Conversations

John Boutté in Concert and Conversation

From New Orleans, jazz vocalist and songwriter John Boutté joins us for a conversation and performance. Boutté is a celebrated interpreter of the American songbook who rose to national attention when one of his own melodies became the theme to the HBO series “Treme.” His repertoire includes contemporary classics in popular music as well as traditional jazz and gospel. Rock ’n Roll Hall of Fame producer Allen Toussaint called Boutté “one of the very best singers in New Orleans.” Over a twenty-year career, Boutté has performed across the U.S. and Europe and released a number of solo albums, including Jambalaya, Good Neighbor, and All About Everything. He has also recorded with Cubanismo! and the funk band Galactic.

Joining him will be Gwen Thompkins, NPR contributor and host of “Music Inside Out,” which airs on WWNO.

Geraldine Brooks and Amy Bloom in Conversation

Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks will share the Barn’s stage with fellow New York Times bestseller Amy Bloom, in a conversation moderated by poet Gail Mazur. Geraldine Brooks is the author of five historical novels (including March and People of the Book), a memoir, and Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women. Last year, Booklist praised The Secret Chord, Brooks’s fictional portrait of King David, as “a gorgeously written novel of ambition, courage, retribution, and triumph.” Amy Bloom’s catalogue of fiction and nonfiction ranges from Away and Where the God of Love Hangs Out to Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites With Attitude. According to the Washington Post, her latest, Lucky Us, is proof that “if America has a Victor Hugo, it is Amy Bloom, whose picaresque novels roam the world, plumb the human heart and send characters into wild roulettes of kismet and calamity.” Both women have lived rich and variegated lives beyond the page: Brooks as an environmentalist and foreign correspondent, Bloom as a psychotherapist and teacher. Gail Mazur, a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College and author of seven poetry collections, serves on the Writing Committee at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center.

Bill James in Conversation with Rob Neyer

Bill James, whose quantitative analysis of baseball revolutionized the sport, talks with baseball writer Rob Neyer about his life, his career, and the national pastime. James, who now serves as a senior advisor to the Boston Red Sox, began writing his annual Bill James Baseball Abstract in the 1970s. These books focused on what James later termed “sabermetrics”—the objective analysis of the game. His ideas reached a larger audience when Michael Lewis wrote about him in Moneyball, a book later made into a movie starring Brad Pitt. Neyer, a writer for FOX Sports and the author or coauthor of six books on baseball, spent fifteen years as a columnist for ESPN and has served as the baseball editor for SB Nation.

Edith Windsor in Conversation

Edith Windsor is one of the two plaintiffs whose joint victory before the Supreme Court led to last year’s landmark decision in favor of marriage equality. In 2009, after the death of her spouse and longtime partner, Thea Speyer, Windsor learned that because her marriage was not recognized by the federal government, she was required to pay more than $300,000 in estate taxes. Windsor fought back, in United States v. Windsor, all the way to the Supreme Court, striking down the Defense of Marriage Act and winning a national following as a beloved and charismatic leader for human rights. Together with Speyer, Windsor is the focus of the documentary film Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement. Her many honors and awards include the Women’s Rights Award from the American Federation of Teachers and the Lifetime Achievement Award from Out magazine.

Onstage with Windsor, we welcome back actor, writer, and activist James Lecesne, whose hit Off Broadway one-man show The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey we are proud to have premiered in the Barn during Twenty Summers’ inaugural season. Lecesne is a cofounder of the Trevor Project, which was inspired by the Oscar-winning film for which he wrote the screenplay. He has appeared on Broadway, published YA novels, and is a frequent speaker at events focused on issues facing LGBT youth.

Artist and Teacher: A Hans Hofmann Symposium June 14, 2015

Twenty Summers hosted a two-part symposium sponsored by The Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust, in celebration of the recently published Hans Hofmann Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings. The first part is devoted to the catalogue raisonné itself, with a focus on his career-changing Chimbote series. Panelists include gallerist James Yohe, professor Ken Silver, and Stacey Gershon, collections manager at The Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust. The second part features a discussion of Hofmann as teacher with Paul Resika and Penelope Jencks, who studied with Hofmann at two different periods of his career.

