Twenty Summers

Artist talk & reception celebrating "Commodity", art installation of life-size animals created by the local artist Gin Stone. An allegorical art installation employing life-size animals created by the artist Gin Stone in a ‘diorama’ that explores the environmental consequences of patriarchal-driven capitalism through human evolution. The unfolding artwork advances its timeline with each consecutive install location it occupies, the results of which are an evolving narrative. In three acts, the installation creates an apt metaphor for the exploitation of living beings, the environment, and ultimately, the planet. The Hawthorne Barn is the setting for the initial installation or 'act'. Gin Stone was born in 1971 in Binghamton, NY. She now lives and works in studio based on coastal Massachusetts. She is a transdisciplinary artist using sculpture, installation and science to convey themes regarding nature and myth. She attended the Hartford Art School. With work that conveys environmental activism while incorporating material based sub-text, animals become allegorical characters used to highlight - and reject- women and nature as commodities exploited by a largely patriarchal capitalist society (ecofeminism). Stone’s creatures are created with materials including commercially fished line, ghost gear, recycled and antique textiles as well as found objects. Her work has explored the myth of ancient religion and goddess worship, channeling her immense interest in myth and mysticism. The resulting effect is a cocktail of politics, culture, history and ritual, inhabiting the space of its viewers with intrigue while inspiring thoughtful dialogue of how texture can be both physical as well as abstract. The beauty inherent in nature is brought to life to craft a portrait of meaning and movement, while building chapters on evolution and ecology.

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Here novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the Maddaddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry in a decade, followed in 2022 with Burning Questions, a selection of essays from 2004 - 2021. Her next collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood was published in March 2023. Atwood has won numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright, and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada. Vivian Gornick is one of the world’s most distinguished and respected women writers and feminists, very much in the first person. She has written several books, including two memoirs, Fierce Attachments and The Odd Woman and the City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987 and 2015), the biography of feminist revolutionary Emma Goldman (Emma Goldman. Revolution as a way of life, Yale University Press, 2013) and three collections of essays, two of which, The Men in My Life (Mit Press, 2008) and The End of the Novel of Love(Beacon Press, 1998), were finalists in the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches creative writing at the New School, writes for various media, and still lives in New York. In 2017 Vivian Gornick won the prize for the Best Work of Fiction awarded by the Gremio de Libreros de Madrid for the Spanish-language version of Fierce Attachments (Apegos feroces, Sexto Piso, 2017). Katha Pollitt is a poet, essayist and a longstanding columnist for The Nation, where she writes about feminism, politics, and culture. She has won many prizes and awards for her writing, including two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her most recent book of poetry is The Mind-Body Problem; her most recent book of prose is Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights. She lives in New York City with her husband and cat.

Kat Wright, whose voice is both sultry and dynamic, delicate yet powerful; gritty but highly emotive and nuanced, has been described as “a young Bonnie Raitt meets Amy Winehouse”. Add to that voice enough stage presence to tame lions, and the combination of feline femininity proves immediately enchanting. There’s soul flowing in and out of her rock ‘n’ roll with a serpentine seduction. Some of soul music’s sweet, grand dames belt, shout, seethe, and succumb, while Wright sings gently like a heartache’s apology. It’s funky in spots and beautiful all over. And it hurts a little … like it should.

“Ever since 1996, when I started working on my first novel, I’ve kept a detailed process journal, where I analyze and develop ideas, and write informally about writing. I think of my journal as a friend, one who never tires of listening to me whine, boast, complain and vent, who is a little bit wiser than me, and often finds solutions to the problems of plot or character that I’m struggling with. I will do a reading from my novels and share some of the corresponding excerpts from the journal. This is not material I usually share with the public, but I think the focus on process might interest the writers and other creative artists in the Twenty Summers community. It’s always fun to see the gears and cogs malfunctioning and to expose the ridiculous amount of effort it takes to make the work seem effortless!” Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, whose books have garnered international acclaim for their ability to integrate issues of science, technology, religion, environmental politics, and global pop culture into unique, hybrid, narrative forms.

