The Summer Awards Host Committee thanked everyone who supported the Fine Arts Work Center and their vision to nurture artists and enrich the PTown community. Together, supporters raised upwards of $600K, a record-breaking success!
Everyone was delighted to toast honorees: acclaimed writer and summer program faculty Terrance Hayes, arts leader and dedicated Board President Lynne Kortenhaus, and multidisciplinary artist and past Fellow Jacolby Satterwhite.
Special thanks to DJ Chris Roxx, the talented host Matt Dunphy, and stage and screen actor Raúl Esparza for making the night unforgettable. Thanks as well to our partners at MAX Ultimate Foodand GlenPharmer Distillery for crafting a bountiful Italian feast and delicious cocktails.
I can’t believe that this specific @allisonzuckerman piece will reside in our home. Read Allison’s explanation. Thank you @eliothess for sharing the same artistic and life goals, thank you Jewish people for being so strong, loving and accomplished, thank you Richard Ekstract for taking me out of my small world, thank you @fountainheadarts for a full enriched life when I needed it most, thank you @lbweissman for making this happen and being so kind, thank you Allison and @kravetswehbygallery kravetswehbygallery for this beauty.
Thanks to Robert Fontaine, Lincoln Road is once again a meaningful and exciting destination for serious art collectors. He recently moved his blue chip art gallery, The Robert Fontaine Gallery, to the legendary outdoor mall, because of the ever-increasing foot traffic. It’s also steps away from the world-famous Art Basel and all of the art fairs that pop up annually.
Robert Fontaine is going to add a certain new pizzazz to the area that he hopes will attract both new and experienced buyers who want blue chip art. Robert and his staff are more than willing to spend time with people who never bought art before and want to be educated.
Just listen to this podcast. Robert explains the art market in ways that will give you a greater appreciation and desire to get involved. He makes it simple and direct. He also discusses topics, like investing, that many gallerists don’t want to talk about. It’s great to have a resource like Robert because he has experienced all of the stages in contemporary art.
His early years were spent in St. Petersburg, Sanibel and Captiva Islands. When he was 18, he lived on a sailboat and worked on the barrier Islands of North Captiva Island, Cabbage Key, and the historic Useppa Island.
Robert entered the art market in 1998 when he interned at the Jill Spanbauer Gallery, Naples FL. In 1998, he received the Robert Rauschenberg Scholarship Award Grant via B.I.G Arts Sanibel. He also studied at the Florida Gulf Coast University for four years. He worked as a studio assistant to Multimedia Artist Nancy Gifford, Naples & Miami Beach FL. Robert also received an Academic Scholarship from the Captiva Civic Association, Captiva Island.
In 2003 he finally moved to Miami Beach for a position as Director of Ashmore Gallery, a 17th-19th century European and American Art Gallery, located near the Bass Museum in what is now the W Hotel. He spent a year as an assistant to Barbara Gillman, Barbara Gillman Gallery, Wynwood and worked as Director of Space 39 Gallery Southwest Florida.
Robert saw the world in 2007 to 2010 when he was named Director of Exhibitions for Performer and Painter Marilyn Manson, staging solo Exhibitions in Zurich, Athens, Moscow, São Paulo, and Cologne.
He finally made it to Miami in 2011 when he opened the Robert Fontaine Gallery which was in operation for 10 years in Wynwood, before moving into pop ups spaces, in various locations in South Florida: Miami Beach, and Palm Beach. He loves his life in art and plans to continue to surprise his audiences.
HWH PR is very happy to announce its association with The Mountain Seed Foundation, a unique and intensive program where injured U.S. veterans join forces with injured Ukrainian veterans and their families for a transformative week.
In August 2024, two consecutive, week-long HBCs (Home Based Camps) will take place in the picturesque Austrian Alps, offering breathtaking natural scenery as the backdrop for this life-changing experience. The program, based on a Positive Psychology approach, is designed to promote healing, resilience, and camaraderie among participants who have endured the hardships of military service and combat injuries. More in the coming weeks.
The Mountain Seed Foundation is located in Centreville, VA.
See 60 Minutes coverage
About the Mountain Seed Foundation:
The Mountain Seed Foundation is dedicated to supporting veterans and their families through innovative programs that combine physical activity, outdoor adventure, and therapeutic support. Founded in 2021, the Foundation has helped hundreds of Ukrainian military families, refugees, and Gold Star families find strength, healing, and community through its various initiatives. Our mission is to “plant seeds of hope and resilience in the hearts of those who have sacrificed so much.” We believe that the transformative power of nature and outdoor activities can significantly aid recovery and well-being.
