"Different From the Others": Film Screening in the Hawthorne Barn
The Provincetown Film Society (PFS) and Twenty Summers collaborated on the first film screening in the Hawthorne Barn. To commemorate the 100-year history of cinema in Provincetown, we showcased another 1919 cinematic milestone: Different From the Others, the first known pro-gay film in the world. We proudly presented the newly restored film with live musical accompaniment featuring an original score by Billy Hough and Sue Goldberg (of “Scream Along with Billy”), followed by a Q&A with Brendan Lucas, an expert on LGBTQ film and history.
Rachel Rossin
Our 2019 Hans Hofmann Resident artist Rachel Rossin, a New York–based visual artist working in the media of virtual reality, sculpture, and painting, hosted a Recursive Life Drawing Class in the Hawthorne Barn. This approach focuses on drawing the body as it feels, not as it looks. The workshop began with an informal overview of deep learning and recursive neural networks. Participants brought their own drawing materials, and Rossin set a timer for each "pose," reading prompts and giving directions.
Rachel Rossin’s primary area of interest is the infrastructure of technology and its impact on contemporary consciousness. A programmer and researcher, Rossin's most recent works employ neural networks and artificial intelligence to examine human datasets. Her work has been shown at numerous galleries and museums around the world and at the Sundance Film Festival. Rossin was the recipient of a Fellowship in Virtual Reality Research and Development from the New Museum’s incubator. She is a subject in National Geographic's Genius series on Contemporary Artists.
Pete Hocking
Pete Hocking is a visual artist and writer based in Provincetown, MA. His work is concerned with personal narrative, place, poetics, and political consciousness. Pete will spend his residency in the Barn working on a series of new works based on walks that he has taken this spring on the Atlantic side of the Outer Cape—primarily in Provincetown and Truro, which he will discuss and share at his Open Studio.
His other preoccupations include Progressive Education and arts pedagogy; American Studies; Queer Theory; ecology and sustainable systems; the public engagement of artists; and documentary practice. He teaches at Goddard College in the Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts program and in the Division of Liberal Arts at Rhode Island School of Design. Previously he was director of Rhode Island School of Design's Office of Public Engagement (2007-2011), and Associate Dean of the College and Director of the Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown University (1988-2005). He's a founding board chair of the Provincetown Commons, an economic development center for the arts and creative economy. He's represented by Four Eleven Gallery in Provincetown, MA.
Lyle Ashton Harris
Resident Artist Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance art. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic. During his Twenty Summers residency, he plans to work on a large-scale collage and portraits.
Lyle Ashton Harris’s work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and has been exhibited internationally in the Venice Biennale, the Bienal de São Paulo, and most recently at the Centre Pompidou in Parisl. He has been a recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Harris’s multimedia installation Once (Now) Again was included in the 78th Whitney Biennial, and his three-channel video work Ektachrome Archives (New York Mix) is in the Whitney’s permanent collection. In 2017 Aperture published his book Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs. Harris is an associate professor of Art at New York University. He is represented by Salon 94.
Megan Hinton
Local resident artist Megan Hinton is an abstract painter and visual artist based on Cape Cod. Hinton will give an artist talk to present and discuss the work she creates during her time in the Barn, to be followed by an audience Q&A and then an evening of music and live projections. During her residency, Hinton plans to paint interior and exterior views of the Hawthorne Barn, aiming to capture the subtleties and vignettes that give the place its character. Through nocturnal projections of her work that incorporate historical photographic references, she hopes to use painting as a way of joining past and contemporary experiences of the Hawthorne Barn and its legacy.
Megan Hinton, a published art writer, educator, and avid traveler, has been exhibiting her work in New England and beyond for over fifteen years. Currently an MFA candidate at Mills College in Oakland, California, she also holds degrees from Ohio Wesleyan University, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and New York University. Megan has been awarded numerous artist residencies in the United States, France, and Belgium, as well as three local Massachusetts Cultural Council grants. Her paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Cape Cod Museum of Art, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and the Artists Association of Nantucket.
Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick
Resident artists Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick are a collaborative team of artists who work primarily in the fields of photography and installation art, specializing in fictitious histories set in the past or future. The duo plan to use their time in the Barn to commence work on a mural photograph (8ft x 24ft) that will be the centerpiece of their show at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in Summer 2020. The imagery will be loosely based on James Ensor’s “Christ’s Entry into Brussels” from 1889. Over the course of the residency and subsequent weeks, they plan to go into the dunes to photograph a crowd of carnivalesque characters flooding over the sands toward Provincetown. At their Open Studio, Kahn and Selesnick will present and discuss photographs, costumes, and source materials that will be on display in the Hawthorne Barn.
Kahn & Selesnick have participated in exhibitions worldwide and have work in over 20 collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution. In addition, they have published 3 books with Aperture Press, Scotlandfuturebog, City of Salt, and Apollo Prophecies. Their latest book 100 Views of the Drowning World was released in 2017 by Candela Books.
Courtney Marie Andrews in Concert (Solo)
One of the brightest rising stars in music today is singer-songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews, a powerful vocalist whom critics have compared with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. Her latest album, May Your Kindness Remain, was one of Rolling Stone’s 25 Best Country and American Albums of 2018; on tour this spring, she shared the stage with John Prine, Patty Griffin, and Deer Tick—but we had her all to ourselves.
Season Six Trailer
Take a sneak peek at the upcoming video releases for Season Six at the historic Hawthorne barn in Provincetown, MA. Courtesy of Twenty Summers. All rights reserved.