For the past twenty years, the unique queer and artistic enclave of Provincetown has been threatened by the forces of climate change, gentrification, a lack of affordable housing and the homogenization of culture. Marc Norman, Dr. Mika Tosca & Jay Coburn imagine a more equitable and sustainable future for Provincetown, and beyond, that preserves the people and this place for generations to come. Marc Norman is an internationally recognized expert on policy and finance for affordable housing and community development. Since July, 2022, Marc has been the Larry & Klara Silverstein Chair of Real Estate Development & Investment, and Associate Dean of the Schack Institute of Real Estate at NYU. Trained as an urban planner, he has worked in the field of community development and finance for over 20 years. With degrees in political economics (University of California Berkeley, Bachelors of Art, 1989) and urban planning (University of California Los Angeles, Master of Art, 1992) and experience with for-profit and non-profit organizations, consulting firms and investment banks, Norman has worked collaboratively to develop or finance over 2,000 units totaling more than $400 million in total development costs. Dr. Mika Tosca is a climate scientist and Associate Professor, having completed her Ph.D in “Earth System Science” in 2012 at the University of California, Irvine, and her postdoctoral work at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. In 2017 she took a faculty position at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in addition to her ongoing work investigating the link between climate and wildfire, she imagines ways that artists and designers can collaborate with climate scientists in an effort to better communicate and conduct climate science research. She has written about the emerging synthesis of art and science and has been invited to speak on the ways art-science collaborations can help us build post-climate change worlds, including a role as Plenary speaker at the 2022 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting. In 2021, Mika was named to the Grist 50 Fixers list and in 2023 she was interviewed by both the BBC’s Science in Action and HEATED’s Arielle Samuelson about her work and activism. Mika works with young artists to push the boundaries of collaboration, including a new project that explores the potential of Solarpunk. She continues to be vocal about the urgency of addressing the climate crisis. Jay Coburn has had an unusual career as an advocate, community activist, and chef/small business owner. Since 2012, Jay has served as President and CEO of the Community Development Partnership – the non-profit community development corporation serving the eight towns of lower Cape Cod. He oversees the CDP’s affordable housing and economic development programs designed to build a diverse year-round community of people who can afford to live, work and thrive here. Jay lives in Provincetown and on winter weekends he can be found on the Alpine and Nordic ski trails of northern Vermont.

Fire has emerged as one of the most visible and devastating impacts of climate change. Fire intensity and area burned are increasing around the globe, in many cases earlier and faster than previously expected. Human activities are to blame -- deforestation, land management, and not least, fossil fuel burning -- which points to potential solutions. Explore how fire is changing and what we can do about it with a diverse panel of perspectives spanning the Arctic to the Amazon. Featuring Woodwell Climate Research Scientists from the Arctic and Amazon Programs.

Sean and Jamie Oshima perform on an evening in the Barn in concert for Twenty Summers Season 10. Maine-based indie duo Oshima Brothers have been creating music together since childhood. The brothers blend songs from the heart with blood harmonies to produce a "roots-based pop sound that is infectious." (NPR) On stage, Sean and Jamie offer lush vocals, live looping, foot percussion, electric and acoustic guitars, vintage keyboard and bass - often all at once. They want every show to feel like a deep breath, a dance party and a sonic embrace. When not recording or touring they find time to film and produce their own music videos, tie their own shoes and cook elaborate feasts.

A writing workshop, poetry discussion, and contemplative practice. “I write the body, yet once someone attempted to correct my English to say that I must have meant that I write about the body. No. I give the body voice. Or rather, I honor that the body innately has voice and create the conditions that allow me to connect to that voice. This embodied journey can then expand until I touch the ancestral edges of myself to find the stories embedded in my DNA. And if I am willing to continue the journey, I can gently brush against the voice of collective bodies that often feel like wind, or the storms. There were stories buried in the tumor that the doctors cut out of me. There are generations worth of stories that have yet to be told, that do not know how to be told, and even when told, have no witness for the telling. The body has infinite stories to tell, and as one who moves through the world in a Black female body, writing her is an act of reclamation. As one who occupies a world built on the exploitation of our Black bodies, writing us is an act of reparation. As one who has disembodied often in order to survive, writing the body is an act of love. Black notions of resistance and fugitivity include the retention of memory.” Antoinette Cooper is a writer, rainmaker and TEDx speaker committed to the liberation of Black bodies through the arts, ancestral healing, social justice, and medical humanities. She was born on the island of Jamaica, and raised on the island of New York in the New York City Housing Projects. She holds a B.A. from Cornell University, a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, and sits on the board of Narrative Medicine at CUNY School of Medicine. She understands that there is no separation between all the realms of the body, the earth, and the arts so her work explores the intersections of these multiple dimensions. She is currently at work publishing a multi-genre collection that documents the historical and present day violences on the Black female body.

