Classical string quartet Aurea Ensemble play their own tribute to Moby-Dick, “Melville and the Great White Whale,” which features Beethoven, Webern, sea shanties, and other nautically evocative music along with readings from the novel and from Melville’s correspondence with Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated his masterpiece.
Production Credits: Filming by Stone Dow and Lise King, Sean Gannett Productions Audio by Chris Blood Edited by Filipp Kotsishevskiy
On May 20, 2017, Twenty Summers was proud to bring together the accomplished and widely admired Richard Russo and Hannah Tinti, each on tour for a new book: Russo for Trajectory, a quartet of novellas; Tinti for her second novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, praised in the Washington Post as “a master class in literary suspense.” In addition to writing ten other books, including the Pulitzer prize–winning novel Empire Falls and the best-selling memoir Elsewhere, Russo is a veteran screenwriter. His novel Nobody’s Fool was made into a movie starring Paul Newman and Jessica Tandy. Tinti is also the author of an internationally acclaimed story collection, Animal Crackers, and The Good Thief, winner of the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. She is a cofounder and executive editor of the journal One Story and of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Italy. She was recently named one of the 100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture. Russo and Tinti, friends as well as kindred authors, discuss life, literature, and anything else they please.
Twenty Summers cofounder Julia Glass moderated.
Media sponsorship by WCAI.
Production Credits: Filming by Stone Dow and Lise King, Sean Gannett Productions Audio by Chris Blood Edited by Filipp Kotsishevskiy
Husband-and-wife duo David Wax and Suz Slezak, known as David Wax Museum, returned to the Barn for the second time to share their rousing Latin-folk-inspired indie rock. They performed a stripped down set of songs from their latest EP A La Rumba Rumba, a celebration of the Latin folk music that inspires them most, as well as tunes from their fourth full length album, Guesthouse.
Production Credits: Filming by Stone Dow and Lise King, Sean Gannett Productions Audio by Chris Blood Edited by Filipp Kotsishevskiy
Twenty Summers welcomed authors Alysia Abbott (Fairyland) and Joan Wickersham (The Suicide Index) to the Barn, who have both written critically acclaimed memoirs about the fathers they loved and lost too soon. The two authors discussed their memoirs, their writing lives, and their other work in this deeply personal and fascinating conversation. WCAI was a media sponsor for this event.
Production Credits: Filming by Stone Dow and Lise King, Sean Gannett Productions Audio by Chris Blood Edited by Filipp Kotsishevskiy
As the latest installment of our ongoing tribute to the painters who worked and taught in the Hawthorne Barn when it was an art school, Marcelle Polednik, a museum director and curator, and Karen Wilkin, experienced art critic and curator, discussed and presented images from Hans Hofmann: Works on Paper, an exhibit they curated for MOCA Jacksonville in Florida, demonstrating the ever-evolving work of Hofmann and the inspiration he drew from Provincetown itself.
This event and video were made possible by generous support from the Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust.
Production Credits: Filming by Stone Dow and Lise King, Sean Gannett Productions Audio by Chris Blood Edited by Filipp Kotsishevskiy
Writer, illustrator, and photographer Garance Doré visited the barn on June 11, 2016, to discuss the current state of fashion, style, and her career with Twenty Summers co-founder Ricky Opaterny. Doré's eponymous blog reaches millions of readers, and the New York Times Magazine has called her the "guardian of all style." She has won the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s Eugenia Sheppard Media Award and is the author of the 2015 bestseller Love Style Life.
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.
Stephin Merritt visited Twenty Summers for a rare, live, solo performance on June 6, 2015. This performance is part of a solo U.S. tour by Merritt, which began on May 2, 2015. A longtime bandmate Sam Davol accompanied him on cello.
Two poets collide when Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields and Rives visit Twenty Summers for a conversation about poetry, language, music, and Scrabble.
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.
On May 28, 2016, Twenty Summers hosted a theatrical reading of 100 YEARS, a new book of sage literary quotations on every age from birth to one hundred. Compiled by Twenty Summers cofounder Joshua Prager and visualized by Milton Glaser, the legendary graphic designer who created the I ♥ NY logo, the book moves year by year through the words of our most beloved authors. A Century Onstage is performed by the actor Jim True-Frost, best known for his work on the HBO series “The Wire.”
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.
On May 21, 2016, we welcomed Nicole Atkins to the Barn. Her debut album, Neptune City, paid homage to her New Jersey hometown and won her a place on Rolling Stone’s list of “Top 10 Artists to Watch.” Since then, she has produced two more (Mondo Amore and Slow Phaser) and toured widely through the U.S. and Europe, both as a headliner and alongside bands such as Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Primal Scream, and the Avett Brothers. She has also performed on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” “Conan,” and “Later . . . with Jools Holland” and is a host on Sirius XM’s Spectrum channel.
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.
Musician, actor, author, publisher, and jack-of-all-trades Marshall Crenshaw launches Twenty Summers’ third season with an intimate acoustic solo performance. In a career now spanning four decades, Crenshaw has reached the Billboard Top 40 and been nominated for a Golden Globe Award. As a stage and film actor, he has portrayed other musicians, ranging from Buddy Holly to John Lennon. Since 2011, Crenshaw has served as the host of WFUV’s radio show “Bottomless Pit,” and he is a contributor to Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger’s HBO series “Vinyl.”
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.
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.
Patty Larkin redefines the boundaries of folk-urban pop music with her inventive guitar wizardry and uncompromising vocals and lyrics. Acoustic Guitar hails her “soundscape experiments” while Rolling Stone praises her “evocative and sonic shading.” She has been described as “riveting” (Chicago Tribune), “hypnotic” (Entertainment Weekly) and a “drop-dead brilliant” performer (Performing Songwriter).
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.
When Ariel, Sarah, and Rose Parkington of the Parkington Sisters pick up their instruments to strike up a song, the air begins to buzz. The chemistry between the three sisters is so present you feel like you can touch it. Hailing from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, the Parkington Sisters cut their teeth on music from the very beginning. Daughters of a prog rock musician and a classically trained guitarist and songwriter, they were raised playing music on picturesque Cape Cod.
About Twenty Summers
Twenty Summers is a nonprofit arts organization (EIN 27-1255685) that produces distinctive programs in the spirit of Provincetown's Hawthorne Barn, engaging with leading and emerging artists and cultural figures, while fostering the creation of new work.