Adia Victoria in Concert
Blues singer-songwriter and performer Adia Victoria dropped into Provincetown for a stripped-down performance as she toured the world to promote her new, critically acclaimed album, Silences, which she recorded with Aaron Dessner of The National. Throughout the album's twelve tracks, which are making “the blues dangerous again” (New York Times), Victoria addresses the topics of mental illness, drug addiction, sexism, and other challenges that consume the day-to-day lives of women attempting to make a world of their own.
Jeremy O. Harris and Emily Bobrow in Conversation
"Meet Jeremy O. Harris: The Queer Black Savior the Theater World Needs." So read a recent headline in Out magazine; Vogue anointed him “one of the most promising playwrights of his generation." The hype is understandable. Though still in his final semester at Yale Drama School while this conversation was filmed, Harris has had two plays in production Off Broadway before runaway Broadway success with SlavePlay. Daddy, the second, stars Alan Cumming and Ronald Peet. Joining him on our very own stage to discuss his work and career was cultural critic Emily Bobrow, who observed in the Economist that Harris writes about race and sexuality "with humour, intellectual rigour, nods to pop culture and an engaging sense of spectacle," asking audiences to confront their own complicity in prejudice.
Eric Kandel and Emily Braun in Conversation
The Provincetown Art Association and Museum hosted an afternoon conversation that brought together Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel with Emily Braun, Distinguished Professor of 20th Century European and American Art at Hunter College. The two experts discussed Kandel’s most recent books, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science and The Age of Insight, in which he examines how science can inform the way we experience a work of art and seek to understand its meaning.
J Mascis in Concert
Best known as the frontman of the influential indie rock trio Dinosaur Jr., J Mascis has also been a solo artist, producer, and film composer. Dinosaur Jr. was founded in 1984 and became one of the most highly regarded groups in alternative rock. By reintroducing volume and attack in his songs, Mascis shed the strict limitations of early 1980s hardcore, becoming an influence on the burgeoning grunge movement. He continues to inspire a generation of guitar players and songwriters today. He treated us to an intimate solo acoustic performance, sharing tunes from his widely acclaimed 2018 solo album Elastic Days.
Luluc in Concert
Luluc comprises multi-instrumentalist, singer, and producer Steve Hassett and songwriter and vocalist Zoe Randall. The New York–based Australian duo recently released their third album, Sculptor. While masterful in its minimalism, the album is anything but quiet in impact. Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney says, “It's music that once you hear it, you can't live without it." In naming their 2014 album, Passerby, his album of the year, NPR's Bob Boilen wrote, "I've listened to this record... more than any other this year. These songs feel like they've always been."
Mountain Man in Concert
We were delighted to present the intimate harmonies of Mountain Man, which comprises three devoted friends—Amelia Meath, Molly Erin Sarlé and Alexandra Sauser-Monnig—who in 2018 released their highly anticipated second album, Magic Ship, a magnetic fourteen-song reflection on the joys, follies, and oddities of existence. In the eight years since Mountain Man’s debut Made the Harbor, the trio took an unintentional hiatus. Amelia Meath created the electro-pop band Sylvan Esso with Nick Sanborn. Molly Sarlé headed for a Zen center along the California coast. And Sauser-Monnig returned to Minnesota, then decamped to a farm in the North Carolina mountains.
William Tyler in Concert
William Tyler has been hailed as one of Nashville’s greatest electric guitarists, but on his brand-new album, Goes West, he returns to the purity of acoustic guitar, backed by a band that includes guitarists Meg Duffy and Bill Frisell, bassist and producer Brad Cook, keyboardist James Wallace, drummer Griffin Goldsmith, and engineer Tucker Martine.
Rebecca Makkai and Christopher Castellani in Conversation
Authors Rebecca Makkai and Christopher Castellani discussed their latest novels, both capturing pivotal historical moments in gay history. Makkai’s The Great Believers, listed by the New York Times as one of the Best 10 Books of 2018, is about friendship and redemption in 1980s Chicago, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and in contemporary Paris. Castellani’s Leading Men, a historical novel inspired by the romance between Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo, is set in 1950s Italy and modern-day New York and Provincetown. Dwight Garner of the New York Times declared it a “blazing” success, “an alert, serious, sweeping novel. To hold it in your hands is like holding . . . a front-row opera ticket.”
Alex Kotlowitz and Adam Moss in Conversation
In his most recent book, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago, acclaimed journalist Alex Kotlowitz once again takes up the subject of youth, poverty, and gun violence in urban America that he explored so powerfully in There Are No Children Here. Joining him at the Hawthorne barn discuss his work and the issues it tackles was Adam Moss, whose fifteen years of innovative work as editor-in-chief of New York Magazine made it the must-read that it is today.
Stonewall 50: Matthew Riemer, Leighton Brown, and Garrard Conley in Conversation
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, we hosted a conversation featuring Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown, creators of Instagram’s @lgbt_history, and acclaimed author Garrard Conley (Boy Erased). The three authors and activists discussed Riemer and Brown’s wildly popular @lgbt_history page and their debut book, We Are Everywhere, a rich and sweeping photographic history of the Queer Liberation Movement, along with Garrard Conley’s best-selling memoir. Boy Erased was adapted for the 2018 film of the same name, as well as the podcast UnErased: The History of Conversion Therapy in America. Their shared experience casts a powerful light on the LGBTQ+ community’s hardships in the past, its challenges for the future, and what Stonewall means to us today.
Jeffrey Foucault & Kris Delmhorst in Concert
Americana singer-songwriters Jeffrey Foucault and Kris Delmhorst may be husband and wife, but each has a distinctive sound and an extensive arsenal of songs to share. They shared the Twenty Summers stage to perform songs from each of their collections of music.