Robert Fisher: A Life in Art
Tuesday, June 8, 7pm
A lecture presented in conjunction with a career survey of the artist’s work, on view at PAAM June 4-July 18, 2010.
For over fifty years the artist Robert Fisher was dedicated to refining and expressing the principles he learned as a student of Hans Hofmann on the use of “pure color” and “volumetrics” to represent both form and dimensionality. Fisher described his process as “working from nature to obtain abstract but living forms; enriching and developing those forms on a two dimensional surface through the use of pure color – these concepts form the basis of my own private search for artistic meaning.”
Please join the executor of the Robert Fisher estate Rita Ricketson, along with the painter and fellow Hans Hofmann student Myrna Harrison; Ellis Jacobson, Director of the T.W Wood Gallery in Montpellier, Vermont; and collector John Wincuinas—co-curators of the Fisher exhibition at PAAM—for a lively conversation on the life and work of the artist Robert Fisher. The panel will discuss how Fisher’s life and work fulfilled the spirit of Mr. Hofmann’s teachings, both as an artist and as a man committed to social justice.
John Wincuinas is an avid collector of early modern and abstract expressionist art and a marketing consultant. His collecting interests began after viewing a PAAM exhibition of the Yasuna Collection of the first generation of American modernists. His personal collection now includes the work of many Provincetown artists including Fisher, Lillian Orlowsky, William Freed, John Von Wicht, Agnes Weinrich, Karl Knaths, William and Lucy L’Engle, and Oliver Newberry Chaffee, among others.
Myrna Harrison has shown extensively in group and solo exhibitions throughout the U.S. and is represented in the collections of the Rose Museum, Brandeis University, PAAM, the Cape Cod Museum of Art, and in private collections throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia. For the past 30 years she has lived in Arizona, where she has been president of three community colleges. She is currently represented by Gold Nugget Art Gallery and James Ratliff Gallery, AZ; Beauregard Fine Art, NJ; Acme Fine Art, Boston, MA; and Gallery Ehva, Provincetown, MA.
Edward Hopper: Early Impressions
A lecture with Curator Bruce Loch,
Tuesday, June 29, 7pm
In conjunction with the exhibition at PAAM,
May 21-July 4, 2010
The art historian and curator Deborah Lyons describes the celebrated American artist Edward Hopper as a “painter of spartan canvases that reflect the emptiness, and sometimes the almost heroic plainness, of modern American life,” whose work could “evoke in the viewer’s imagination scenes of great drama and longing.”
PAAM is pleased to present the exhibition “Early Impressions,” which provides a rare opportunity to view a collection of works on paper created by the artist as a student, and early in his career. Much of the work (which remained in the artist and his wife Josephine’s private collection until her death in 1968) has never been publicly exhibited. Please join exhibition Curator Bruce Loch for a lecture on the life and work of Edward Hopper.
Bruce Loch is the Curator of “Edward Hopper: Early Impressions,” and the President of Loch, Elsenbaumer, Newton & Co., an accounting and business consulting firm located in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In the late 1990s, Bruce and his wife Pam began a passionate course of self-study in surrealist and modern art of the 20th century. Their interests and focus extended to 20th Century works on paper by Edward Hopper, as well as Oscar Bluemner, Robert Henri, and Harry Bertoia; their private collection now comprises more than 300 paintings, sculptures and original works on paper by many world-renowned artists.
Jack Tworkov: Against Extremes: A lecture with Curator Jason Andrews, Tuesday, July 13, 7pm
In conjunction with the exhibition at PAAM, July 9-August, 22, 2010
Jack Tworkov is regarded as one of the seminal figures of American art; his gestural paintings and dramatic mark-making helped define the Abstract Expressionist movement in America, along with Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline.
Tworkov was a fixture in the Provincetown art colony of the 1920s, where he befriended artists Ross Moffett, Karl Knaths, and Edwin Dickinson. In 1958 he returned to purchase a home in the West End and divided his time between his Provincetown studio and New York. He was the Chairman of the Art Department at Yale University from 1964-1969 and in 1968, became a founding member of the Fine Arts Work Center, along with Fritz Bultman, Stanley Kunitz, Philip Malicoat, Robert Motherwell and Myron Stout. Over the course of his life, Tworkov painted masterpieces inspired by the solace and solitude he found on Cape Cod. Tworkov died at his home in Provincetown in 1982. In 1983, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum held a memorial exhibition in his honor, featuring a selection of the artist’s late paintings.
Join Jason Andrews, curator of the Estate of Jack Tworkov, for a lecture on Tworkov’s life in Provincetown. Rare photographs of the artist’s life and work will be presented, along with excerpts from the artist’s journals and personal letters—including letters from Willem de Kooning and Hans Hofmann, among others. This lecture is held in conjunction with the artist’s first comprehensive survey of five-decades of painting; the exhibition first opened in New York in August 2009, and will be on view at PAAM July 9-August 22.