Barney Frank and Joanna Weiss in Conversation

How did a disheveled, intellectually combative gay Jew with a thick accent become one of the most effective (and funniest) politicians of our time? Barney Frank grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, where, at age fourteen, he made two vital discoveries about himself: he was attracted to government…and to men. He resolved to make a career out of the first attraction and to keep the second a secret. Now, fifty years later, his sexual orientation is widely accepted, while his belief in government is embattled. Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage is one man’s account of the country’s transformation—and the tale of a truly momentous career.

David Hilliard in Conversation

Hunter O’Hanian, director of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City, speaks with David Hilliard about the photographer’s work, especially as showcased in David’s new book, What Could Be (Minor Matter Books), a semi-autobiographical progression of the artist’s explorations of family, societal norms, relationships, and moments of personal discovery in understanding concepts of masculinity.

Michael Cunningham and Adam Gopnik in Conversation

Pulitzer prize–winning novelist Michael Cunningham (a Ptown regular) and the Canadian-American New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik (who’s partial to Wellfleet) united onstage for the first time ever, to talk of matters newsworthy and intimate, factual and imaginary, lofty and lowbrow. Learning to drive, channeling Virginia Woolf, parenting in a foreign country, trespassing in the forbidden forest of the fairy tale.

Storytellers: Steven Petrow

Steven Petrow, also known as Mr. Manners, is a respected journalist and the go-to source for questions about modern manners. He is often cited in the New York Times, People, and Time, as well as on NPR. His usually gentle, often humorous, but always insightful advice has made him a nationally recognized expert. The author of five etiquette books, Petrow writes the “Civilities” column for the Washington Post; “Manners Hero” for Parade; and “Medical Manners” for Everyday Health. Previously, he penned the New York Times’s “Civil Behavior” column. He is also the former president of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association.

Storytellers: Melanie Braverman

Melanie Braverman is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of the novel East Justice and the poetry collection Red, for which she received the Publishers Triangle Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her artwork is in the permanent collection of New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum, and she is working on a forthcoming exhibition at AMP Gallery in Provincetown.

The Hawthorne Barn A Century of Art

In the first video addressing the legacy of the Hawthorne Barn, Josephine Del Deo, an art historian who has lived in Provincetown since 1950, spoke about artist Charles Hawthorne and his founding of the Cape School of Art. David Dunlap, New York Times reporter and creator of a remarkable online testament to Ptown’s art history spoke about other illustrious artists who worked in the barn.

In the second video, moderated by art critic Karen Wilkin, the focus was on the great artist Hans Hofmann, who worked and taught in the barn after Hawthorne died. Hofmann experts in attendance included Marcelle Polednik (director of MOCA Jacksonville), Lucinda Barnes (chief curator of the Berkeley Museum), and Tina Dickey (author of Color Creates Light). This event was sponsored by the Hans Hofmann Trust.

About the Participants:

James R. Bakker is the president of PAAM, president of the Cape and Islands Historical Association, chair of the Town of Provincetown Visitor Services Board and of the Provincetown Art Commission, and previous executive director of the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum.He is also an auctioneer, art dealer, appraiser, consultant and independent curator specializing in American paintings and prints and a member of the Antiques Dealers’ Association of America. He opened the doors to his first antiques shop at the age of fifteen; over the next forty-five years, he had galleries in Littleton, Cambridge, and Boston. Currently he maintains a gallery in Provincetown, where he also resides. Over the past two decades, Bakker has curated numerous museum exhibitions, many with a focus on Provincetown artists. He wrote the chapter “Charles Webster Hawthorne Founds the Cape Cod School of Art” in the The Tides of Provincetown: Pivotal Years in America’s Oldest Continuous Art Colony (1899-2011), published by the New Britain Museum of American Art to accompany their landmark traveling exhibition of the same title.

Lucinda Barnes is chief curator and director of programs and collections at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Before coming to Berkeley in 2001, Barnes served as curator of collections at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, and she has held senior curatorial posts at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art) and the University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach. Barnes has organized numerous exhibitions at numerous museums and has lectured widely, most recently about the internationally renowned Hans Hofmann collection at BAM/PFA. In 2002–2004, Barnes’s exhibition “Hans Hofmann: The UC Berkeley Art Museum Collection” toured to the Akron Art Museum, McNay Art Museum, Des Moines Art Center, and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Barnes is currently working on “Hofmann by Hofmann,” opening at BAM/PFA in July 2014, and a major Hofmann exhibition scheduled to tour in Europe in late 2016 and 2017.

