Ryan Landry was at Provincetown Town Hall on Oct. 26, but he wasn’t there to produce one of his outrageous shows. He just had a question. No, really. “What is an artist?” he asked.
It wasn’t the first time that question has been posed in Provincetown. It’s one that has echoed around here since at least 1949, when artists including Hans Hofmann and Adolph Gottlieb took on the topic in a discussion at Forum 49, an influential series of presentations on emerging modern art.
This summer, Forum 24 — a series organized by the Provincetown Art Gallery Association and chaired by artists Cid Bolduc and Grace Hopkins — resurrected the question as part of a celebration of the 75th anniversary of that important moment in American art history.
In July, artist and curator Mike Carroll put the question to a panel at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. That group included heavyweight figures in contemporary art, including artist and writer Mira Schor and curator Helen Molesworth. They raised no conceptual clash between traditional and abstract painting as had been done 75 years earlier but instead debated commitment and validation and uselessness, the kinds of existential concerns that, Molesworth joked, lead to “therapy and panel discussions.”
This Oct. 26 coda, “Everyone’s Forum With Ryan Landry,” was not a panel but was something more like an open mic — without the camp of Landry’s “Showgirls.”
Landry, a performer and painter who works in Provincetown during the summer, got the conversation going by answering first. “I think an artist is someone who is handed the keys to a portal,” he said. “They can choose to either open the door or tuck the key away for another time. Or become someone they regret.”
Landry told his own story and described how the support he got from his parents at an early age shaped the artist he is today. His parents worked in a factory in Maine, he said, but they had a broad view of what they considered to be art and what was appropriate for a child. “To them, there was no weirdness,” he said. He would draw a lewd image from a matchbook, and his parents, proud of what he had done, would take it to work to show to people.
“That’s when they really told me that they loved me, when I would draw for them,” he said. “I had confidence in that. I did not have much confidence in anything else at all.”
Landry then asked the 50 or so people gathered — a group that included artists, gallerists, and supporters of the arts — for their thoughts.
“It’s always been challenging to call myself an artist, even though I’ve been an artist since I was young,” said Jill Rothenberg-Simmons, co-owner of On Center Gallery. “To give yourself permission to identify as an artist is a big step,” she added, one that she took only with the encouragement of her wife, Jane Rothenberg-Simmons, and her business partner, Scot Presley.
The discussion about the challenges of declaring oneself an artist expanded from there.
Someone in the audience said that the problem of identifying as an artist is generational, arguing that young artists are more comfortable claiming their identities because they weren’t forced into molds like people were in previous generations. Maybe younger people are more comfortable with being artists because of their parents’ values, said another speaker, harking back to Landry’s story.
The intersections and complications of merging one’s identity as an artist with other identities wove itself into the conversation.
“I would be horrified to only be considered a ‘gay artist,’ ” said Landry when someone asked if he was comfortable with that designation. “I’m an artist first, a human being second, an absolute romantic or absolute idiot, and somewhere down the line is ‘gay.’ ”
Men can more easily claim they’re an artist, said Grace Hopkins, who is director of the Berta Walker Gallery. “As a woman first, a mother (and father) second, I usually say it last,” she said. For women, she said, a big hurdle is “just the ability to say, ‘I’m important, you should look at my work.’ ”
Painter Donna Pomponio said her artist identity emerged through her own effort. “After 30 years of painting, I’m an artist. I own it,” she said. “I live it every day in my studio. I worked very hard as a woman, as a single mother, being who I am. I found my voice behind the pen and paintbrush before anybody needed to notice it. That’s where I felt comfortable.”
There was a fierceness to Pomponio’s description of becoming an artist. “At 71 years old, nobody is going to deny me that voice that I have worked to get,” she said to audience applause.
“Money is an issue,” said Landry, raising that proxy for external acknowledgement.
But does money have to come in the form of commerce? Filmmaker Lise Balk King brought up the need for artists to have society’s support to live out their vocations. “You look at places like Canada, like Europe, where you have support of the arts that gives some sense of safety and security to people who dedicate their lives to being in service to its practice,” she said. “As artists, as a group, we are in a crisis right now, because we’re fighting for fricking scraps.”
“It’s constantly shoved down our throats that we are an arts community,” said Landry. “Endless advertising: ‘It’s an arts community!’ But we’re not getting the help that we need.”
Much of the ensuing conversation suggested that an artist is not just a vocation or identity crafted through an individual’s will but also through collective, society-wide support.
Hopkins proposed that the conversation about artists’ survival continue with state Sen. Julian Cyr, who lives in Truro, and with whom she said she had discussed housing for artists who are financially “hanging on a thread.”
Balk King said that some years ago her frustration about not getting funding for a film project had gotten her involved in civic life. The legislature wasn’t doing anything to grow film production in Massachusetts, she said, but when she served on Provincetown’s select board she was able to get the town to approve a film-permitting process. Artists, she said, “need to be in the rooms where decisions are being made.” Decisions like how tourism money gets spent, she said, how rents get funded, and how places like the Provincetown Commons come to be.
The Commons came up more than once over the course of the evening as a valuable resource for artists. Founded in 2017 as a co-working space and exhibition and event venue, the former school and then disused community center on Bradford Street has become an incubator for the arts by providing subsidized artist studios.
Beth Farley, who has a studio at the Commons, talked about the power of that physical place and of the town itself as one that still harbors artists.
“My artist community here is a community every single day,” Farley said. “I have the wonder of a child because of this community.”
