Twenty Summers & East End Books Ptown

invite you to celebrate

Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring
An Evening with Brad Gooch
benefiting Twenty Summers

The fascinating and fast burning life and times of Keith Haring and his Pop Art contemporaries have been studied, written about, transformed into musicals, plays and monographs for decades. Multiple award-winning poet, novelist and biographer Brad Gooch has created the most extensive portrait to date, having interviewed or consulted more than 200 people for his multi-colored, masterful book. Meet and hear personal stories from Brad, a former model and denizen of the halcyon days of 1980s New York City, in this intimate gathering at our new space at 494 Commercial. 

This intimate dinner follows a public event upstairs at WOMR where Brad will be in conversation with Ken Fulk. Each dinner guest will receive a signed copy of Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring.

7:00 - 8:00 pm -- Drinks and passed hors d'oeuvres, mingle and chat across 20S and Schoolhouse Gallery spaces. Featuring live postcard art by local artists Naya Bricher, David Chick, Thom Markee, and Paul Rizzo.

8:00 - 9:30 pm -- Private, sit down dinner with Brad Gooch for limited guests in the 20S space

Tickets are limited. Please make your minimum $500 donation per guest soon. 

Even if you are not able to attend, please consider making a donation to Twenty Summers.

Contact development@20Summers.org to RSVP via check or for any questions.

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Donations to Twenty Summers are tax deductible, to the extent permitted by law; the non-deductible portion of each dinner ticket is $25. Twenty Summers is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit charitable organization; EIN/federal tax ID number is 27-1255685

$20 Suggested Donation

Join us for a preview of Signs from the Mainland, a documentary short that explores the extraordinary history of the Martha’s Vineyard deaf community, followed by a conversation with 2021 Twenty Summers Fellow Jeffrey Mansfield and director Michael Cestaro.

Starting as far back as the early 1700s, genetic deafness took a foothold on Martha's Vineyard where as many as one in four residents were deaf and a majority of hearing residents also were able to communicate in what is considered one of the precursors to modern American Sign Language. The film explores the deeper meaning and lessons to be learned from this unique enclave where deaf and hearing individuals coexisted seamlessly. 

Through interviews with historians and community members, the documentary asks, “why did this happen?”, “what was it like?”, and also “where did it go?” The story of the MV deaf community’s eventual conclusion shows us the first steps of the ASL movement, the establishment of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford CT, and bigger lessons about connection over time. 

Signs from the Mainland reflects on the legacy of the MV Deaf community, the implications for the broader society, and its relevance to contemporary conversations about inclusivity and diversity. 

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.

Support for this project provided by Expanding Massachusetts Stories, an initiative of Mass Humanities.

$20 Suggested Donation

Join us at Waters Edge Cinema for a screening of “The African Desperate”, a film by Martine Syms.

Chaos reigns in the riotously funny debut feature from visual artist Martine Syms. With a breakthrough performance from Diamond Stingily, this hallucinatory day-in-the-life of a Black artist is a rollicking satire of art-world pretensions and a rowdy portrayal of sex and drugs in the Internet age.

Martine Syms has shown extensively including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and ICA London. She has also done commissioned work for brands such as Prada, Nike, and Celine, among others. She is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award, a United States Artists fellowship, the Tiffany Foundation award, and the Future Fields Art Prize. She is in a band called Aunt Sister and hosts Doubler Penetration, a monthly radio show on NTS. She also runs Dominica Publishing.