Mal Blum, once dubbed “punk’s greatest hidden treasure” by Stereogum, cleverly crafted songs that are are as self-effacing as they are viscerally relatable. In 2019 they released their latest full length, Pity Boy (Don Giovanni), an album that explores boundary setting and self-sabotage, and an exemplification of Mal's ability to interrogate the human condition with lyrical ingenuity. Following that, they released a 7", Nobody Waits b/w San Cristóbal, with Saddle Creek Records' Document Series in 2020.
Mozelle & Mike Flanagan
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Twenty Summers presents Mozelle & Mike Flanagan (featuring Cliff Lechy) LIVE at Truro Vineyards of Cape Cod, Truro, MA, July 16, 2021
Video: Michael Pineda Cestaro www.upabovecreative.com
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Mozelle Andrulot grew up in Eastham and attended Lesley University where she studied Liberal Arts. Her career has taken her to New York City and London where she performed at the SoHo House in both cities.
Here on the Cape, she’s performed at Mahony’s, Tin Pan Alley, The Muse and regularly with Zoë Lewis’s Bootleggers show in Provincetown. She has graced the stage with local notable jazz artists Bruce Abbot, Fred Fried, Fred Boyle and John Thomas. This local jazz jewel, along with Doug Ricardi’s Jazz till Dawn, entertains audiences from Wellfleet’s Preservation Hall to the Yarmouth Cultural Center. This summer she will be singing outdoors regularly at the Fox and Crow.
MikeMRF is a performing artist, recording artist, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter. His latest album Mob Music 2 hit #39 on the iTunes R&B Albums Chart and was featured on Apple Music. Album opener, "Tip Jar" landed in the Semi-Finals of the 2020 International Songwriting Competition and was featured in the Amazon Prime Show "30 The Series" along with two other songs. Mike is also a Lennon Award winner in the 2017 John Lennon Songwriting Contest for his original song "Mob Music", the title-track off of his iTunes Chart-Topping sophomore album. In 2014, Mike won 2 OUTmusic Awards (with 5 nominations, the most that year) including the highly coveted Humanitarian Songwriter of the Year for his song "Be Strong (LGBT Youth)". "Be Strong" was selected as Boston Pride's Flag-Raising Anthem.
Mike holds a Bachelor's of Music in Jazz Saxophone & Music Education from Berklee College of Music, as well as a Master's of Music in Music Theory & Composition from New York University where he currently teaches Songwriting and Composition as an Adjunct Professor. Mike has performed with Ada Vox, Matt Alber, Esera Tuaolo, Ruth Pointer (Pointer Sisters), Cassandra Wilson, Esperanza Spaulding, Varla Jean Merman and many more. He performs and music-directs various shows in Provincetown, MA.
Season 8 Fellows
Season Six Trailer
Twenty Summers Season Six took place in Provincetown's historic Hawthorne Barn between May 10 and June 15, 2019 where we hosted six weekends of concerts, conversations, artist open studios, and community events, presenting an eclectic mix of both emerging and established musicians, writers, cultural figures, activists, and artists. Our season was made possible by the support of our generous sponsors and donors.
Hello Neighbor: Climate Migrants & Community Journalism with Brian Vines
Brian Vines is a Chicagoan by birth and a New Yorker by choice. After completing the Masters Program in Broadcast Journalism at Boston University’s College of Communication he fetched coffee for some of the most respected journalists and news figures in the world during his tenure at CNN. After a stint in political communications Brian fell in love with his own reflection and reported for here! networks, NYC-TV, Brooklyn Independent Media, the internationally syndicated VJIAM show, and Broad Band Network3 among others. In addition to reporting, show running and producing Brian is also a skilled host and moderator of live events on topics ranging from contemporary memoir to police brutality. A dedicated cyclist, NPR subscriber, and podcast enthusiast, Brian can be spotted balling-on-a-budget, fighting the urge to binge watch and answering questions about his hair.
Vital Signs: Artist Talk with Maynard Monrow
Interviewer: Brian Vines
Maynard Monrow was born in Hollywood, California and currently lives in New York City. Monrow received his BFA and MFA from California Institute of the Arts. His work has been exhibited at numerous institutions and galleries including: The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Hollywood, FL; Gavlak Gallery LA and Palm Beach; Booth Gallery, New York, NY; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, NY and ACME Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2005). He has staged international performances in Rome, Italy, and participated in numerous projects including Ruffian’s Spring 2016 Ready-to-Wear Collection and LAX Art’s L.A.P.D. Billboard Project.
