“This place will always be a part of my life, more so than I ever imagined,” says the writer Vedran Husić. “The work that I’m doing here is so meaningful […]
fine arts work center
WRITERS
For H.R. Webster, the Poetical Is Political
Writing as “an act of radical imagination”
H.R. Webster has a poem provocatively titled “Failure.” “I have made fun of the way language/ is always finding its own end,” she writes. “I have made fun of these […]
ARTISTS
Meditating on Clouds and Cave Paintings
Tom Pappas’s art is intuitive and elemental
Tom Pappas is what some call a “painter’s painter” — one immersed in paint’s possibilities, letting process determine the result. For Pappas, the results are modest-size abstractions with earthy colors […]
WRITERS
That Feeling of Silent Communion With a Place
Far from Nepal, Samyak Shertok finds his home in poetry
“They came unarmed. They came/ half-masked. They came/ before the crow. They came/ with the moon. They came/ moonless. They came/ out of rain. They came/ as their enemy. They […]
WRITERS
Molly Anders’s Characters Confess All
‘Funny accounts of downfall’ from a childhood filled with AA meetings
A huge water heater lives in the middle of writer Molly Anders’s tiny kitchen. “This is Louis,” she says, gesturing as she makes coffee. She says all the other Fine […]
DAY FOR UKRAINE
Making Prints for Peace
Local artists get their hands dirty to help Ukrainian refugees
A couple of Wednesdays ago, a dozen artists gathered in the Fine Arts Work Center’s printmaking studio. They had been invited to create prints and donate them to “A Day […]
ARTISTS
Battling the Elements for Art’s Sake
Elizabeth Flood paints layers of history and meaning
As an elementary-school student in Virginia, Elizabeth Flood found a Civil War bullet while digging in the sand at recess. “It was on my radar at a very early age […]
WRITERS
Wandering the Topkapı Palace With Zeynep Özakat
A ‘novel in protest’ about a haunted harem
“Narrative weaves through many aspects of our lives in ways we are often not even aware of,” says the Turkish-born writer Zeynep Özakat. Her first novel, which she is working […]
ARTISTS
Nick Fagan’s Southern Comfort
Finding the ‘sincerity in banal objects’
Fine Arts Work Center visual fellow Nick Fagan knows the power of a good, weighty blanket. The bright colors and soft textures are a balm for troubled minds in turbulent […]
POETS
Writing of the Past, for the Future
Laura Cresté’s poems explore complex family dynamics
Laura Cresté still has Mead notebooks full of the nature poems she started writing around age six. She wrote one after watching a seagull attack a crab while on the […]
WRITERS
The Internet as a Place of Fracture and Connection
For Tracy Fuad, identity transcends geographic borders
Tracy Fuad was born the same month as the internet: March 1989. In her most recent poetry collection, about:blank, published in October, she describes the web as a bridge between […]
WRITERS
De-Generalizing the ‘Native Experience’
A FAWC fellow writes of growing up on the Blackfeet Reservation
“There’s very little legitimate literature about Native people,” says Fine Arts Work Center writing fellow Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, who grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. “It wasn’t until I […]
ARTISTS
From Black Resin Disco Balls to Cryptic Sky-Blue Paintings
Kevin Brisco Jr. considers his art a ‘container for concepts’
Kevin Brisco Jr. paints too slowly, he says, for that to be his focus as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. Instead, he is working mostly on conceptual […]
WRITERS
For Shastri Akella, Telling Stories Is a Labor of Love
An Indian-born author finds his queer identity in his prose
Shastri Akella’s first novel, The Sea Elephants, begins with these lines: “My father left the country the year my sisters were born. He returned six months after I watched them […]
ARTISTS
Complicated by Contradiction
Ellen Akimoto finds inspiration in ‘moments of flux’
Sitting in her studio in Provincetown, Ellen Akimoto says she has “a weird feeling of being at home and definitely not at home.” Originally from California, Akimoto arrived as a […]