Funding provided by the Estate of Jack Tworkov; Seamens Bank; Poss Family Foundation; Inn at the Moors; the Kraus Family Foundation
The Restless Creative Spirit: the Life and Work of John M. Johansen
Tuesday, July 27, 7pm
In conjunction with the exhibition Gathering: Art about Architects at PAAM (June 25-August 29, 2010)
John M. Johansen was born in New York City in 1916, studied architecture at Harvard University under Walter Gropius, and went on to become one of the preeminent American architects of the modern era. Now retired from practice and a resident of Wellfleet, MA, he has devoted himself to the development of a visionary architecture based on scientific discovery. His far-reaching creative practice includes painting, printmaking, sculpture, jewelry design, and songwriting. He has also written a number of books, including John M. Johansen: A Life on the Continuum of Modern Architecture and Nanoarchitecture: A New Species of Architecture.
In his lecture, Johansen will discuss the major buildings of his Modern Movement period, and present his experimental concepts in illustrating advancing building technologies. Johansen will also show video of his animated buildings – structures that will actually grow in the next century. Signed copies of his DVD will be available for purchase.
Saudade: An Interactive Gallery Talk with Photographer Mischa Ricther
Tuesday, August 31, 7pm
Join Mischa Richter for a discussion of his photographic project Saudade, which focuses on the life and people of Provincetown. This will be an interactive presentation, in which attendants will be encouraged to share their own stories of town. Richter states, " A very important part of my relationship with Provincetown is my past here. I spend a lot of time talking with people in town about what we all remember from the past. I would like this lecture to embody that concept. Please bring your stories."
Mischa Richter, born in Windsor, England in 1971, grew up in New York City and Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Richter studied fine art at the Chelsea College of Art and Middlesex University in London and his work is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, England. Since leaving university he has worked for The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, i-D, The Face, Esquire, Wallpaper, and Vibe.
Larry Collins: Finding Light
A Video Presentation and Discussion with the Artist
Tuesday, September 14, 7pm
In conjunction with the career survey exhibition, Finding Light, at PAAM, on view August 27-October 10, 2010
Join artist Larry Collins for a video presentation and discussion of his life and art. The evening will begin with an inaugural screening of “Larry Collins in his Studio,” a video by Liz McLean, where Collins, filmed in Provincetown, shows and discusses examples of work from every period of his career.
Larry Collins’s precocious beginnings (under the tutelage of a charismatic art teacher, his paintings and drawings had been shown in more than a half-dozen museums and university galleries by his seventeenth year), and his time as a studio assistant to a painter and two printmakers, provide insight into his creative trajectory. A graduate of the University of Oklahoma and the Massachusetts College of Art, the value of his artistic training became starkly evident to Collins during the Vietnam War, when he was pulled from an infantry line company to become an Army combat artist and photographer. On his return from Vietnam, the artist moved to New York City, where he worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, followed by a career as a teaching artist. Collins moved to Provincetown in 1993 to concentrate on his artwork. He became Director of the Driskel Gallery at the Schoolhouse Center for Art and Design, a gallery specializing in vintage photography and antiques, and he has continued that tradition for the past 7 years at Larry Collins Fine Art. The artist returned to Vietnam in 2009, and will discuss how the trip moved him to create a memorial work, A Shau Valley, one of the most recent paintings in the exhibition.
Peter Watts: Paintings
Tuesday, October 5, 7pm
In conjunction with his exhibition at PAAM, on view September 24-November 14, 2010.
The paintings of Peter Watts, in the words of the artist, “condense the richness of the landscape of Wellfleet,” where he has lived for over forty years. “I have absorbed this landscape and considered its every nuance of light, and change of topography and weather.” As art critic Margaret Sheffield noted, Watts “expresses thought, emotion, and mood through color,” working with high contrast and simplified form.
Watts brings to the Cape Cod landscape a multiplicity of painting approaches drawn from his formidable artistic toolbox. He powerfully moves from a classically composed post-impressionism to simple compositions of stratified color fields reminiscent of Arthur Dove. “At the same time,” says gallery owner Berta Walker, “these paintings impart the spiritual abstracted light of a Rothko painting.” Of the simplicity of form Watts states: “I am building a painting with as little form as is possible. If the viewer finds a small truth in the work, the painting is successful.”
Peter Watts first came to Cape Cod as a child and returned in 1954 with the artist teacher La Force Bailey. He has taught at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, C.W. Post College, and Trinity School among others, and he is represented by the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown.
In October, Watts will teach a Master Class at the Lillian Orlowsky / William Freed Museum School at PAAM. Please contact Grace Ryder-O’Malley- gryderomalley@paam.org - for information or to register for this workshop.
The 2009 Fredi Schiff Levin Lecture Series Archive
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