Making Light: A Conversation with Artists on Sustaining Creativity, Courage, and Connection in Difficult Times

April 21 at 7:00pm
The Provincetown Commons
Free and open to the public.

In dark times, artists make light.

It’s no secret that culture and the arts are under attack. We’ve now had some time since the advent of the new régime in the United States to think about what it means to us as artists. We’re looking at a substantial drop in funding, possible silencing mechanisms, and a culture of fear that stifles creativity.

Come and join the conversation as 10 local artists, writers, musicians, and performers share their plans for maintaining their various artistic practices in the face of this repression, and perhaps advance ideas that can be adopted by others for maintaining culture in dark times. 

Presenter: Jeannette de Beauvoir is a novelist/poet and the host of Arts Week on WOMR.

Panelists include Mike Carroll (gallery director), David Drake (director/actor), Sheryl Jaffe (handmade paper artist), Steve Desroches (writer), Susan Lambert (musician/actor), Helen Grimm (artist), Scott Cunningham (actor/performer), and Peter Donnelly (musician).

Come share your ideas for keeping the arts alive!

LVW LezNetwork Event

LezNetwork! A LVW Ptown Financial Planning Workshop & Networking Event

Join us for an evening of learning and networking with Isobelle Ives of Northwestern Mutual leading a financial planning workshop followed by a professional networking reception with light refreshments. 

See you there!

Date: Tuesday, April 22nd
Time: 5-7 PM
Location: The Commons (46 Bradford St)

Please RSVP so we have an idea of how many to expect.

Our event will feature informative workshops on financial planning tailored specifically for the LGBTQ+ community. Connect with and expand your personal and professional network in a welcoming and inclusive environment. 

Workshop topics to include:

• Personal & Professional Financial Literacy Basics – What we were never taught in school

• LGBTQ+ Financial Planning 101 – What’s unique to our community

• Searching for Financial Security in an Uncertain World – What’s in our control & what's not

• Taking it Further – LGBTQ planning programs & opportunities to explore

Schedule:

5:00 - 6:00 Financial Planning Workshop

6:00 - 7:00 Networking

This is a free event.  Donations to LVW for future programming are welcome (cash or venmo).

For info about the week: www.lvwptown.com

VAGINA MONOLOGUES:
Date: Wednesday, April 23 7 - 8:30 PM
The Commons

Join us for a powerful and intimate reading of The Vagina Monologues in celebration of Lesbian Visibility Week at The Provincetown Commons. This iconic, unapologetic play, by Eve Ensler, is a raw and moving exploration of women's experiences, voices, and stories. A talented slate of local actresses, including beloved and familiar faces from our community, will bring this work to life with passion and authenticity. This is a free, first-come, first-serve event, so come early to claim your seat and experience an evening of connection, empowerment, and visibility.

Lesbian Visibility Week

Provincetown’s 2nd Lesbian Visibility Week!

LVW – Our aim is to celebrate lesbians and show solidarity with all LGBTQ+ women and non-binary people in our community. We believe in unity and lifting up those who are most marginalized.

For more information and scheduling visit lvwptown.

You’re Invited: Building a Thriving Outer Cape – Together
Date: Wednesday, April 30 from 5 - 6 PM
Where: The Commons
Registration required: event is free

We’re inviting Outer Cape business owners, managers, and community leaders to a 60-minute interactive session that blends live workshop with open discovery. In this session, you’ll get a firsthand experience of the 5A Method, a powerful, practical framework designed to reduce burnout, repair communication breakdowns, and strengthen trust—within your teams, with your customers, and across our local economy.

You’ll also help shape the future of how we support businesses and organizations on the Cape. We’ll introduce one of the biggest challenges facing our workforce today—and show you a proven, community-rooted solution that’s already creating ripple effects in workplaces across the country. Then, we’ll open the floor to hear from you. What do you need most right now? How can this framework meet those needs and strengthen our shared community?

Whether you run a seasonal business, a nonprofit, or a town department, this session is designed to support you—and give you tools to bring ease, connection, and sustainability back to your workplace.

Before You Arrive
To get the most from this experience, please take 10 minutes to complete the 5A Questionnaire (link below) and bring your archetype numbers with you. You’ll also receive a 2-minute video introducing the method—watch it before the session so you’re ready to dive right in.

About Carey Davidson
Carey Davidson is the founder of Harmin Labs and author of The Five Archetypes. She’s worked with leaders at Microsoft, Starbucks, and Tony Robbins, helping them break patterns that lead to burnout, stress, and miscommunication. Her 5A Method combines neuroscience, behavioral science, and 5,000 years of wisdom into a system that creates measurable, lasting change in how people relate—and how organizations thrive.

Collage Workshop with Karen Cappotto at The Commons
Free for Local Artists registration required: limited spaces available

Join Karen Cappotto, founding board member of The Commons and artist/gallery owner of RSVPtown in Provincetown, for an inspiring collage workshop. As part of her curation for Heresy, a collage show featuring over 40 local artists (April 30 - May 12), Karen will lead a hands-on workshop exploring the art of mixed media and collage.

Workshop Details:

• Date: Tuesday, May 6

• Time: 5 - 6:30 PM

• Location: The Commons, Provincetown

• Free for local artists: (registration required, spaces are limited)

In this workshop, Karen will guide participants through the process of creating collages, demonstrating how to combine imagery from magazines, decorative papers, and fabrics to add texture and depth to your artwork. Whether you prefer abstract compositions, representational illustrations, or a combination of both, you'll discover how to push the boundaries of your creativity and add new dimensions to your art practice.