Barcelona protesters throw items and spray travelers with water while shouting ‘tourists go home’
A man ducks and a woman covers her ears as protesters interrupt their meal in Barcelona.
The protesters — angry about the city’s long-standing problems with overtourism — used thick police-style tape to block hotel entrances and sidewalk cafes in the small neighborhood of Barceloneta in a symbolic effort to close the establishments.
Mass tourism troubles hit fever pitch in Barcelona, Spain, on Saturday as protesters threw items and sprayed travelers with water guns and canned drinks, while shouting “tourists go home.”
The crowd, which numbered some 3,000 people, according to local media, also marched holding a large banner demanding that city officials “decrease tourists now.”
Videos and photographs show people attempting to avoid the crowds — some walking away from their tables mid-meal — while others, including restaurant staff, verbally sparred with anti-tourism activists.
The demonstration coincides with Barcelona’s peak summer travel months. In 2023, hotel occupancy rates neared 80% in July and August, as the city of 1.6 million people swelled to accommodate more than 4 million visitors, according to the Barcelona City Council.
But the delicate dance between locals and visitors had spiraled long before that.
Hotels in the city quadrupled from 1990 to 2023 to accommodate a rush of travelers, which surged from 1.7 million to 7.8 million during the same period, according to the Barcelona City Council. That doesn’t include the millions who travel to the city’s outskirts, too, it notes.
The city also buckles under the weight of the Barcelona Cruise Port as day-trippers descend on the city by the thousands. The port processed some 2.2 million passengers in 2023, up from 560,000 in 2000, according to its website.
A woman dining at a restaurant in Barceloneta being confronted by a protester.
The result is a city in which many locals can no longer afford to live, activists say — most notably because of the housing market, where rents have increased 68% in the past decade, according to Barcelona’s mayor, Jaume Collboni.
Collboni announced in June that Airbnb-style short-term house rentals would be banned in the city by 2028. The move would add some 10,000 apartments back into the long-term rental market.
Two tourists on bicycles being stopped in front of a demonstration against mass tourism in Barcelona on July 6, 2024.
A report published by Barcelona’s City Council in 2023, titled “Perception of Tourism in Barcelona” shows more residents feel tourism is beneficial, rather than detrimental, to the city. However, the gap between these numbers has closed through the years, it showed.
Half of the 1,860 respondents surveyed said they modify where they go in the city because of tourists. “They avoid a widespread area around the city centre (Plaça Catalunya, La Rambla, Gothic Quarter, Raval, Old Town, Waterfront), as well as the Sagrada Família area. In terms of specific spaces, Park Güell tops the list of those deliberately avoided.”
Even those who recognize the economic contribution of tourism are becoming disillusioned by the sheer number of travelers in the city, according to the report.
“More and more people believe that Barcelona has reached its tourism capacity limit,” it states
Thank you @provincetownlib (Provincetown Public Library) for promoting @fearlessflyingfannie (Fearless Flying Fannie) online. Your presentation with flying feathers is so inspiring and imaginative.. @librarygrl83 (Courtney Francis) you are very special.
East End Books Ptown put on quite a performance last night at the Provincetown Public Library by featuring Sam Bernstein and his Joan Crawford book. Oh, the stuff we learned. Sam was so entertaining that the audience stayed well beyond the designated time. Can’t wait to read the book. Thank you Jeff G. Peters.
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“It’s one of the only places in the world where unconventional people are not just tolerated, but preferred.” The words of Michael Cunningham, an American novelist and screenwriter.
He wrote the introduction to the “Artists of Provincetown,” a book and exhibit at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, PAMM. We were at PAMM yesterday.
Cunningham says, “When anyone asks me why I’m so attached to Provincetown I generally say something along the lines of, “It’s one of the only places in the world where unconventional people are not just tolerated, but preferred.”
I’m not happy about the fact that the world at large considers artists, writers, musicians and others anyone who creates something out of nothing to be “unconventional.” I’d prefer a world in which people who harbor no urge to create are the unconventional ones.
We do, however, live in this world. In this world, people who create can, for the most part, only be reconsidered for the title conventional if they and their work become famous. The urge to create, and the stunningly hard work it requires, doesn’t always mean much. Success means a great deal. In a city like New York, people who are initially interested in the fact that you’re an artist or a writer or a musician tend to become less interested if they learn that you aren’t yet represented by a gallery, have yet to publish anything, have not yet released a hit song.
And so we, whether we live full time or part time in Provincetown, have collectively established a world within the larger world a place where creators are not only honored and respected for their efforts, but are honored and respected whether or not they’ve become famous. They are, in fact, honored and respected if they never become famous.
Provincetown knows, in ways many other places don’t, that significant work doesn’t always = widespread recognition.