Josephine C. Del Deo (often writing as Josephine Breen Del Deo) is a longtime resident of Provincetown who has enjoyed a prolific writing career spanning poetry, fiction, biography, art history, essays, and plays. She has also been active in a number of significant achievements in local conservation, such as the preservation of 3,000 acres of the Province Lands for the Cape Cod National Seashore in 1961; the preservation and establishment of the Provincetown Heritage Museum (now the Provincetown Public Library) in 1976; and the initial effort, as committee chair, to designate a portion of Provincetown as a Historic District. This initiative, launched in the 1970s, was finally completed by others on behalf of the town in 2003. Her work in art history produced a definitive biography of the Provincetown artist Ross Moffett,  one of Charles W. Hawthorne’s  favorite students, and she has published numerous essays about other area artists, including George Yater, Victor and Charles De Carlo, Mary Hackett, the “Indiana Boys,” Philip Malicoat, Bruce McKain, Oliver Chaffee, William and Lucy L’Engle. Her essay “Ross Moffett and the Modernist Tradition” was included in The Tides of Provincetown, the exhibition catalogue produced for the New Britain Museum of American Art exhibit in 2011. Her personal memoir of dune life on the back shore of Provincetown and Truro  between l953 and 2003, entitled The Watch at Peaked Hill, will be published in 2015.

Salvatore Del Deo is an artist and a longtime community leader in Provincetown. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1928, and began his artistic education at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1945, at theVesper George School of Art, he met Henry Hensche, a protégé of Charles W. Hawthorne. Hensche’s remarkable approach to portraiture convinced Del Deo to enroll in the Cape School of Art, where he studied for three years. In 1953, after subsequent study in New York at the Art Students’ League and a stint in the U.S. Army, he returned to Provincetown, where he met and married his wife, Josephine. A resident since then, he has had a long association with PAAM as a contributing member, vice president, and trustee, initiating classes for children there in 1965. He was also a founding member of the Provincetown Group Gallery and, along with his wife, of the Fine Arts Work Center in 1964. As an artist, Salvatore Del Deo has exhibited in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., and widely on Cape Cod. His work is in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution, the art museums at Williams College and Smith College, Harvard’s Houghton Library, PAAM, and the Cape Cod Museum of Art. Since 1992, he has been represented in Provincetown by the Berta Walker Gallery.

Tina Dickey, artist, author, and filmmaker, studied painting with former students of Hans Hofmann prior to conducting an oral history, now in the Archives of American Art, and exhibited with them at Copenhagen City Gallery in 1993 (USA on Paper). During her nine years as editor of the Hans Hofmann Catalogue Raisonné (1997–2006), she was chief research consultant for the PBS documentary Hans Hofmann: Artist/Teacher, Teacher/Artist (2002), while editing the journals of painter Myron Stout. She has contributed to numerous books and exhibition catalogs related to Hofmann and his former students in the United States, Canada, Spain, and Germany. Her manuscript on Hofmann’s teaching, Color Creates Light: Studies with Hans Hofmann, was published in 2011.  She is producing and directing an international series of four feature-length independent art documentaries on interrelated master artists; the first, Paint Until Dawn, will be released to festivals in 2015.

David Dunlap is the author and photographer of a building-by-building guide to Provincetown’s history, Building Provincetown, which is available online and in print. He wrote the text of the “Historic Provincetown Walking Tour” map. He lives in Manhattan and has covered architecture and landmarks as a New York Times reporter since 1981.

Dr. Marcelle Polednik is director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville. Prior to her present appointment, she served as the chief curator of the Monterey Museum of Art and as assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She holds a Ph.D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Dr. Polednik is a published scholar and has curated numerous modern and contemporary art exhibitions. Most recently, she authored “In Search of Equipoise: Hofmann’s Artistic Negotiations, 1940–58” for the three-volume Hans Hofmann Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings (Lund Humphries, 2014).

