.”

    Sara Martin, a returning fellow from 2018-19, lives in Philadelphia. According to her FAWC statement, her job history is varied: “reptile care, donuts, 19th century prison tours, marine debris removal, ice cream, pet insurance investigation, libraries, urban farming, and Halloween parties.” In Provincetown, she’ll be working on a manuscript and documentary about death rituals in the United States and cultural attitudes concerning cremation.

    Born in San Bernadino County and raised in Claremont, Calif. on ancestral Tongva-Gabrielino land, Lucas Martínez is a writer and translator. He considers English and Spanish his native languages. According to his FAWC statement, he plans to spend his months in Provincetown working on translations and “a manuscript of writing that includes collage, translation, essay, and poetry.”

    Matthew Wamser, a fiction writer and essayist, is from Milwaukee, Wisc. He has an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program and has published work in The Missouri Review and Salamander.

    Readings by the fellows will take place from February through April.

    FELLOWSHIP

    Here to Make Films, Explore Chance, and Paint With Rainwater

    FAWC’s visual arts fellows get a taste of the Outer Cape’s natural history

    By

    The 20 winners of seven-month winter fellowships at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center arrived in town on Oct. 1. As usual, the cohort includes 10 visual artists and 10 writers. They are in the middle of a “robust orientation schedule,” says Thierry Kehou, FAWC’s fellowship director.

    The 2024-25 FAWC fellows arrived on Oct. 1. Seventeen of the 20 fellows pose for a group picture. Top row, from left: Ian Page, Parker Hobson, Carlos Zerpa, Mengwei Ma, Elena Kovylyaeva, José De Sancristóbal; middle row: Kevin Fitchett, Matthew Wamser, Acie Clark, Lucas Martínez, Dani Levine; bottom row: Jason Ferris, Edd Ravn, Sara Martin, Kai Conradi, Cherrie Yu, Jiaqi Kang. (Photo by Joshua Willis)

    Kehou, a writer and translator, is himself new to Provincetown. He and his family arrived in town in June from New York City, where he co-founded the Lampblack Literary Foundation, a nonprofit supporting Black writers. He has also been director of programs and partnerships at Poets & Writers.

    Last week, cartographer, geologist, and painter Mark Adams led a coastal geology lesson for the fellows. “He showed them how the Cape came to be,” says Kehou. The fellows also went foraging for mushrooms in Wellfleet with food writer Elspeth Hay. Afterward, they made mushroom ragu in FAWC’s communal kitchen. “I could smell it from my office,” says Kehou, “which is pretty far away.”

    The orientation has also included a sunset sailing trip, movie night, and a tour of Commercial Street. “The fellows are having a blast,” says Kehou. “The orientation is grounding them in this place and its history.”

    In past years, FAWC’s visual arts fellows have largely been painters. This year, “there are quite a few fellows who work with film — still images and moving images,” Kehou says. There are a lot of interdisciplinary visual artists working in a variety of mediums, he adds.

    Brief profiles of the 10 FAWC visual arts fellows follow.

    José De Sancristóbal uses photography, film, and writing to explore the way lens-based images inform society, particularly how cameras are used to regulate and monitor citizens. His work draws both from realism and fantasy, distorting traditional ways of identification.

    Born in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, Alejandro Guzmán creates works that encourage viewers to confront their relationships with structure and space. His mixed-media, geometric, sculptural works seem otherworldly yet entirely physical. Guzmán is a returning fellow from 2013-14.

    Elena Kovylyaeva is based in Leipzig, Germany. Her work has been exhibited in Germany and the U.S. Using found materials, Kovylyaeva focuses on a tactile experience — her work, mostly done in muted colors, is cracked, frayed, and folded.

    Dani Levine is an artist and educator currently living in Astoria, Queens, in New York City. Since 2023, she’s been an artist in residence at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. According to her artist statement on the FAWC website, Levine’s paintings “converse with queer-feminist aesthetics to explore themes of chance, agency, and resilience.”

    Born in Zibo, China, Mengwei Ma is now based in Beijing. A writer, director, and actress, Ma is currently raising money for a new short film titled A Piece of Shit. She’s also writing a feature film script and a novel. In her FAWC artist statement, Ma says that the artistic process is about “discovering the true connection between the self and the world.”

