Antoinette Cooper

Writing the Body with Antoinette Cooper

May 20, 2023 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

Antoinette Cooper is a writer, rainmaker and TEDx speaker committed to the liberation of Black bodies through the arts, ancestral healing, social justice, and medical humanities. She was born on the island of Jamaica, and raised on the island of New York in the New York City Housing Projects. She holds a B.A. from Cornell University, a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, and sits on the board of Narrative Medicine at CUNY School of Medicine. She understands that there is no separation between all the realms of the body, the earth, and the arts so her work explores the intersections of these multiple dimensions. She is currently at work publishing a multi-genre collection that documents the historical and present day violences on the Black female body.

Photography by Debbie Baxter and The NEST Project

Alejandra Cuadra

Estamos Aqui, En Mente, Espiritu, Cuerpo, y Alma

May 23, 2023 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

Alejandra was joined by a collective of artists, movers, and community members in an afternoon of meditation. They led guests in movement, breathing, and bodily exercises which allowed audience to engage and explore the world around them in a variety of different capacities.

Alejandra Cuadra embraces clay, wood, mixed media, and her proud Latina sensibility as she weaves, braids, and knots together her history—what was, what is, and what is to come. Feeling neither from here nor there, Cuadra seeks to reconnect to her roots in Peru. She threads together meditations on identity, displacement, traditions, belonging, and a desire for freedom. Her installations reflect her quest—what it means to belong within the body, soul, community, and the rooted valleys on earth. Through her works, she seeks to create a space where we can hear and feel aspects of the human heart that connect us all.

Cuadra holds a BFA in sculpture with a minor in public engagement from Maine College of Art & Design, where she was a Warren Public Engagement Fellow and received a Pillars Student Award. She also holds an associate degree from Cape Cod Community College. Transplanted from her homeland of Peru, she can never forget where she came from and she works to reclaim her sense of belonging in the U.S. Cuadra has attended residencies at Yale Norfolk School of Art, Monson Arts, Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, and Ellis Beauregard Foundation. She is continuing her creative path honoring her apprenticeship with Steve Kemp and Matthew Kemp while being a part of Mudflat’s Technical Education Program. She currently lives and is finding roots in the Greater Boston community.

At Cross roads, Sitting on Uncertainty, Redefining Identity (2018)

Como canta los Ríos de la Luna. Aluminum, Uprooted roots, wire, sentiments of belonging.

Ruth Ozeki

Journaling and the Writing Process with Ruth Ozeki

May 19, 2023 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, whose books have garnered international acclaim for their ability to integrate issues of science, technology, religion, environmental politics, and global pop culture into unique, hybrid, narrative forms.

Her new novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, published by Viking in September 2021, tells the story of a young boy who, after the death of his father, starts to hear voices and finds solace in the companionship of his very own book.

Her novels, My Year of Meats (1998), All Over Creation (2003), A Tale for the Time Being (2013) and The Book of Form and Emptiness (2022) have been translated and published in over thirty countries. Her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being, won the LA Times Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Book of Form and Emptiness is the winner of the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction as well as the 22nd Annual Massachusetts Book Award, the BC Yukon Book Prize, and the Julia Ward Howe Prize for Fiction.

Her work of personal non-fiction, The Face: A Time Code (2016), was published by Restless Books as part of their groundbreaking series called The Face.

Ruth's documentary and dramatic independent films, including Halving the Bones, have been shown on PBS, at the Sundance Film Festival, and at colleges and universities across the country.

A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Ruth was ordained in 2010 and is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and the Everyday Zen Foundation.

She splits her time between Western Massachusetts, New York City, and British Columbia, Canada. She currently teaches creative writing at Smith College, where she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities in the Department of English Language and Literature.

Kate Rich

Feral Business: Kate Rich Artist Talk

May 20, 2023 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

Kate Rich is a trade artist and feral economist, born in Australia and living in Bristol, England. In the 1990s she co-founded the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT), an international agency producing an array of critical information products including economic and ecological indices, event-triggered webcam networks and animal operated emergency broadcast devices. The Bureau's work has been exhibited internationally in museum, educational and corporate contexts. Since 2003 she has run Feral Trade, an art endeavour and long-range economic experiment, using the spare carrying capacity of the art world to transport and transact coffee, olive oil and other vital goods, outside commercial systems.  

Kate is part of the finance team at Bristol's volunteer-run Cube Microplex, system administrator for the Irational.org art server collective, and a member of the FoAM network of transdisciplinary labs. At FoAM, she is setting up the Institute for Experiments with Business (Ibex), an emergent research entity whose remit is to think about business as a medium for generative experiments. 

In other collective affiliations she is a member of the Community Economies Institute (CEI), a group of scholars, artists, activists and practitioners from around the world who foster thought and practice to help communities survive well together. She is economist in residence with the Sail Cargo Alliance, an assembly of traders, brokers and ship owners who are reinventing the ancient art of running cargo on wind-propelled ships. And she was recently engaged as feral business advisor for the lumbung kios working group, organised by Indonesian art collective ruangrupa for the documenta fifteen international art event. Kate's ongoing preoccupation is to move her art practice deeper into the infrastructure of trade, administration, organisation and economy. To this end, she is currently working on establishing the curriculum for the Feral MBA, a radically different kind of  training course in business for artists and others.