Karen Wilkin is a New York–based independent curator and critic specializing in 20th-century modernism. She is the author of monographs on Stuart Davis, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Giorgio Morandi, Hans Hofmann, and Georges Braque, and has organized exhibitions of the work of these artists, among others, internationally. She is the contributing editor for art for the Hudson Review and a regular contributor to the New Criterion and the Wall Street Journal. Wilkin also teaches in the MFA program of the New York Studio School. Her recent projects include the traveling exhibition American Vanguards: John Graham, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Their Circle, 1927–1942 (in collaboration with William C. Agee and Irving Sandler), which was chosen as “best show of 2012″ by the Boston Globe, and Hans Hofmann: Magnum Opus (with William C. Agee), a retrospective for the Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern in Germany.

An Evening of Writerly Conversations

Fantasy, Reality, and Bookcraft: The Art of World Building.” Gregory Maguire, author of the Oz-inspired series The Wicked Years, and National Book Award–winning young-adult author M. T. Anderson (Feed; The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing) discuss their lives, their craft, and their upcoming books in a staged conversation moderated by Katherine Howe, New York Times bestselling author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane.

Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker in Conversation

Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein joined Twenty Summers cofounder Julia Glass for a day of conversations with writers on May 24, 2014.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and a novelist and the author of ten books. Her novels include The Mind-Body Problem, Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics, and 36 Arguments for The Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.  She is also the author of Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, named one of the best science books of 2005 by Discover magazine, and the award-winning Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. Her latest book is Plato at The Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away. Goldstein has been received numerous honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 1996 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the “genius” prize.  She has also been named the Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association and Free-thought Heroine by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is visiting Professor of Philosophy at New College of the Humanities in London.

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. Currently Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker has also taught at Stanford and MIT. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Psychological Association. He has also received seven honorary doctorates, several teaching awards at MIT and Harvard, and numerous prizes for his books The Language InstinctHow the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. He is chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and often writes for the New York TimesTime, and the New Republic. He has been named Humanist of the Year and has appeared on such prominent lists as Prospect magazine’s “The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals,” Foreign Policy‘s “100 Global Thinkers,” and Time‘s “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”

Take Three: A Trio of Novelists Read and Talk

Bestselling novelists Andre Dubus III, Julia Glass, and Edward Kelsey Moore read from and talk about their new novels.

Andre Dubus III is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestsellers House of Sand and FogThe Garden of Last Days, and a memoir, Townie. His most recent book, Dirty Love, published in the fall of 2013, was a New York Times “Notable Book” selection, a New York Times “Editors’ Choice,” a 2013 “Notable Fiction” choice from The Washington Post, and a Kirkus Reviews “Starred Best Book of 2013.” Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches full-time at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Fontaine, a modern dancer, and their three children.

Julia Glass is the author of the novels And the Dark Sacred NightThe Widower’s TaleThe Whole World Over, and the National Book Award–winning Three Junes, as well as the Kindle Single “Chairs in the Rafters.” Her third book, I See You Everywhere, a collection of linked stories, won the 2009 SUNY John Gardner Fiction Award. She has also won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Other awards for her fiction include the Sense of Place Award, the Tobias Wolff Award, and the Pirate’s Alley Medal for Best Novella. Her essays have been widely anthologized, most recently in Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book, edited by Sean Manning, and in Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers, edited by Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon. Also a teacher of creative writing workshops at programs ranging from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown to the M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College, Julia lives with her two sons and their father on the North Shore of Massachusetts.

Edward Kelsey Moore is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat, which was awarded the 2014 First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was chosen as a 2013 Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. It was also named a 2014 Illinois Reads book by the Illinois Reading Council. Moore’s essays and short fiction have appeared in The New York Times and a number of literary magazines, including Ninth LetterIndiana ReviewAfrican American Review, and Inkwell. His short fiction has been featured on Chicago Public Radio’s Stories on Stage series. In addition to his writing, Edward maintains a career as a professional cellist, performing with a number of ensembles, including the Chicago Sinfonietta and the Joffrey Ballet Orchestra. A native of Indianapolis, Indiana, Edward lives in Chicago with his partner of many years. He is currently at work on his second novel.