Pascuala Ilabaca y Fauna present a magical evening in concert at the historic Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA, June 3rd, 2023. Hailing from Valparaiso, Chile, singer-songwriter Pascuala Ilabaca is a unique and treasured voice in both the Latin American and World Music scenes. Her music is rooted in traditional Chilean sounds while effortlessly integrating jazz, pop and rock, and wider global influences. Accompanied by her formidable band Fauna, her unique stage presence conjures up sweetness and empowerment at the same time, setting her songs alive with both fragility and verve. In little over a decade, she has released six albums and performed on multiple world tours.

Local newspapers have been dying in America’s towns and cities for a decade or more. The losses are not confined to tens of thousands of jobs: an essential foundation of democracy — independent, reliable sources of news — is crumbling. But small-town journalism based on hard-hitting reporting is hardly dead. Join Provincetown Independent founders Ed Miller and Teresa Parker, Vineyard Gazette publisher Jane Seagrave, and former New York magazine editor Adam Moss to find out why. Jane Seagrave has been the publisher of the Vineyard Gazette for the past 12 years. The Gazette covers the six towns on Martha’s Vineyard and is one of the most distinguished small newspapers in the U.S. and the winner of numerous awards. It was founded in 1846. Jane is president of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association. Before going to the Gazette, she was Senior Vice President and then Chief Revenue Officer of the Associated Press. Adam Moss was editor-in-chief of New York Magazine from 2004 until he stepped down in March. The vast digital expansion he oversaw for parent company New York Media led to the creation of five other publications—Vulture, The Cut, Intelligencer, The Strategist, and Grub Street—and grew to reach 50 million visitors each month. During Moss's tenure, New York and nymag.com won 40 National Magazine Awards. Moss first rose to prominence in the early 1990s as founding editor of the legendary weekly 7 Days, after which he took on a succession of leading editorial roles at the New York Times. Advertising Age named him Editor of the Year in 2001, 2007, and 2017; Adweek gave him the same honor in 2018. In 2012 he won the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism. The Provincetown Independent is Outer Cape Cod’s only locally owned newspaper — and the most widely read paper here, too. They believe high quality homegrown news can bring you closer to your neighbors and to this outermost community.

Join Chef Jon Kung for an exploration of Chinese American cooking, highlighting the seasonal bounty of the Outer Cape. Jon Kung is a content creator and chef hailing from Detroit, Michigan. A self taught Third Culture* cook, Jon combines his lifelong experiences growing up in Toronto and Hong Kong as well as his life lived in his adoptive home of Detroit to create a cuisine he truly sees as Chinese American. His current focus is on creating content and teaching people on new media platforms like Tiktok and Youtube how to express themselves in the kitchen. *Third Culture refers to the mixed identity that one assumes, influenced both by their parents' culture and the culture in which they are raised.

“The world makes you something that you’re not, but you know inside what you are.” Thus begins Geena Rocero’s earth-shifting TED Talk in March of 2014, a speech she wrote when the impulse to hide her truest self from the world—once deemed necessary—became unbearable. Born in 1983 in Manila, Geena began competing in local beauty pageants at the age of 15, winning local, then national adulation as she claimed trophy after trophy. With mounting fame came pressure and harsh criticism, and thus the necessity to harness the grit and strength of spirit that would ensure her continued ascent. From Filipina pageant queen to American model; from effeminate child dodging hateful taunts on the street, to transgender advocate imparting wisdom at the United Nations—this spring, Geena Rocero shares her singular journey in HORSE BARBIE: A Memoir (The Dial Press, 5/30/23). Born and raised in the Philippines, Geena Rocero is an award-winning producer, director, model, public speaker, trans rights advocate, and television host. She was named by Time magazine as one of the “Top 25 Transgender People Who Influenced American Culture,” and her TED Talk “Why I Must Come Out” has been viewed more than five million times and translated into thirty-two languages. Geena made history in 2020 as the first trans woman Playboy Playmate of the Year, and again as the first trans woman ambassador for Miss Universe Nepal. In 2020, she was honored on Gold House’s A100 List of the most impactful Asians and Pacific Islanders. Geena’s directorial debut, her limited series film Caretakers, was nominated four times at the 65th Annual New York Emmy Awards held in October 2022. Bob Keary is a Provincetown-based writer and talkshow host who has been living and working in town since 2005. His morning show “Wake Up! In Provincetown” airs every Friday at 9am on YouTube, and his late-night stage show “Good Night, Provincetown” is fast becoming a summer staple. When he’s not interviewing someone, you can still find him running his mouth and shaking cocktails behind the bar at THE red INN.

