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Friday Night in Provincetown

July 5, 2010

perfect P-town:motorcycle, baby carriage, gallery goers

the meditative and moneyed P-Town

The couple of miles of Commercial Street that constitute the commercial spine of Provincetown can be divided into distinct districts. The compact central downtown is haute raffish: souvenir shops, bars, t-shirt shops, henna tattoos, ice cream – think Ocean City in old buildings. This is bracketed by the residential West End, which includes some of the 250 year-old houses that were floated over the harbor on barges from the original settlement at Long Point after one too many storms had swamped them.On the other side is the East End, home to many galleries, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and its share of historic buildings.

Unlike some other more buffed and shiny historic areas, like Society Hill in Philadelphia and Beacon Hill in Boston, restoration in P-Town has largely been confined to basic maintenance; the whole town is kind of crumbly around the edges and for the most part, P-Towners like it that way.

Bailey's sculptures

Every Friday night during the summer, all the galleries in P-Town participate in the gallery crawl and most have receptions for the artist(s) featured that week. The exhibitions change pretty much every week because there are only about 10 weeks to the season during which most of a year’s worth of income has to be earned.

Maryalice Johnson's work

my summer gallery home

This Friday I stopped first at Art Strand, the coop gallery that includes many of the finest year-round resident artists and whose exhibitions are consistently among the most interesting in town. No sailboats or lighthouses here. The current show features the work of Maryalice Johnson and Bailey Bob Bailey. Johnson’s cut-out collages are peopled with a cast of female characters whose adventures she has been chronicling for some time. They are made on clear plastic and mounted about 6 inches off the wall, so that the play of shadows increases the population and the activity exponentially. While I frankly resist devoting the time that would be required to decipher the narrative, the visual impact of the work is strong enough on its own to make it fully successful.

Bailey’s sculptures promise nothing more than fun and they deliver. My favorites are the painted foam pieces, out-of-scale big, looking eroded by time and weather and simultaneously heavy and light.

Wohlfarth gallery goers

Vinnie Wohlfarth herself

Just a short walk brought us to Wohlfarth Gallery, my lovely gallery home for the summer. Vinnie has hung (and lit!) my 15-piece grid of encaustics really beautifully – somehow it found itself in the background of all the pictures I took. Imagine that. My opening reception there is July 23, where we’ll be showing a grid of yummy tar paintings.

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