Poetry–Speaking to and Speaking with Raymond Antrobus
Interpreting services provided by codabrothers.com
Raymond Antrobus was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is a Cave Canem Fellow and author of ‘The Perseverance’ and 'All The Names Given' both being published in the US this year by Tin House. His first children's picturebook 'Can Bears Ski?' illustrated by Polly Dunbar is published by Candlewick Press. His work has been featured on NPR, BBC, The Guardian, Lit Hub, POETRY Magazine among others. His accolades include a Ted Hughes Award, Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award, the Rathbone Folio Prize and he was awarded an MBE for his contribution to English language literature. He is currently based in Oklahoma City.
Moving the Needle: Writing and Filmmaking with Shaina Feinberg
Shaina Feinberg is a writer/director from New York City. Her book Every Body – a candid look at sex from every angle – came out in January 2021 from Little, Brown. Her bi-weekly column in The New York Times, "Scratch" is an illustrated look at the world of business. Shaina is also a filmmaker who specializes in micro-budget filmmaking. In 2019, she was named by Indiewire as 1 of 25 queer filmmakers to watch. She has directed two original series for Audible: Aliens of Extraordinary Ability, starring Maeve Higgins and Cristela Alonzo, and Phreaks, starring Christian Slater, Carrie Coon and Justice Smith. She is a visiting professor at the Vermont College of Fine Art in the MFA program for film. She lives in Brooklyn.
Spaces of Reconnecting: Of Deafness, Internment, and Pandemic w/ Jeffrey Mansfield
Jeffrey Yasuo Mansfield is a design director at MASS Design Group and a Ford-Mellon Disability Futures fellow, whose work explores the relationships between architecture, landscape, and power. Jeffrey is a recipient of a Graham Foundation grant and a John W. Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress for his work on Architecture of Deafness, which explores how Deaf schools and other Deaf Spaces emerged as sites of cultural resistance. Jeffrey holds a Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and an AB in Architecture from Princeton University. Deaf since birth, Jeffrey is a Yonsei, or fourth-generation, Japanese American, and attended a deaf school in Massachusetts, where his earliest intuitions about the relationship between aesthetics, geography, and power emerged.
Interpreting services provided by codabrothers.com
Willed by Wit and Wisdom with Chanel Thervil
Chanel Thervil is a Haitian American artist and educator that uses varying combinations of abstraction and portraiture to convene communal dialogue around culture, social issues, and existential questions. At the core of her practice lies a desire to empower and inspire tenderness and healing among communities of color through the arts. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Pace University and a Master’s Degree in Art Education from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She's been making a splash in Boston via her educational collaborations, public art, and residencies with institutions like The Museum of Fine Arts, The Boston Children's Museum, The DeCordova Museum, The Harvard Ed Portal, and The Cambridge Public Library. Her work has been featured by PBS Kids, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Bay State Banner, WBUR's ARTery, WGBH, and Hyperallergic.
"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.
Claudia Rankine and John Lucas: Film Screening & Conversation
Join author Claudia Rankine and filmmaker John Lucas for a screening of and Q&A about the latest in their Situations series.
Situations, in Rankine's words, "is a multi-genre response to contemporary life in the twenty-first century. Each video is in dialogue with a natural disaster or a national or international event or policy. Our intent was to interrogate the political and cultural impact of catastrophic events on individual lives through layered responses to moments such as the attack on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina or “stop and frisk” laws. At times, these events were set in motion by a single encounter, as in the World Cup headbutt where Zinedine Zidane felt the assault that language can yield and responded to it. At other times, social media supplied us with the videos of shootings of unarmed people of color that were collaged in order to recreate the effect of an accumulated affront on a life, on lives. As artists and citizens, we were especially interested in how the media informs our understanding through specific racialized framing of these public events. Our national discourse reinforces or interrupts ideas informing the racial imaginary and since many, if not all, of these events engage the language of race and racism, this age-old tension was crucial as we set out to marry language to image. The documentary impulse behind Situations can be seen not only in the appropriated images but also in the appropriated language. Our titles attempt to locate the events in real time and in some works, like Hurricane Katrina, the text, for the most part, is taken from actual statements made in response to the displacement and abandonment of American Citizens. It is our feeling that both devastating images and racist statements need management. In other videos a frame was built for the images through appropriated texts from literary and philosophical sources which exist alongside the poetic lines. This ongoing series was conceived in part as a civic response to an archive of images of contemporary life that carries with them the legacy of the “afterlife of slavery.”
Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; numerous video collaborations, and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. She lives in California and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.
John Lucas has worked as a documentary photographer for more than 25 years and has directed and produced several cutting-edge multimedia projects. In 2014, Lucas completed his first feature-length documentary film “The Cooler Bandits,” which was awarded best documentary at the 2014 Harlem International Film Festival. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries both nationally and internationally including the Brooklyn Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Redcat, OK Harris Works of Art, La Panaderia, Aeroplastics Contemporary and Fieldgate Gallery.