No-No Boy is an immersive multimedia work blending original folk songs, storytelling, and projected archival images all in service of illuminating hidden American histories. Taking inspiration from his own family’s history living through the Vietnam War as well as many other stories of Asian American experience, Nashville born songwriter Julian Saporiti has transformed years of doctoral study into an innovative project which bridges a divide between art and scholarship. By turning his archival research and fieldwork into a large repertoire of folk songs and films Saporiti has been able to engage diverse audiences with difficult conversations performing with a revolving cast of collaborators everywhere from rural high schools and churches to Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.

Saltine and Sullivan are a creative duo based out of Provincetown and Boston MA. Saltine is the host of Eggs Isle, a radio show about the rejects of Ptown. At this very moment Saltine is looking through a spyglass preparing her return to Provincetown. The journey from her home on Eggs Isle, the island home to all who are now “too ugly and too poor” to live in modern-day Provincetown, is in mileage short, but is nevertheless fraught with peril as the only way to and from this oasis for the displaced is a rickety skiff with a broken motor. Nevertheless, she’ll find her way here. She always does, eventually planting her busted high heels into the sands of Provincetown to share the gospel of bohemia and broadcast tales of the ravages of nouveau-riche capitalism and the devastating effects of a society awash in competitive consumption, frozen rosé, and Botox. Cody Sullivan and his godmother Saltine are a creative duo based in Provincetown Massachusetts. Sullivan writes stories, performs solo theater, makes drawings with pastel, and is a student of herbalism. Saltine and Sullivan do not use social media for their own mental health, and to not connect their work to mind numbing/revolution depressing algorithms.

Rosanne Cash & Julian Zelizer in Conversation with musical accompaniment by John Leventhal at the historic Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA, June 10, 2023. One of the country’s pre-eminent singer-songwriters, Rosanne Cash has released 15 albums of extraordinary songs that have earned four Grammy Awards and 12 additional nominations. Cash is also an author whose four books include the best-selling memoir Composed, which the Chicago Tribune called “one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read.” Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Oxford American, The Nation, and many more print and online publications. Her most recent book, Bird on a Blade (2018), was published by University OF Texas Press, combining images by acclaimed artist Dan Rizzie with Cash’s lyrics. In addition to regular touring, Cash has partnered in programming collaborations with Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, SFJAZZ, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the Library of Congress. She served as artist-in-residence at New York University last year. In 2017–2018, she was a resident artistic director at SFJAZZ and continues her partnership with them in 2022/23. Along with many other honors and awards, Cash received the 2021 Edward MacDowell Medal, awarded since 1960 to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to American culture. She is the first woman composer to receive this prestigious honor. ‘I consider artists to be in the service industry; the premier service industry for the heart and soul. I am curious to a pathological degree and the Sword of Time hangs over me, and those two things— curiosity and the hourglass— make me feel more urgent than ever to connect, to find community, and to create. It doesn’t matter what the world thinks, it only matters that what is unsaid and what is unseen is given form and has a voice.’ – Rosanne Cash - New York Times best-selling author Julian E. Zelizer has been among the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a CNN Political Analyst and a regular guest on NPR’s "Here and Now." He is the award-winning author and editor of 25 books. Zelizer, who has published over 1200 op-eds, has received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the New York Historical Society, and New America.

Mali Obomsawin Magdalena Abrego Antonija Subat Charles (Chuck) Roldan Mali Obomsawin is an award winning songwriter, bassist and composer from Odanak First Nation. With an eclectic background in indie rock, American roots/folk and jazz, Obomsawin carries several music traditions. A Smithsonian Folkways Recordings artist, Mali has toured internationally, receiving acclaim from NPR and RollingStone and several Boston Music Awards nominations with her band Lula Wiles. Obomsawin frequents the folk/roots circuit as a frontwoman and sidewoman, appearing several times at Newport and Philly Folk festival, and also performs as bassist/singer in the creative music scene with Peter Apfelbaum, Taylor Ho Bynum and with her Sextet project, Sweet Tooth. Known for her striking, sardonic lyricism and sonic dreamscapes, Mali’s songwriting delivers the lush, anti-imperialist rock show we’ve all been craving. IG & Twitter: @featherbitchxx Facebook: facebook.com/maliobomsawin