    Ian Page is interested in continuity. How does continuity reject change yet embrace progress? His sculptures, installations, and videos confront things that stay. In his artist statement, Page specifically mentions candy bars: “Why don’t they go away?”

    Zeinab Shahidi Marnani was born in Isfahan, Iran and now lives in Tehran and New York. Her work includes the disciplines of video installation, painting, and collage and explores the idea of vision and perspective. Shahidi Marnani is a returning fellow from 2023-24.

    Edd Ravn is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York. According to his artist statement, his practice includes “growing bacteria, painting with rainwater, recording soundscapes, and designing public furniture to co-create animate objects that question perception, connection, and change.”

    Born in Xi’an, China, Cherrie Yu now lives in the U.S. Her work involves choreography, moving images, writing, and installation, with a particular focus on how embodied knowledge is kept and then passed on.

    Based in Caracas, Venezuela, Carlos Zerpa is an artist, creative producer, educator, and social entrepreneur. His work addresses social issues in South America and the Caribbean through storytelling. Zerpa’s scriptwriting, design, animation, and street art is “rooted in cooperation and solidarity,” according to his artist statement.

    Exhibitions of work by the visual arts fellows will be on display periodically from February through April at FAWC’s “Fellow Fridays.” Brief profiles of this year’s 10 writing fellows will appear in next week’s Independent.

     

    POSSIBILITIES OF PAINT

    The Slipperiness of Realism

    A group exhibition of work by former FAWC fellows adds sparks of magic to the mundane

    By

    “Anything is possible” is written at the top of a painting by Sam Messer currently on view in “Edge Conditions,” a group exhibition of work by former visual arts fellows at the Fine Arts Work Center. The phrase appears on a sheet of paper arising from a typewriter. In an exhibition that features representational art, the phrase challenges the viewer to reconsider the visual possibilities inherent in artwork that claims to depict real things, such as the typewriter in Messer’s painting or the two figures sitting listlessly on a dock in a painting by Matt Bollinger, the show’s curator.

    The work in “Edge Conditions,” an exhibition now at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, often straddles the line between realism and abstraction. (Photos by Abraham Storer)

    The show’s title is a term in urban design that describes the junction where contrasting elements meet. Bollinger relates the concept to his experience of walking from a parking lot to a dune shack and traversing asphalt, sand, and several distinct ecosystems.

    “The works in this exhibition exist in edge conditions, junctions of contrasting elements, ideas, materials, and images,” he writes. “Some draw attention to the contrast between elements, leaving their seams visible… Others hide their joints under the illusion of continuity.”

    In Messer’s painting, the typewriter sits on a desk and dominates the composition in the manner of a portrait. Ostensibly, this is a painting of a typewriter. But Messer’s painting, like many similar ones he has painted, is not really about the typewriter. Rather, the object becomes an armature to explore the material possibilities of paint.

    In Anything Is Possible, Messer renders the white body of the typewriter by slathering butter-colored paint onto the canvas with the decadent flourish of a baker icing a cake. For its keys, he squirts out dollops of paint straight from the tube. They lie on a surface that looks like an orange fish skin, created with an oily varnish. It’s fun to observe how he renders the delicate mechanical innards of the typewriter with his heavy-handed touch.

    Anything Is Possible by Sam Messer.

    In his exhibition statement, Bollinger writes about how the parts of each painting become more than their sum. In Messer’s case, the painterly components of the work far outstrip any interest in the typewriter as an object.

    Herman Aguirre pushes the material possibilities of paint even further in a pair of meaty paintings in which he builds three-dimensional forms with globs of oil paint and oil skins. It’s unclear what these amorphous forms are supposed to represent. But there are discernable images in their midst, like flowers and a portrait, and the shadows they cast render them as physical objects, not just abstract forms on a canvas.

    Enfrente by Herman Aguirre.

    As in Messer’s paintings, representation takes second place to material play in Ezra Johnson’s depictions of stacks of sketchbooks. While Johnson works with much thinner paint, his loose gestures and casual approach to drawing locate these paintings in a territory that straddles both geometric abstraction and representation.

