Mission
Twenty Summers honors and extends Provincetown's rich artistic history through residencies and public events that cultivate cross-disciplinary dialogue engaging a diverse array of voices, from near and far, all striving to protect and sustain creative freedom in a time of accelerating change.
What We Do
Twenty Summers, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, was founded to honor and renew the legacy of Provincetown's historic Hawthorne Barn, giving artists the opportunity and the resources to create original projects and share innovative ideas in a place that has inspired their predecessors for over a century. We offer rare access to the Barn's majestic space through residencies for masters and innovators in a host of creative and intellectual pursuits and through intimate staged events for the public. Our name, invoking a poem by Provincetown's legendary Stanley Kunitz, underscores our dedication to celebrating the artistic soul of this place and this community, with the hope that they will continue to work their magic twenty summers from today.
In a month-long festival of performances, installations, conversations, and workshops held in the Barn every spring, and throughout the year in a separate, contemporary space named Stanley, Twenty Summers cultivates cross-disciplinary dialogue with and among painters, photographers, filmmakers, scientists, journalists, activists, inventors, musicians, culinary artists, and poets, amplifying culturally diverse and underrepresented voices from Cape Cod and beyond. We also partner with other local arts organizations to enrich and broaden our programming, which we strive to make affordable if not free. In prioritizing the pursuit of equity, sustainability, and creative freedom, we invite neighbors and travelers alike to immerse themselves in Provincetown's timeless yet evolving culture, to step back in history while contemplating future avenues of creativity in a time of accelerating change.
Please note that the Barn is only open to the public when we have a listed event.
Twenty Summers films and records almost all of our events. You can watch or listen to past events for free on our videos page and podcast page.
The name Twenty Summers is the closing line of Stanley Kunitz’s poem “Route Six”, capturing the pull of Provincetown and its legacy of art.
THE BARN
Charles Webster Hawthorne built the barn in 1907 atop a sandy bluff in Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. He opened it as an art school. Outfitted with wooden cupboards, a gambrel roof, and a glorious 15-by-15-foot window on its north end, the Cape Cod School of Art quickly lured hundreds of students from around the country. Hawthorne taught them to paint outdoors, “en plein air.”
Hawthorne died in 1930. Four years later the barn was reborn when Hans Hofmann, a master of Abstract Expressionism, assumed its lease from the Hawthorne family. Hofmann reopened the school, training the artists who continued to flock to Provincetown in his “push-pull” theory about the tension of space, line, color, and form. In time, however, the school closed. And as the decades passed, the barn became less an incubator of art than an object of art itself—its wood bearing the vestiges of the classes it held, the handprint of painter Henry Hensche coloring a slat in the loft.
Hensche was just one of the dozens of prominent artists and writers who studied or otherwise spent time in the barn. The list includes Norman Rockwell, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Tennessee Williams and Norman Mailer. Little surprise then that in 1979, the barn joined the National Register of Historical Places.
In the years that followed, the barn passed from Hofmann to the painter Morris Davidson to the pop artist Peter Gee. Despite their best efforts to revive the barn, it was a landmark in dire need of a physical upgrade and a new champion.
In 2012, our 501(c)(3) organization, Twenty Summers, found a buyer to renovate the barn. The buyer renovated the barn beautifully. And we took out a lease on the barn that enables us to host events and classes in the barn annually, from mid-May to mid-June, and to share them — both in person and online — with the rest of the world.
Twenty Summers launched its annual programming in May 2014, returning art to the barn for a second century.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The organization Twenty Summers acknowledges that it was founded and built upon unceded Native homelands of the Wampanoag Nation, People of the First Light, in Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. Provincetown is on the lands of the historic Paomet Wampanoag tribal village, near the villages of Nauset and Potanumicut, to name just a few.
We begin with a breath of gratitude for their ancestors and modern day descendants, and for the birds, insects, animals, and other beings that continue to grace the air, rivers, grasslands, bogs, cedar swamps, forests, and beach, that are both seasonally and permanently here, as well as the whales, dolphins, seals, turtles, sharks, fish, shellfish, and crustaceans in the Atlantic Ocean surrounding.
We echo the existing Federal tribal nations of Mashpee and Aquinnah in recognizing these lands and waters as important Relations with which we are all interconnected and dependent on to sustain our life, culture, and well-being. Mashpee and Aquinnah were places of refuge for tribal communities on Cape Cod and beyond, and who encourage responsible and sustainable stewardship of Turtle Island.
This Land Acknowledgement was prepared by Elizabeth James-Perry, a traditional and contemporary Native American visual artist, and one of our Spring 2021 Residents.
Elizabeth James Perry, “Decolonized Map of New England”, 2020, Watercolor and graphite on paper, Fruitlands Museum Collection
““Twenty Summers shouldn’t, technically, exist at all. Twenty Summers takes place in an historic barn at the end of an obscure little street, on top of a hill, reached by way of a narrow dirt path.
And yet, Twenty Summers has been packing them in since its first season, in 2014. People find the obscure street, people climb the little path, for the poetry and music, the art and conversation.
It makes sense, in its nonsensical way, in Provincetown, which has always maintained only a passing acquaintance with that which is technically impossible.
Art, however, will always be on the endangered species list, even as it continues to demonstrate its necessity to the human ecosystem. Even as people seek it out in remote and challenging places.
Thank you for supporting Twenty Summers. Thank you for whatever you’re doing to help keep its lights on, the lights at the top of a hill; the lights that demonstrate, for a month every summer, the ongoing life of our shared desire to know, to consider, to feel more than we’re technically supposed to.””