Participants will explore how images and words can be taken out of their original context, reinterpreted, and reconstructed into unique, original works. Through this process, Karen will encourage experimentation and creative risk-taking in your own artistic journey.

This workshop is open to local artists looking to deepen their practice, share ideas, and engage with a vibrant community of creators.

It’s Happening. Thursday, May 8, 2025, 7:00pm, marks the official beginning of the 1st Annual Outsiders Festival atThe Provincetown Commons. In the spirit of the Sun Gallery and the HCE Gallery, it’s a Happening like no other as the the past and the present cross paths for a look into the future utitilizing AI and AR digital technologies. Music by Steinway. Art by fluxus. Provincetown Collagists by Karen Cappotto and the Camp Provincetown alumni.

There was John Henry and Pecos Bill, Harry Kemp, and AI Hansen. Yes. Create your own mythos.

“The happening is the most delightful and exciting challenge to theatrical deadweight in may a year. Increasingly the young people put them on, while the theater institution wonders where everybody is and whatever became of Broadway. This book is the first book that attempts to deal in a concise way with all the aspects of the happening and its related forms and analogues. Al Hansen, one of America’s leading pop artists and a pioneer in the development of the happening, here presents his delightful account of what this very lively medium is all about. No work of scholarship, the intent of this book is to inform, to provoke original thought on the part of the reader, and perhaps to suggest that he try his own experiments.” – Al Hansen – “A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art” – 1965

THE ART OF SPECTACULARISM

“No Sniping: Representing the healthy troublemakers is Al Hansen, a young New York artist who directs the HCE (Here Comes Everybody) Gallery, Provincetown’s best, and shows his own elegant and witty collages at the more far-out East End Gallery. “The Art Association is a great case of artertiosclerosis,” Hansen says. For him the uniqueness of Provincetown as an art colony is the selling aspect. “East Hampton and other summer places don’t sell,” he points out. “There are just collectors sniping away in the dunes, trying to get works cheap.” – August 24, 1964, Newsweek Magazine

Come the summers of 1959 and 1960, the seeds were being sown for a full blown high water mark in the canon of American cultural enlightenment. We got woke in the early 20th century (the 19-teens Cultural Moment , the Roaring 20s), when any momentum was conveniently interupted by two World Wars. It was all just dress rehearsal for what was to now nostagically referred to as the “60s.”

Visionaries in the world of the art business kept one foot in a cutting edge New York City market while mixing business and pleasure at the tip of Cape Cod. When Picasso was first shown in the USA, Alfred Steiglitz apologetically returned Pablo his work after a cold reception from art patrons and museum curators alike. Provincetown gallerists like Ivan Karp and Nathan Halper held bunny ears as the reward for seeing Warhol and Lichtenstein as the future while buyers missed the opportunity to snatch up the early work of the Pop revolution for short change. There were no red dots at the HCE in those early days. The art of future Provincetown greats like Robert Motherwell and Milton Avery had still yet to get the traction that would later send the value of their work into the stratosphere.

There was enough wiggle room in these post-WWII, pre-internet days where it would be hard to prove or disprove much of anything coming out of many a man’s mouth and great artists like Joseph Beuys were just as crafty at creating their own mythos as they were at putting paint to canvas and this is where the story of Al Hansen begins.

The seven-month-old Hansen skipped the pacifier for he’d rather a No. 2 pencil to play with. The precocious young artist with the Prince Valiant hairdo, recalled his early foray into art as, “looked upon a suspect.” His first performance art piece involved tossing the teacher’s chair and personal belongings out the window along with all the chalkboard erasers when the teacher briefly left the classroom unattended. Growing up in Jamaica, Queens sealed his his fate as a juveline deliquent often joyriding borrowed cars with neighbor and future author Jimmy Breslin, the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight , as his co-pilot.

“I would constantly lose interest, because I was probably always being held back to the mien of the norm, which is one of the basic things the matter with American education.” – Al Hansen – Archives of American Art – 1973

SPECIAL, An Award-Winning New Play & Film Project
by Writer Director Producer Ann P Meredith

SCRIPTED PERFORMANCE

June 6th 2025 - 630-830pm Provincetown Commons A Collaborative Workspace for Artists 46 Bradford Street Provincetown, MA 02657
* All Welcome - Free and Open to the Public Produced by Swordfish Productions Pictures & Theatricals www.annpmeredith.com

Since January 1970 Swordfish Productions has been creating Social Impact Art, Photography, Film and Theatre to give a compassionate and realistic face and voice to people and cultures who have been injured, marginalized under-represented and therefore under-served

Facts
1 out of every 4 Girls and 1 out of every 6 Boys Will be sexually assaulted before they reach the age of 18 93% of victims Know their attacker High School Girls are 5X more at Risk SPECIAL is a Healing Tool for the World SPECIAL Changes People’s lives Forever

For Help Contact Provincetown PRIDE Center 115 Bradford Street 508.975.6394 Outer Cape Health Services 49 Kemp Way 508.487.9395 Helping Our Women 34 Conwell Street 617.719.6865 helpingourwomen.org ASGCC AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod 96 Bradford Street