    Johnson’s concern with abstraction extends to his use of color, where he juxtaposes a primarily blue palette with sparse reds. Circular marks denoting the edge of a spiral-bound notebook, along with a children’s drawing on one surface, shift the image back to representation. But as viewers, we’re left on unstable ground, always oscillating between understanding the work as abstract one moment and realistic the next.

    For the artists in the show who work more solidly within the camp of representation, the edge conditions — or fissures between reality and artifice — are revealed through close looking. From a distance, works by Ellen Akimoto and Phil Whitman appear as legible pictures of everyday scenes.

    Houseplant 2 by Ellen Akimoto.

    Akimoto paints from a perspective of looking down at a houseplant. What appears as a photographic likeness of the serpentine plant unravels when one notices the ghost of a form in the background of the painting. Is it another leaf or a discarded idea? Likewise, the pot is only legible through its shape and shadow. Its surface is unrendered; it’s a wash of paint, a notation of color. Here, painting offers an opportunity to experience the passage of time and the process of something coming into being.

    Whitman paints what appear to be commonplace scenes of a red barn and children playing in a park. In Noli Me Tangere: Kensington Playground, he works with egg tempera on panel to capture the variety of color and texture in the scene. His fastidious, obsessive marks render the space with a hyperrealism that far surpasses casual observation. The marks create a reality unto themselves, dancing across the surface of the panel in all manner of movement. They sway and overlap each other in a grassy hillside; when depicting gravel, they’re measured and uniform. The picture recalls the strangeness of looking at something too closely or under a microscope.

    Noli Me Tangere: Kensington Playground by Phil Whitman.

    In his other painting in the show, Cerridwen, Whitman pays close attention to overlooked details like vines growing out of a gutter and the variation in color among shingles on the roof of a barn. Two abstract forms hang on the barn doors. They could be images, like Midwestern barn quilts, attached to the surface of the doors. But they could just as likely be abstract aberrations from the artist’s imagination.

    The slipperiness of realism surfaces in many of the other works in the exhibition, including James Stanley’s tender portrait of his daughter. The tight rendering of her face and strands of hair gives way to a background painted in lush swirls of purple paint. Anne Clare Rogers’s sculpture Weathervane depicts a leg made of paper and human hair. The hairs protrude from the surface of the sculpture with a creepy, lifelike accuracy. But the illusion falls apart upon close inspection: what appears as skin is paper, and the leg tapers off before a foot is rendered. There’s more at play here than mere illusionism.

    Dreaming Child by James Stanley.

    Whereas realism can often be perceived as stodgy or academic, reality becomes a fertile territory for creative possibility in “Edge Conditions.” In the process, the show reorients us to our reality, making us see the world anew — or, at least, through the eyes of someone else.

    Bollinger’s painting of two figures smoking and drinking Slurpees by a lake could easily have been a banal and unglamorous image of suburban ennui. But he elevates the scene through a dramatic, almost ecstatic use of color. “Anything is possible” guides Bollinger’s formal decisions, adding a spark of magic to the mundane.

    ‘Edge Conditions’

    The event: An exhibition of work by former fellows of the Fine Arts Work Center
    The time: Through Aug. 23 in Provincetown; Sept. 6-8 in New York City
    The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown; The Armory Show, 429 11th Ave., New York City
    The cost: Free (Provincetown); $57 (Armory Show general admission)

    ART AND WORDS

    Workshops at FAWC Inspire Provincetown Schools Artists and Poets

    A showcase of spring prints, dreamy cityscapes, and peace-seeking poems

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Seven third-graders from the Provincetown Schools took the stage at the Fine Arts Work Center on April 11 to thank artist Vicky Tomayko for showing them how to make prints.

    The students had taken a class in the center’s printmaking studio with Tomayko, etching their images on plates and running them through the press. The class was part of a program called “Directions: Collaborations in Art Making and Word Play,” part of a series of activities with artists from FAWC in March.

