Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) has an excellent line-up of exhibitions this spring.

Waves: Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, A Director's Choice Exhibition

Remembering Forum 49: Works from the PAAM Collection, curated by Grace Hopkins

Rosalind Pace: Poiesis, Five Decades of Collage, curated by Grace Hopkins

Julia Salinger: The Insistence of Memory, curated by Susie Nielsen

Waves: Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb

A Director's Choice Exhibition

Curated by Christine McCarthy

This spring, Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) presents Waves: Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, a Director’s Choice exhibition. Curated by Christine McCarthy, Waves is on view April 12 - May 27, 2024 with a public reception on Friday, April 19 from 6-8pm. The artists will share a slide presentation, TWO LOOKS: Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb Photographs, at PAAM on Saturday, May 18 at 2pm (free with $15 Museum admission). 

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Inspired by Virginia Woolf ’s novel The Waves, this collaborative project brings together the work of creative partners Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb. This intimate collection serves as a pandemic logbook in words and images, created while the couple was largely sequestered on Cape Cod from March 2020 through May 2021. Rebecca provides original, hand-written poetry that punctuates her lyrical photographs and Alex’s panoramic seascapes. Their images serve as poignant meditations on what it means to be both deeply connected to the world around us and profoundly isolated from much that we hold dear.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Alex Webb has published 17 photography books, including The Suffering of Light, a survey book of 30 years of his color photographs. He’s exhibited at museums worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y., the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. A Magnum Photos member since 1979, his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and other publications. He has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. His most recent books are Dislocations (2023) and the collaborations Waves (2022) and Brooklyn: The City Within (2019) with Rebecca Norris Webb, the latter exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York.

Originally a poet, Rebecca Norris Webb often interweaves her text and photographs in her nine photography books, most notably with her monograph, My Dakota—an elegy for her brother who died unexpectedly—with a solo exhibition of the work at The Cleveland Museum of Art (2015), among other venues. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, and is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, N.Y. Norris Webb is a 2019 NEA grant recipient. Her first collaboration with Alex Webb, Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs from Cuba, was exhibited at the MFA, Boston. Her upcoming tenth book, A Difficulty Is a Light, a hybrid poetry collection punctuated by 15 of her photographs, will be published by Chose Commune in Fall 2024.

Remembering Forum 49: Works from the Collection

Curated by Grace Hopkins

Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) presents the exhibition Remembering Forum 49: Works from the PAAM Collection, curated by artist Grace Hopkins. On view April 19 - June 2, with a public reception on Friday, April 19 from 6-8pm, this exhibition is in conjunction with the Provincetown Art Gallery Association’s Forum 24: The 75th Anniversary of Forum 49.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

This exhibition will include works from PAAM’s permanent collection by artists who were featured in the original Forum 49, such as Adolf Gottlieb, Alexander Calder, and Morris Davidson, as well as many works created by artists in Provincetown in 1949. 

Forum 49 was a summer-long series of sophisticated programs held in 1949, beginning with the forum "What Is An Artist?" and ending with the controversial "French Art vs American Art Today." Record crowds attended the exhibits of paintings and programs focused on the avant-garde in many areas (architecture, psychoanalysis, poetry, jazz) all held in a gallery at 200 Commercial Street.

FORUM 24

Forum 24 celebrates the 75th anniversary of the seminal Forum 49 presentation of emerging modern art - an event that changed the history of art in Provincetown and worldwide. The Provincetown Art Gallery Association will mark the occasion with a summer of events designed to honor the original Forum and illuminate the connections between modern art and the cultural changes and artistic changes that still resonate in the world today. Learn more at www.provincetownartgalleryassociation.org/forum-24

ASSOCIATED PAAM EVENTS

Wednesday, July 17, 6pm: Surrealist Film Shorts: Beginnings. A screening and discussion with Howard Karren.

Inspired by the surrealist and Dada movements in visual art, Luís Buñuel teamed up with his friend Salvador Dalí to produce this anti-clerical, deliberate assault on bourgeois values, “Un Chien Andalou” (An Andalusian Dog), which changed the face (and figure) of film forever. Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon” attempted to give dream imagery a voice and create a genuine independent cinema in the U.S. These two shorts are iconic examples of the birth of surrealist cinema.

The films:

• Un Chien Andalou (1929), “An Andalusian Dog,” directed by Luís Buñuel, written by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, B&W, 16 min.
• Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), directed by and starring Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, written by Deren, B&W, 14 min.

Wednesday, July 31, 6pm: “What is an artist?” Panel discussion led by Mike Carroll. 

A nod to the program opener for Forum 49 was a discussion “What is an artist?” lead by George Biddle, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, and Serge Chermayeff. 

Wednesday, August 21, 6pm: Surrealist Film Shorts: Beyond. A screening and discussion with Howard Karren.

Surrealist imagery soon entered the realm of mainstream filmmaking, appearing mostly as dreams and sometimes full features. Avant-garde artists began to move beyond. Here are two examples: in “Le Chant du Styrène” (“The Song of Styrene”), French New Wave master Alain Resnais turns plastic into poetry, and in “The Order,” a 31-minute excerpt of his three-hour epic Cremaster 3 (part of the nine-hour-long, five-part Cremaster Cycle), Barney looked to create form beyond biology, “cremaster” being the muscle that raises or lowers the testicles in response to temperature.

