Perspective on the Provincetown Art Colony - a series of 5 Art History Classes with Deborah Forman on Zoom  

5 Tuesdays,  April 27 - May 25, 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm (1.5 hours)

$75 members / $85 non-members / $60 CCMoA Docents 

The course on the history of the Provincetown art colony will begin with the launching of the colony when Charles Hawthorne opened his school in 1899. It will trace the early conflicts between the traditionalists and modernists, the impact of the Hans Hofmann School, and the golden years of the late ‘40s,‘50s, and ‘60s when the Abstract Expressionists were in town and New York galleries had satellite locations in Provincetown. When the art colony began to languish in the late ‘60s, the effort to revitalize it with the founding of the Fine Arts Work Center, the activities at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and the impact of Long Point Gallery will attest to the determination to maintain the town’s cultural integrity, which continues today.

Details:

April 27 - Charles Hawthorne opened the Cape Cod School of Art and launched the art colony in 1899. This class will cover the early years and the clash between the conservatives and the modernists.

May 4 - Learn about the Provincetown Printmakers, mostly women and many who had studied in Paris, artist Henry Hensche, with his focus on impressionism, and his students Salvatore Del Deo and Robert Douglas Hunter.

May 11 - From Hans Hofmann in the mid 1930s through the Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s and 1950s – it was the heyday of the art colony. We’ll talk about Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Helen Frankenthaler, among others.

May 18 - A look at representational artists Milton Avery, Edward Hopper, and Ben Shahn and the comeback of Figurative art made at the Sun Gallery with Red Grooms and Alex Katz exhibiting there. We will cover the Long Point Gallery and the significant impact it had in Provincetown and beyond. 

May 25 - The revitalization of the art colony, with the opening of the Fine Arts Work Center in 1968, brought new artists, including Jim Peters and Paul Bowen, into town. The art colony today continues to thrive with artists Paul Resika, Robert Henry, Tabitha Vevers, Ann Packard, and Cynthia Packard, among others, still active there.

Instructor Bio:

Deborah Forman is the author of five books: Perspectives on the Provincetown Art Colony, (2011); Contemporary Cape Cod Artists: Images of Land and Sea (2013); Contemporary Cape Cod Artists: People & Places (2014); Contemporary Cape Cod Artists: On Abstraction (2015); and Art from Cape Cod: Selections from the Cape Cod Museum of Art (2016), co-written with Edith Tonelli. All were published by Schiffer Books. She wrote the script, conducted the interviews, and worked on the filming for Art In Its Soul, an award-winning documentary on the history of the Provincetown art colony, aired on public television stations nationwide. Also an artist, she is represented by Miller White Fine Arts in South Dennis. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, and has a degree in journalism from Temple University. She has curated several shows at the museum and has taught courses at the museum, Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, and Open University of Wellfleet.