    Third-graders in front of the sixth-graders’ work from drawing sessions with FAWC fellow Rehab El Sadek. From left: Ever Schneider, Kaela Carter, Lyla Keyes, Bea Ferreira, Trent Burritt, Victor DePoalo, and Julian Lima. (Photos by Pat Kearns)

    Eager to present their showcases, the students and about 30 audience members, mostly their peers, then followed Tomayko into the print shop, where the exbibit “Monoprints: Signs of Spring” was on display.

    It was, says Tomayko, “One of my favorite days at the work center.” Tomayko is a longtime teacher at FAWC.

    Ever Schneider was the first to show her work, a print featuring polka dots she made with a finger dipped in paint. Then Trent Burritt showed his print: “I went for a sunset and robins and blue jays — how they nest and stuff,” he said, “and some flowers sprouting.”

    Spaceships, stars, clouds, and little green beings figure in another closeup of the students’ collaborative mural.

    Julian Lima was next. “That’s a piece of pizza,” he said. “It’s cheese, because I’m a vegetarian.” His is a minimalist print of solid shapes in deep colors.

    Lyla Keyes’s print shows birds coming out in spring and a heart-shaped figure. “Because sometimes, more in spring than summer and winter, I feel like I love the animals more and flowers and all the nature,” she said.

    The students had previously created prints in their classroom illustrating events in the Revolutionary War, but at FAWC their works focused on color and shape. “How many of you want to continue making art for the rest of your lives?” asked painter and FAWC facilities director Jerome Greene. All of the students jumped up and raised their hands.

    FAWC visual arts fellow Agnes Walden shows Provincetown Schools third-grade students her printmaking process. Next to her is Julian Lima. In back are students Victor DePoalo, Trent Burritt, and Kaela Carter; Nate Goodman of Provincetown Community Television; students Lyla Keyes and Bea Ferreira; Nancy Flasher, who handles field studies at the schools; and FAWC Program Director David Simpson.

    FAWC visual arts fellow Agnes Walden showed the students prints she made on heavy limestone. “The bigger the stone, the more prints you can make over time,” said Walden, explaining that the stone gets smaller and smaller as works are produced — “kind of what happens to limestone in a river.”

    As part of the same collaborative artmaking series, sixth-grade students worked with visual arts fellow Rehab El Sadek and their teachers David McGlothlin and Michael Gillane on a mapmaking and city drawing project. The resulting mural was hung behind the stage by Greene, who said he rarely displays art in the work center’s Stanley Kunitz Common Room, but for the students he had made an exception.

    During their workshop sessions, the students split into two groups. One group painted portraits while the other worked in the abstract. Jon Gunn, one of the sixth-graders, stepped up to the podium and described the left side of the imagined cityscape. “We did futuristic work,” he said. “Nike does flying shoes now — so I made shoes. I also made a robot chef that prepares all the food in the city.”

    This part of the mural created by sixth-graders in a mapmaking workshop includes houses, bugs, and a stairway to the sky.

    While sixth-graders made prints and drew maps, a group of middle-years students (grades six through eight) wrote poetry during their time at FAWC. “Today, we celebrate a roomful of talented and emerging writers,” said FAWC Director Sharon Polli, thanking poets Tyler Raso and David Hutcheson, who led a series of workshops with the students.

    A poster invites friends and family to the students’ showcases. (Image courtesy Provincetown Schools)

    After each reading, middle-years language and literature teacher Amy Rokicki encouraged audience members to “snap, clap, and shower with praise” those who were reading.

    Shakira Brooker’s “Nothing Good Lasts Too Long” addresses the death of her aunt. “Tears are words only God understands,” she read.

    “I am peace when there is no war,” read Silas Hamilton, who had worked on his poem with Hutcheson.

    “No disruptions, no pressure, just peace,” read DeAndre Luster.

    “Keeping people’s hearts from breaking in the first place,” read Andrew Prada from “Happy,” his poem that tries to shift the listener’s mood.

    Nath’allia Steele read a rhyming poem she titled “A Poem of Healing.” She wrote: “Forgiveness lingers in the shadows,” and “In the dance of heartbreak and forgiveness/ We find the strength to rise above the mess.”

    Trinity Thibeau read, “I shine like the sun and smile at who I have become.”