The films: 

• Le Chant du Styrène (1958), “The Song of Styrene,” directed by Alain Resnais, written by Raymond Queneau, color, 13 min.
• Cremaster 3: The Order (2002), written, directed and starring Matthew Barney, color, 31 min.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Grace Hopkins is a Wellfleet artist, parent, and educator. She is also the steward of the estates of artist Budd Hopkins and art historian April Kingsley: her parents. She earned a BFA in photography from the School of the Fine Arts at Tufts University and has guided the art world for two decades with positions in museums, academics, and galleries. Her innovative photography has been exhibited widely on the Cape and elsewhere. She is the director of the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown and a member of the steering committee for the Provincetown Art Gallery Association.

Rosalind Pace: Poiesis, Five Decades of Collage

Curated by Grace Hopkins

This spring, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) will showcase the collage artworks of longtime Outer Cape resident and accomplished poet Rosalind Pace. Opening May 3rd and running through June 23rd, 2024, Poiesis: Five Decades of Collage will present a visual journey through Pace’s evocative collage pieces. A public celebratory reception will be held on Friday, May 10 at 6pm.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

While best recognized in literary circles for her vivid and stirring poems, Rosalind Pace has simultaneously nurtured her passion for visual art. As a director of the Long Point Gallery and teacher of creative courses at Castle Hill Center for the Arts, PAAM, and elsewhere, she has long spurred creative expression in others. Now, through this exhibition, viewers can discover Pace’s own lyric style realized through intricate collages crafted over five decades. 

Characterized by luminous palettes using a variety of papers, Pace's collage works have an unmistakable resonance. Balancing texture and negative space, she assembles shapes and fragments into dynamic compositions. 

In addition to close-up appreciation of selected collages, the exhibition will showcase large-scale sequential paintings Pace has created using her collages, some expansive enough to fill PAAM’s gallery walls. The interplay between intimate, small pieces and their transformation into vividly scaled paintings spotlights her creative flexibility across media. 

This unprecedented exhibition offers the public a chance to discover the full breadth of Rosalind Pace’s artistic talents. With decades of honing her skills through dedicated creation and the instruction of emerging talents, she now invites viewers into her vivid inner world through its striking visual vocabulary.  

Pace’s work will be featured in a solo exhibition at the influential Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown in conjunction with the show at PAAM. The dates for the event at the Berta Walker Gallery will be announced.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Grace Hopkins is a Wellfleet artist, parent, and educator. She is also the steward of the estates of artist Budd Hopkins and art historian April Kingsley: her parents. She earned a BFA in photography from the School of the Fine Arts at Tufts University and has guided the art world for two decades with positions in museums, academics, and galleries. Her innovative photography has been exhibited widely on the Cape and elsewhere. She is the director of the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown and a member of the steering committee for the Provincetown Art Gallery Association.

Julia Salinger: The Insistence of Memory

Curated by Susie Nielsen

This spring, Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) presents an exhibition by Provincetown artist, Julia Salinger. The Insistence of Memory, curated by artist Susie Nielsen, is on view May 10-July 7, with a public reception on Friday, May 10 from 6-8pm and a Fredi Schiff Levin Lecture on Thursday, June 13 at 6pm.

Salinger asks: “Why do we choose to retain certain moments and filter the rest, while other lost fragments emerge years later?” The Insistence of Memory explores these questions through objects, drawings, poetry, paintings, prints, and video installation. Intertwining visual creations and the written word, Salinger layers memory and narrative to uncover and generate meaning. Her work includes paintings mounted on various materials (cloth, silk, plastic), works on paper, imaginary archeologist series “Lost Letters”, sculptural objects, and more.

“What I am looking at with Julia's work is the consistency of line throughout her work and how it crosses over materials. I am drawn to her mark-making and how it pushes outside of the boundaries of whatever medium it is on…Julia's work is completely intertwined with the rest of her life. Words that come from her memories are the primary focus, and they are connected by her various marks. It is one continuous line. It is one long poem or song lyric,” writes curator Susie Nielsen.

A book of Salinger’s work designed by Nielsen and titled Mermaids Grange: A Curious Visual Adventure on the Scenic Route will be published in conjunction with the exhibition and available for purchase at PAAM.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Julia Salinger's varied art career began as an art historian. Her mentor, Irving Sandler, was the preeminent art scholar who wrote The Triumph of American Painting. She continued her studies at Columbia University and worked for Ronald Feldman Fine Arts as a researcher for five Andy Warhol print portfolios. During this period, she was accepted into the prestigious curatorial program at the Hirschorn Museum in Washington, DC. She has also worked at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design, the Guggenheim, The Neuberger Museum and the Whitney.

Her journey took her into the musical side of the arts, where she managed performers for over seventeen years. She worked with such diverse talents as Laurie Anderson, Bobby McFerrin, Diane Reeves and Diana Krall. After a few life changing experiences, she decided it was time to nourish her own creative spirit. In 1999 she started to create her own work. Since 2000, she has shown in numerous group shows and is represented in collections in the US, Europe and Asia.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Susie Nielsen is a curator, designer, and artist- owner/curator of Farm Project Space + Gallery, Wellfleet, MA. Curating since 1997, Nielsen has created exhibitions in traditional and non-traditional spaces including universities, outdoor environments and a boxing gym. She has curated three previous exhibitions of Julia Salinger.

HOURS AND ADMISSION:

From November 1-April 30, PAAM is open Thursday-Sunday from 12-5pm. From May 1-October 31, PAAM is open Wednesday-Monday from 11am-5pm, and until 8pm on Fridays (closed Tuesdays).

The Museum is closed on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day, and open on New Years Day and Monday holidays (Martin Luther King Jr. Day, President’s Day, Patriot’s Day, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Veteran’s Day). The Museum occasionally closes for private events, those dates and times are listed on our Events Calendar.

General Admission is $15, and free on Fridays from 5-8pm. Admission for PAAM Members is always free, members also receive one guest pass with their annual membership.