This understanding has been shared among us for well over a hundred years. We who live in Provincetown now are the great-great-grandchildren of Hans Hofmann, who might have been speaking about Provincetown itself when he said that his aim in painting was to create pulsing, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light.
We are, as well, the great-great-grandchildren of Eugene O’Neil and Susan Glaspell whose plays, in the 1920s, were equally locally renowned. It doesn’t matter, not really, that only one of them went on to be inducted into the literary canon.
Both were lauded for their work as they were creating their work.
It helps that Provincetown’s moody beauty, and its relative isolation, imply the making of art more powerfully than do many other places. How else, exactly, are we to respond to blinding blue autumn skies arcing over the glittering blue-black Atlantic, or to misty spring afternoons when the lilacs seem to have blossomed overnight those interludes during which Provincetown all but whispers, you have no other home than this. We are not, of course, compelled to depict Provincetown directly. But any response to Provincetown and its surroundings other than elation can feel more than a little miserly. At certain hours, on certain days, it’s easy to feel as if there are only two possible responses: fall to our knees, or do whatever we can to pay it homage in other, more corporeal ways. Or both.
Making art, like those beatific days in Provincetown, can be transcendent. I feel reasonably sure that all the artists pictured here have had their share of good and great days—the days when it pours out, when it’s coming through you as well as from you, when you know with absolute certainty that you’re using your gifts to their outermost limits. The days when the work itself whispers, you have no other home than this.
On the other hand, art has a way of turning off the tap, sometimes as suddenly and unexpectedly as it turned the tap on. Making art can, with surprising swiftness, turn from an ecstatic outpouring of our love, our rage, our pure astonishment at life itself into an effort that more nearly resembles pushing a piano up a flight of stairs.
Provincetown, too, can be as difficult as it is rapturous. Its challenges range from hurricanes and floods to ever-more-astronomical rents. Living in Provincetown now is only slightly less expensive than living in San Francisco, or Tokyo. I’m not sure how artists, unless they have trust funds, can move to Provincetown today. I’m not sure, for that matter, how artists who’ve been here for decades are able to remain, if they’re able to remain at all.
Along with Provincetown’s catastrophic expense, Commercial Street in the summers is as crowded as a subway at rush hour. The artistic impulse can wither a bit in the face of all those tourists, all those souvenirs and t-shirts. In winters, it’s possible to walk down Commercial Street, past the boarded-up shops and restaurants, without seeing a single other person. There are almost no year-round jobs. Provincetown is remote, not just literally but in the worldly sense, as well. If you live here it’s easy to imagine, for better and for worse, that there’s no other world but Provincetown.
I should add that, for some of us, those are virtues, not liabilities. Still. As far as I know, at least nine of out ten of the artists portrayed in this book have made significant efforts not only to get here but to stay here.
Most work, of any kind, isn’t easy, from performing surgery to mixing drinks behind a bar. I wouldn’t want to over-romanticize those who create. I can, however, say with confidence that many of the people portrayed here have, along with the good days, survived periods of deep loneliness, crippling doubt, and a periodic sense of futility that tends to strike us not as a fallow period but as truth, revealed. How could we have failed to realize that we can’t really do this at all? Not to mention the desire to produce something too great for any living being to produce, which can miniaturize our own attempts.
Producing art, like living in Provincetown, requires a degree of daily determination, in the face of the doubts and the foods; in the face of landlords who, without notice, double our rent.
There are, in short, many sensible reasons not to live in Provincetown, just as there are many sensible reasons not to create. It’s always a gamble, for everyone. Will it be a hit, or a miss, not only for others but for you, yourself?
And how much longer can we put off paying the electric bill before they turn our power off? As occupations go, being an artist is one of the least reasonable of all possibilities.
And yet, everyone portrayed in this book has insisted on remaining unreasonable. For me, a working definition of an artist is someone who persists not only in creating art but in living, as best we can, with an ideal that remains, despite our every effort, slightly out of reach. The artists in these portraits, then, are not only accomplished, but are survivors. Victorious survivors. Full disclosure: I’m in the book, too. All gratitude to Ron Amato and Pasquale Natale for bringing this book to fruition. The book is important now, and it’ll be important in the future, as a record of those who found their way to a town on a remote spit of sand and produced work that will endure, even after its creators are gone. For all of our differences, everyone in this book is engaged in the same effort.
Everyone in this book has, by dint of hard work and the summoning of magic, produced something that the world requires, if it is to survive at all.
HESSE FLATOW is pleased to announce that Randi Renate will be our artist in residence for the month of July.
On the occasion of her residency, she will present a solo exhibition of her sculptural work in the gallery’s Amagansett location, on view from July 20 through August 3.