    After the reading, Rokicki chatted with seventh-grader Matthew Peres. “Last year, Matthew was locked in the bathroom for the readings and a teacher kept going in to try to get him out,” she said. “This year, after writing a beautiful poem with Tyler Raso, Matthew asked Tyler to read his poem for him. Then, on the bus here, he finally decided to read the poem.”

    “I grew up,” said Peres.

    Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on April 18, incorrectly identified student Jon Gunn as “Joe” and teachers David McGlothlin and Michael Gillane as “Mr. Mac” and “Mr. Villains.”

    FREQUENCIES

    Tinja Ruusuvuori Practices Giving Up Control

    In her radio station, the FAWC fellow taps into a collective imagination

    By

    In Tinja Ruusuvuori’s studio at the Fine Arts Work Center, some of her recent artwork is in piles on the floor. One piece that she recently showed at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum — a cascading length of unstretched canvas painted green — sits crumpled underneath recent prints scattered about among coils of wire. “I’m trying to be casual and let go of control,” says Ruusuvuori.

    Tinja Ruusuvuori in her studio at the Fine Arts Work Center. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    Nothing in Ruusuvuori’s studio seems precious in its display or execution. In recent prints, where the registration is always a bit off, she playfully experiments with forms: she makes monoprints with the impressions of wires, splashes turps across the surfaces she prints, and etches into discarded milk cartons. She’s not sure yet what she’ll show in an upcoming showcase at FAWC, but she wants to convey the process-driven energy of the work.

    “I’m trying to figure out a way to show some of these works without feeling that they are already dead in the gallery space,” she says.

    Ruusuvuori, who is from Finland and describes herself as an “anti-disciplinary artist,” is in her second year as a resident at FAWC. She studied documentary filmmaking at Aalto University in Helsinki after working for eight years as a screenwriter and host for a children’s TV program — an experience that she credits with preserving her sense of childlike play and curiosity.

    She also has a graduate degree in fine art practice from the Glasgow School of Art. She ended up in Provincetown after a friend from Maine told her about the FAWC residency. “This is how I want to end up in places, through that grid of love and interconnectedness,” says Ruusuvuori.

    Ruusuvuori has been exploring printmaking for the first time during her fellowship. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    In Provincetown, she has been working on extending that grid by establishing a mini-FM radio station, Radio Uncertainty, which can be heard on the airwaves around FAWC. That, in addition to printmaking and working on her first feature-length documentary, has been her primary creative pursuit here.

    Like her printmaking, her radio station embraces mistakes and happenstance. “I can’t control what comes out from the press, and I’m always a little surprised or disappointed,” Ruusuvuori says. In her radio work, she says, she “tries to stay open to what happens in the community and collective imagination.”

    Both mediums are new for her, and she relishes the role of being an amateur. She’s had her share of failures, including a kite she made with an open wave receiver attached to it. “It didn’t work out very well,” says Ruusuvuori. “It barely soars and often fails to get any signal. There’s been a lot of humor, and it helps me to be more resilient. It feels like a resistance against success-driven systems.”

    Sketch for a radio chapel, dry point on oat milk carton. (Photo courtesy Tinja Ruusuvuori)

    Radio Uncertainty originates from the front of her studio, where she constructed a cozy womb-like work space. The lighting is dim and warm, projecting shadows of spiraling wires on the walls, which are covered with recycled cardboard. “I’ve been trying to use things that are already around,” she says.

    From her studio, she has hosted wide-ranging conversations and connections. On Christmas Day, she invited in anyone who didn’t have a place to go for the holiday. Four people showed up, including other fellows and townspeople, and they discussed uncertainty on the Cape.

    On a snowy day she pulled in Jerome Greene, the facilities director at FAWC, to take a break from snow blowing and discuss living in Provincetown on a budget. Jay Critchley has stopped by and played from his collection of bells; there was one broadcast of a reading from Time and the Town from Mary Heaton Vorse’s bedroom; writer Philip Hoare discussed the sense of home for the Rice’s whale with Tommy Tucker from the Center for Coastal Studies. Ruusuvuori describes the experience as both intimate and collective.