Jaswinder Bolina & Victoria Chang in Conversation
Poets Jaswinder Bolina and Victoria Chang virtually gathered to discuss their latest books — Jaswinder’s first essay collection Of Color (McSweeney’s, 2020) and Victoria’s 2020 National Book Award longlisted Obit (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) — as well as artistic influences and a new generation of poetry.
Jaswinder Bolina is an American writer. His first collection of essays Of Color was published by McSweeney’s in June 2020. His most recent collection of poetry The 44th of July was released by Omnidawn in April 2019. It’s been named a finalist for the 2019 Big Other Book Award and was long-listed for the 2019 PEN America Open Book Award. His previous collections include Phantom Camera (winner of the 2012 Green Rose Prize in Poetry from New Issues Press), Carrier Wave (winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry from the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University), and the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (Floating Wolf Quarterly 2014). An international edition of Phantom Camera is available from Hachette India. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and been included in The Best American Poetry series. His essays can be found at The Poetry Foundation, McSweeney’s, Himal Southasian, The Writer, and other magazines. They have also appeared in anthologies including the 14th edition of The Norton Reader (W.W. Norton & Company 2016), Language: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press 2013), and Poets on Teaching (University of Iowa Press 2011). He teaches on the faculty of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Miami.
Victoria Chang’s new book of poetry, Obit , was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Other poetry books are Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. She also edited an anthology, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Katherine Min MacDowell Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, a Poetry Society of America Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and other awards. Her poems have been published in Best American Poetry. Her children’s picture book Is Mommy? (Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster), was illustrated by Marla Frazee and was named a NYT Notable Book. Her middle grade verse novel, Love, Love was published by Sterling Publishing in 2020. She is a contributing editor of the literary journal, Copper Nickel and a poetry editor at Tupelo Quarterly, as well as a contributing editor for On the Seawall. She is the Program Chair of Antioch University’s low-residency MFA Program, as well as co-coordinates the Idyllwild Writers Week. She lives in Los Angeles with her family and her wiener dogs, Mustard and Ketchup.
Gioncarlo Valentine & Dawit N.M. in Conversation
Twenty Summers was thrilled to host our first joint-residency with director and photographer Dawit N.M. & writer and photographer Gioncarlo Valentine earlier this October, and to hear them talk about the residency experience, projects they have (and have attempted) to collaborate on, and other projects they have worked on during COVID-19.
Dawit N.M. is a director and photographer currently based in New York. Born in 1996 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, he later moved to Hampton Roads, Virginia, with his family at the age of six. After establishing a deep interest in the visual arts, he became an ardent autodidact, committing himself fully to learning the art of filmmaking and later photography. His subjects have taken audiences into worlds of loss, devotion, intimacy, and innocence. In the same vein, the images question the transparency of narratives that are shaped by western influences. This relationship between identity and stereotypes inspired his first self-published photography book, Don’t Make Me Look Like The Kids On TV (2018).
Dawit’s directorial debut—a visual accompaniment for Ethiopian-American singer/songwriter Mereba's debut album entitled The Jungle Is The Only Way Out (2019)—earned him a nod for Emerging Director at the 2019 American Black Film Festival. Dawit’s first exhibition, The Eye That Follows (2020), is currently on view at The Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, VA, through August 16th, 2020.
Gioncarlo Valentine (b. 1990) is an award winning American photographer and writer. Valentine hails from Baltimore City and attended Towson University, in Maryland. Backed by his seven years of social work experience, his work focuses on issues faced by marginalized populations, most often focusing his lens on the experiences of Black/LGBTQIA+ communities.
Gioncarlo was a member of the 2018 class of Skowhegan’s School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2019 he opened his debut solo exhibition, The Soft Fence, at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon. He has had his work collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art, is a regular contributor to The New York Times, and has been commissioned by Wall Street Journal Magazine, Propublica, The New Yorker, Esquire, Vogue, and Newsweek among many others.
Diane Cook & Lydia Kiesling in Conversation
Authors Diane Cook and Lydia Kiesling join the first-ever Twenty Summers virtual festival to talk about their recent novels, The New Wilderness (Harper, 2020) and The Golden State (Picador, 2019), respectively, both of which examine motherhood, the state of the world, and glimpses at even darker futures in unique, funny, and sometimes devastating ways.
Diane Cook is the author of the novel, The New Wilderness, currently nominated for a Booker Prize, and the story collection, Man V. Nature, which was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, the Believer Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, Granta, and other publications, and her stories have been included in the anthologies Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She is a former producer for the radio program This American Life, and was the recipient of a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, daughter and son.
Lydia Kiesling is the author of The Golden State, a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree, and a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a contributing editor at The Millions and her writing has appeared at outlets including The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker online, The Cut, and The Guardian.