In Pending Memories, Adrian Fernandez combines photographic media, three-dimensional installation, digital art and elements of architecture and engineering software to achieve images that challenge the viewer's perception by proposing a new imaginary reality. The viewer is called to consider the motives that led to the existence of each construction, reframing a fabricated past to dream of a utopian future. Adrian Fernandez studied visual arts at the San Alejandro Fine Arts Academy (2004) and later at the Superior Institute of Arts (2010) in Havana. From 2010 to 2012, he trained at The Ludwig Foundation of Cuba and New York University, Tisch School of the Arts Special Programs, where he also taught. He has exhibited extensively, from Berlin to New York, Houston to Antwerp, including ongoing representation at Provincetown’s Schoolhouse Gallery. "From a conceptual point of view, I believe this work connects with my perception of the Cuban reality and the crisis this country has lived with for such a long time. The current paradigm crisis, from a social and ideological point of view, drives the creation of these photographs. The accumulation of similar images reveals a reality that shows structures in disuse, abandoned within the idleness of a depleted territory. The ‘photographed’ constructions function as metaphors for the inert remains of a society sustained by the spectral foundation of memory. The residues of the epic past and the current precariousness of the current moment appear as ruins of the fiction that we still have to live with today. " —Adrián Fernández Milanés

Sharon Mashihi works in the mediums of audio, film, and performance. In 2018, Sharon won the Third Coast International Audio Prize Silver Award for her audio documentary, Man Choubam (I Am Good.) In 2020, she released the metafictional audio series, Appearances, in which she performed as 36 distinct characters. Described by New York Magazine as "a breakthrough for the podcast form", Appearances named a best podcast of the year by The New York Times, Vulture, Indiewire, The L.A. Review of Books, and others. Sharon is a former editor of the podcasts,The Heart and Bodies.

Devin N. Morris is a Baltimore born, Brooklyn based artist who is interested in abstracting American life and subverting traditional value systems through the exploration of racial and sexual identity in mixed media paintings, photographs, writings and video. His works prioritize displays of personal innocence and acts of kindness within surreal landscapes and elaborate draped environments that reimagine the social boundaries imposed on male interactions, platonic and otherwise. The use of gestural kindnesses between real and imagined characters are inspired by his various experiences growing as a black boy in Baltimore, MD and his later experiences navigating the world as a black queer man. Memory subconsciously roots itself in the use of familiar household materials & fabrics, while symbolically he arranges it. Looking to buoy his new realities in a permanent real space, Morris posits his reimagined societies as a prehistory to futures that are impossible to imagine. Jenna Wortham is an award-winning journalist for the New York Times and host of the culture podcast "Still Processing." A graduate of the University of Virginia, she worked at Wired before joining the Times in 2008 and more recently, the New York Times Magazine. Wortham is an important voice on digital culture and new technologies, and is a co-author of “Black Futures” with Kimberly Drew, coming out via One World 2020.

Cynthia Nixon is an actress, activist and theatre director best known for her portrayal of Miranda Hobbes in the HBO series Sex and the City. In 2018 she ran for Governor of New York on a platform focused on income inequality, renewable energy, establishing universal health care, stopping mass incarceration in the United States, and protecting undocumented children from deportation. Nixon is also an advocate for LGBT rights and received the Yale University Artist for Equality award in 2013 and a Visibility Award from the Human Rights Campaign in 2018. V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a Tony Award-winning playwright, activist, performer, and author of the Obie award-winning international theatrical phenomenon The Vagina Monologues, published in over 48 languages, performed in over 140 countries, and was recently heralded by The New York Times as one of the most important plays of the past 25 years. She is the author of many plays and books including her critically acclaimed memoir, In the Body of the World, best-seller The Apology, now available in almost 20 languages, and soon to be released Reckoning by Bloomsbury in 2023. She is the founder of V-Day, the almost 25 year old global activist movement to end violence against all women (cisgender and transgender), gender diverse people, girls and the planet—and founder of One Billion Rising, the largest global mass action to end gender-based violence in over 200 countries, as well as a co-founder of City of Joy. Kara Swisher is an American journalist. She is an opinion writer for The New York Times, a contributing editor at New York, the host of the podcast Sway, and the co-host of the podcast Pivot.