    Her most recent conversation featured a discussion between Aden Choate, a Mary Heaton Vorse fellow at the Provincetown Independent, and LaRissa Rogers, a FAWC fellow, about collectivizing care. “It was really windy, and there were some technical issues,” says Ruusuvuori. “There’s always some interference.” But that’s part of the point. “Interference is interesting,” she says. “What’s the sound of interference in Provincetown?”

    A still, by former FAWC fellow Yahna Harris, from Tinja Ruusuvuori’s in-process film Matri(x)archy. (Photo courtesy Tinja Ruusuvuori)

    Ruusuvuori considers Radio Uncertainty a queer project in its embrace of interference, fluidity, and unexpected sources of connection. “I’m moving away from the idea of the artist or lover as a singular being,” says Ruusuvuori. The station changes its name and pronouns daily, has no set airtime, and sometimes changes its frequency. “I’m interested in what happens when you’re falling between frequencies,” she says.

    The project is also personal. “I find present systems alienating, and I’m trying to find belonging,” she says. Her yearnings are utopian, where a sense of community — like a found family — becomes a source of inspiration and connection, holding up individuals in the space between secure frequencies.

    Her new documentary, with the working title Matri(x)archy, also explores themes of connection and care. She describes it as an “associative journey,” and it builds from her other film work, which eschews straightforward narrative in favor of looser arrangements of enigmatic situations and characters. So far, she’s filmed in the U.K. and Finland, where she focused on the members of a Finnish women’s choir who were preparing for a ritual to liberate themselves from caretaking roles.

    She has continued work on the documentary here, thinking of the radio station as a character. She’s filmed some of the radio conversations and “filmed the station talking on its own, broadcasting signals from the future,” says Ruusuvuori.

    As a director, Ruusuvuori is no amateur. Her cinematography is cleanly composed, and scenes are carefully ordered. She sees some overlaps in methodology between her filmmaking and more experimental projects.

    “In documentary filmmaking, you can’t really control a situation,” she says. “You just have to trust.”

    She’s eager to continue trusting. She’ll bring the bold gestures of her experimental projects from Provincetown back to Finland, where she will finish her film over the next year. “This work has made me braver and more comfortable not controlling so much,” she says.

    Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on March 28, incorrectly described a discussion with Philip Hoare and Tommy Tucker as being about right whales; it was about the Rice’s whale.

    That Grid of Love

    The event: A showcase with fellows Molly Anders, David Hutcheson, Tinja Ruusuvuori, and Agnes Walden
    The time: Friday, April 5, 5 to 8 p.m.
    The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
    The cost: Free

    PERFORMANCE ART

    A Fairy Tale at Land’s End

    In True Love’s Kiss, Miguel Braceli will create the queer procession he never had

    By

    For Miguel Braceli, Provincetown is at once extraordinarily real and as fantastic as a fairy tale. His studio space at the Fine Arts Work Center is more “gathering place” than workshop. His works resist the limitations of any one medium; they revel in fabrics and photography. His upcoming performance, titled True Love’s Kiss, is being meticulously planned but will unfold at the whim of the moment.

    FAWC fellow Miguel Braceli. (Photos courtesy Miguel Braceli)

    As the sun sets on Saturday, March 23, a cavalcade of people carrying a long length of tulle will proceed down Provincetown’s West End jetty and give Braceli a kiss. The performance is part of a larger project, A Queer Fairy Tale in Provincetown.

    Kisses have always frightened Braceli, he says. But he’s fascinated by the way they mark watershed moments in fairy tales. “The kiss in a fairy tale has this magical power to change everything,” he says. “A princess comes alive.”

    For Braceli, place is character and subject as much as setting. Before arriving at FAWC as a fellow, he had only a vague idea of what he wanted to generate here. “I came to Provincetown with the hope of creating my first queer piece,” Braceli says. It felt like “something I owe myself.”

    The contours of the project materialized after he became acquainted with the town’s idiosyncrasies: its architecture, wintry social ecosystem, and ardent sense of community. Braceli says he has found a sense of belonging here — the first time he has experienced that at an artist residency.

    “On a Sunday you’re sad, and you call your friends from town, and you go make dinner,” he says. “That’s something you can do in a place you’ve been living, at the very least, for five years.”