As an individual who explores the world spatially, Renate has interests that lie in between architectural memory (embodied and dissociated), subaqueous states (psychic and physical), and allocentric entanglement (human and non-human). Her diverse, large-scale architectonic structures agitate an investigation on the somatic and cognitive ways of understanding our embodied being-in-the-world.
Randi received a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014 and moved to Berlin where she maintained a studio and artist-run project space, TRACE.
She is a 2020 MFA graduate of the Sculpture Department at the Yale School of Art. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships including Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, NY, Lighthouse Works on Fishers Island, NY, Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, NE, Fountainhead in Miami, FL, and Santa Fe Art Institute in Santa Fe, NM.
Randi Renate has shown both internationally and nationally, with solo and group exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, NY, and ROCKELMANN & and Galerie im Turm in Berlin, DE among others. Her 2021 permanent public sculpture, “blue is the atmospheric refraction I see you through,” at the Adirondack History Museum, was made in part by the 2021 New York State Council of the Arts DEC Community Arts Grant and featured in Interior Design Magazine.
Her most recent public sculpture in NYC for the 2022 Socrates Annual exhibition “Sink or Swim Climate Futures.”
Randi also produces the podcast CORALESCENCE: conversations highlighting the connection between art and science. These episodes are “studio visits” she conducts with scientists and other researchers in their fields, exploring a broad range of topics like coral conservation, neuroscience, cosmology and beyond.
July 20 – August 3, 2024 Opening Reception: July 20, 5-7PM 68A Schellinger Road, Amagansett, NY
There are thousands of commencement addresses on college campuses each spring. Most are unremarkable and go unremarked upon. But occasionally one gets people talking and gains traction online. That was the case with the speech given by the retired tennis champion Roger Federer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., on June 9.
Mr. Federer, who dropped out of school in his native Switzerland at 16 to play professionally, noted early in his remarks that he was not an obvious choice for a commencement speaker.
“Keep in mind, this is literally the second time I have ever set foot on a college campus,” he told the more than 2,000 graduates.
After some warm-up jokes about beer pong (which is said to have been invented at a Dartmouth fraternity party) and a few shout-outs to local institutions (“I got a chance to hit some balls with my kids at the Boss Tennis Center … I also crushed some chocolate chip cookies from Foco”), Mr. Federer got down to business and offered the graduates some tennis lessons that doubled as life lessons.
The part of the speech that has caught on with audiences far beyond the Ivy League environs of the Dartmouth campus — prompting numerous TikTok videos, many of them set to inspirational string music — was his reframing of his years of dominance on the tennis court.
“In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80 percent of those matches,” Mr. Federer said. “Now, I have a question for all of you. What percentage of the points do you think I won in those matches?”
The answer was 54 percent.
“In other words,” he said, “even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play.”
He went on, “The truth is, whatever game you play in life, sometimes you’re going to lose. A point, a match, a season, a job.”
A video of Mr. Federer’s speech has garnered more than 1.5 million views on Dartmouth’s YouTube channel, putting it in the company of earlier commencement addresses that have left a lasting impression.
In 2011, Conan O’Brien, a Harvard graduate, stood behind the same tree-stump lectern at Dartmouth and roasted the idea of elite higher education to uproarious laughter. Mr. O’Brien’s speech continues to be watched as a comedy master class, with 4.8 million YouTube views.
A 2005 speech by the writer David Foster Wallace to the graduating class of Kenyon College, titled “This Is Water,” circulated online as a transcript in the pre-social-media days and, in 2009, was published as a book.
Another noteworthy commencement speech, known as “Wear Sunscreen,”was not delivered as an address but rather written as a 1997 column for The Chicago Tribune by the journalist Mary Schmich. (It was the speech Ms. Schmich would have given, if asked.) Her piece inspired a hit spoken-word song by Baz Luhrmann, “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen),” and was also published as a slim book, “Wear Sunscreen: A Primer for Real Life.”
Mr. Federer’s decision to quit school seemed to work out for him. Over a 25-year career, he won 103 tour singles titles, including 20 Grand Slam titles, and was acknowledged as one of the greatest tennis players. Two years after his retirement, Dartmouth awarded him an honorary doctorate, citing his work as an athlete, entrepreneur and philanthropist.
Grabbing a racket toward the end of his speech, he left the Dartmouth graduates with one final lesson: “OK, so, for your forehand, you’ll want to use an eastern grip. Keep your knuckles apart a little bit. Obviously, you don’t want to squeeze the grip too hard.”
Then he added, with a smile, “No, this is not a metaphor! It’s just good technique.”
DigiDame 