“In Full Boom” begins with a simple proposition: artists cannot resist flowers.

They never have. From Dutch vanitas painters warning viewers of life’s fleeting pleasures, to modernists exploding blossoms into color and abstraction, still lifes and florals have long served as both artistic proving ground and philosophical meditation. A vase of tulips can become a technical exercise, a coded self-portrait, a study in light, or a quiet act of devotion. On Cape Cod, where gardens wrestle with salt air and hydrangeas achieve near-mythic status, the tradition has flourished with particular intensity.

The artists represented here approached these subjects not as decoration, but as opportunity. Some painted with meticulous observation, attentive to every bruised petal and shifting shadow. Others treated flowers as vehicles for experimentation - flattening forms, heightening color, or dissolving blooms into gesture and atmosphere. In studios from Provincetown to Dennis, Wellfleet to Falmouth, artists returned again and again to arrangements gathered from gardens, roadside stands, kitchen tables, and untamed dunes. Flowers wilted. Light changed. The challenge renewed itself each morning.

Still life painting has often occupied a curious place in art history: beloved by artists, occasionally underestimated by critics. Yet its endurance reveals its deeper power. These subjects ask viewers to slow down. To notice. To recognize the drama contained within ordinary things - a reflective pitcher, quahog shells, bursting crocuses. Such works are intimate without being small. They transform observation into revelation.

This exhibition also offers a rare opportunity to encounter works from corners of the CCMoAcollection that do not always find their way into thematic exhibitions. Unified less by movement or chronology than by attentiveness itself, these paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, and sculptures reveal how generations of Cape artists have interpreted nature through their own visual languages, studio practices, and temperaments. Some works are exuberant, others restrained; some border on abstraction while others remain deeply rooted in realism. Together, they remind us that floral and still life traditions are endlessly renewable precisely because they are inexhaustibly human.

Cape Cod’s artistic history has always balanced seriousness with eccentricity. Here, world-class painters worked beside fishermen, poets, gardeners, and summer visitors carrying armfuls of beach roses. The ordinary and the transcendent have long shared the same table. “In Full Boom” celebrates that lineage - one rooted equally in observation, experimentation, humor, sensuality, and the persistent urge to capture beauty before it disappears, sometimes after.

We invite you to see through the perceptive eyes of some of Cape Cod’s most beloved artists and to spend time with works that reward lingering attention. Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection of more than 2,000 artworks, this exhibition reflects CCMoA’s ongoing commitment to preserving, studying, and sharing the rich artistic legacy of the region.

We extend special thanks to Blossoms of Cape Cod and lead designer/owner

Tara Cappello for contributing weekly floral arrangements - living interpretations that place these artworks into fragrant and full-bodied conversation with the present moment. 

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