    His fairy tale is informed by a project he embarked on early in his fellowship called “Dear Daddy,” in which he interviewed older queer people “to learn about love and life, somehow recreating the figure of my father to get advice I never had,” he says. Braceli’s also been collaborating with artist and cartographer Mark Adams on a “Map of Love.”

    Braceli says his installation Biblioteca Abierta extended the idea of a classroom by allowing literature and knowledge to exist outside walls, including in the Barrio Pajaritos of Caracas, Venezuela in 2016.

    In True Love’s Kiss, Provincetown will be a main character. The performance is meant to challenge a deficit from Braceli’s childhood: his earliest learning came from fairy tales, he says, but he never recognized himself in them: “I’m doing a project that I would love to have had as a reference when I was a kid.”

    Braceli was born in Carabobo, Venezuela and studied architecture at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas. Having an architecture practice felt impossible in Venezuela’s political unrest and social upheaval, and Braceli turned toward activism. His work became increasingly performative: at some point, he says, “I understood that what I was doing was art.”

    In 2013, Braceli’s Biblioteca Abierta (free library) “reprogrammed” public spaces by leaving books splayed open in arresting patterns and numbers. “While the government was giving free food as a mechanism of control, this project was providing free books as a form of emancipation,” he says. Three years later, the project appeared on the streets of Barrio Pajaritos, a poor enclave in the Caracas subdivision of Chacao. His projects use art and communal participation to “activate public spaces,” he says. “A collaborative experience, working with other people and with different materials, changes reality for a few seconds and at the same time creates new memories.”

    Braceli’s Monumentos Horizontales performance in Guadalajara’s Plaza Juárez became a playground for kids in the park. “Things can happen onsite that are beyond the knowledge of the classroom,” he says.

    Braceli left Venezuela in 2018 for an M.F.A. at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and he’s continued working internationally. In 2020, his exhibition Monumentos Horizontales epitomized the unexpected turns of collective performance. Working with students in Guadalajara, Mexico, he organized a group walk with a life-size horizontal obelisk made of elastic fabric. When the group arrived in a park, kids clambered onto it, and the fabric unexpectedly became a playground.

    Braceli is three years into a collective project “reactivating” and honoring the work of Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt, known as Gego, a prolific Venezuelan-German sculptor and artist. Since 2021, participants have been sending in works addressing her Reticulárea, an installation linking lines in space. With submissions spanning the globe, the project addresses the Venezuelan diaspora. He’ll head next to Tulsa, Okla. for the three-year Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

    Braceli’s studio at FAWC is somewhat bare. It has a ring light and 14 nails he mounted in hopes of experimenting with how tulle falls. In one corner, a tiered tulle skirt that the performer Saltine will wear as she chaperones the fairy tale procession sits upright in a chair. There are maps on the table with geometric directions that Braceli says are preliminary plans for the aerial angles a drone will take in documenting the jetty spectacle.

    As Braceli talks about the gaps between performance and documentation, he’s drawing lines, circles, and arrows summoning each other like an abstracted concept map. True Love’s Kiss will unfold in real time, informed by how the wind billows the tulle and by who responds to the fairy tale’s open invitation.

    “It’s a conversation with the landscape,” he says, “with the people, with the contingency of what happens.”

    WRITERS

    Grand Stories Told From the Periphery of Loss

    In Grace Chao’s worlds, a single event can change the trajectory of a life

    By

    Something goes terribly wrong for one family in Grace Chao’s short story “Family Travel.” A train hits a couple’s small blue car — stopped on the train tracks going from Taipei to the Taiwanese port city Kaohsiung — leaving their orphaned newborn to the care of grandparents.

    Grace Chao will read at the Fine Arts Work Center this Friday. (Photo by Henry Chen)

    Chao’s story focuses not on the family at the heart of this tragedy, however, but on a Taiwanese American family on the train, who, like everyone else in the stuffy compartment, have not been told what’s happened. Although this family is ostensibly at the periphery of the misfortune, the next several hours on the halted train prove calamitous. One daughter’s violin cracks in the heat, setting off the father’s rage. Years later, the violinist and her sister look back on this scene as the traumatic genesis of the anger visited on them by their father from then on.

    But for the father, Chao writes, the moment conjures a different memory: of the man sitting next to him, holding a bonsai tree. He is moved “that one could love a barely living thing so much.”

    “I’m interested in how one very small event alters the trajectory of someone’s life, even if they don’t know it,” says Chao. “How differently members of the same family can look back on that event, and how that creates friction.”

    “Family Travel” is one story in a collection Chao has been working on as a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She will be reading from her work on Friday, March 8 in a showcase with writer Jack Eley and visual arts fellows Micha Patiniott and Zeinab Shahidi Marnani.

    Chao says her stories are often preoccupied with the idea of family — in particular, how time and memory can modulate and distort an individual’s perception of her family legacy.

    In her story “The Year I Became My Mother,” which won Sewanee Review’s 2022 fiction contest, a daughter grieving the recent loss of her mother to cancer recalls a road trip in which her father abandoned the family for an hour in their broken-down car. Stirred by this memory, she resolves to dedicate her 25th year to living the life of independence that her mother never had. In the end, the legacy of her mother’s life is altered.

    Many of the moments that inspire Chao’s stories are drawn from her life, she says, such as the train collision in “Family Travel.”

    “I remember learning afterward that we had hit a car,” she says. “It was strange, because to us it felt like a very slow collision — we didn’t know why we had stopped until later when we reached the station.”

    That moment was less momentous for Chao than it was for her characters, but it sparked intrigue and mystery: how could such a violent end to life be almost imperceptible to those on board the train?

    Some of the moments in her tales are passed down to Chao from her ancestors, who “told very grand stories,” she says. While both of her parents were born in Taiwan, their roots on the island grew in much different places. “My mom’s family had been in Taiwan for many generations, but my dad’s father came over from China after fighting in the Civil War,” she says. “His side lost, and he fled to Taiwan, leaving his first family behind.”

    Chao grew up in Cupertino, Calif., an hour south of San Francisco. She attended Stanford University, where she studied English before receiving an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Oregon.

    The stories in Chao’s collection all come from the same world: she writes about Taiwanese American families living in the Bay Area who often don’t have much in the way of community. “They are often quite isolated in themselves,” she says. Many stories trace the lineage of one family, starting with life in Taiwan under prewar occupation to the present-day tech boom of San Francisco. Her stories are written in different voices: one inhabits the mind of a woman coming of age alongside social media; another captures the moment her mother first arrived in California from Taiwan.

    Chao is interested in how immigration fragments intergenerational memory. “I think it’s amplified when children have grown up in a different place than their parents,” she says. “Parents obviously make sacrifices when they leave everything behind to move to a new country, but future generations sacrifice as well, even though those generations can’t see clearly what has been given or taken.”

    In that sense, another theme emerges in Chao’s work — of faith and the loss of it. For many immigrant communities struggling through dislocation, church can be a place to find one’s footing, Chao says. But for the second generation of immigrants, it isn’t always essential. “Sometimes, the second generation doesn’t immediately need that same sense of community,” she says. “And it becomes not just the loss of religious faith but the faith in how much your parents can do for you.”

    Chao has embarked on another project at FAWC: she is in the early stages of writing a novel, a multi-perspective family saga that takes place on the night of the older daughter’s prom. “It’s about how this family collapses on itself over the course of one night,” she says.

    “It’s important to me that my fiction always has the immigrant experience in the background,” says Chao. “But I want to focus more on the second generation.” While her narrators go through the same “American” rites of passage as their peers around them, “being second generation always suffuses that experience.”

    At Oregon, she says, a fiction professor gave Chao sage advice for ratcheting up the dramatic tension in those moments in her stories drawn from her life: “Just make it worse.”

    Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on March 7, incorrectly reported some details about Grace Chao’s family history. It was her father’s father, not grandfather, who fought in the Chinese Civil War and fled to Taiwan. The Japanese occupation referred to in the article occurred in prewar, not postwar, Taiwan.

    Family Tree

    The event: A showcase with FAWC fellows Grace Chao, Jack Eley, Zeinab Shahidi Marnani, and Micha Patiniott
    The time: Friday, March 8, 5 to 8 p.m.
    The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
    The cost: Free

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