Brenda Zhang (Bz)

Home and Elsewhere: Co-Creating an Atlas with Brenda Zhang (Bz)

May 14, 2022 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

Through a series of exercises, Twenty Summers Fellow Brenda Zhang (Bz) guides participants in visual and spatial documentation of their individual experiences and narratives of Place, while exploring the shared meanings of “home” and “elsewhere.” Participants are invited to bring cartographic tools from their own traditions, diasporas, or fictions.

Brenda Zhang (Bz) is a visual artist, designer, organizer, and educator based on unceded Tongva land (so-called Los Angeles). They are a core organizer with the Design As Protest Collective and Dark Matter University and a founding member of SPACE INDUSTRIES. In their practice, they investigate physical and cultural construction as entangled processes and use disciplinary tools of art and architecture to imagine futures beyond settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy. Bz received a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Visual Arts from Brown University. In their free time, they look for birds and trash in the Los Angeles River.

Gender + Sexuality Resource Center (2021)

ELSEWHERE, OR ELSE WHERE? (2018—2019)

call and response (2020)

Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil

Indigenous Futures: A Conversation with Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil

Fellowships May 14, 2022 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil (Ayutla Mixe, 1981) is a member of COLMIX, a collective of young Mixe people who carry out research and dissemination activities on Mixe language, history and culture. She studied Hispanic Language and Literature and completed a Master's degree in Linguistics at UNAM. She has collaborated in various projects on the dissemination of linguistic diversity, development of grammatical content for educational materials in indigenous languages, and documentation projects and attention to languages at risk of disappearing. She has been involved in the development of written material in Mixe and in the creation of Mixe-speaking readers and other indigenous languages. She has been involved in activism for the defense of the linguistic rights of indigenous language speakers, in the use of indigenous languages in the virtual world and in literary translation. She has also been involved in processes in defense of the environment.

A Modest Proposal to Save the World | December 9 , 2020.

The Map and the Territory: National borders have colonized our imagination | October 26, 2020

Miguel Gomez Medina, Map of Mexico (1931) | Smithsonian

Devin N. Morris

Devin N. Morris and Jenna Wortham in Conversation

May 21, 2022 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

Editor and mixed media artist Devin N. Morris, uses paintings, photographs, writings, and video to explore racial and sexual identity. His works prioritize displays of personal innocence and acts of kindness within surreal landscapes and elaborate draped environments that reimagine the social boundaries imposed on male interactions, platonic and otherwise.

Devin N. Morris is a Baltimore born, Brooklyn based artist who is interested in abstracting American life and subverting traditional value systems through the exploration of racial and sexual identity in mixed media paintings, photographs, writings and video. His works prioritize displays of personal innocence and acts of kindness within surreal landscapes and elaborate draped environments that reimagine the social boundaries imposed on male interactions, platonic and otherwise. The use of gestural kindnesses between real and imagined characters are inspired by his various experiences growing as a black boy in Baltimore, MD and his later experiences navigating the world as a black queer man. Memory subconsciously roots itself in the use of familiar household materials & fabrics, while symbolically he arranges it. Looking to buoy his new realities in a permanent real space, Morris posits his reimagined societies as a prehistory to futures that are impossible to imagine.

Jenna Wortham

Devin N. Morris and Jenna Wortham in Conversation

May 21, 2022 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

Jenna Wortham is continued a residency from 2020 that was interrupted by the pandemic. She is a sound healer, reiki practitioner, herbalist, and community care worker oriented towards healing justice and liberation; Jenna is also a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, co-host of the podcast Still Processing, and is working on a book about the body and dissociation.

Dominick Mouroz of Peng! Collective

Dominick Mouroz is a digital artist, up-cycling clothes designer focused on sustainability of repurposed clothing. He has also been a social media manager of multiple pages as well as content creator on his personal online brand and sole curator of multiple digital content pages which focus on queer content and humor.

The Peng! Collective members feminist human rights activist Jelka Kretzschmar, digital artist and up-cycling designer Dominick Mouroz and writer and performer Rebecca Nea Alemee Meyer, will continue their work of Golden NFT Project. The project began with a larger collective of creatives to raise enough funds through the sale and circulation of NFTs to buy a “Golden Visa” for a family from Afghanistan stuck in the misery of Moria Refugee Camp on Lesvos, Greece. At the Barn, the work will expand on the possibilities of a creative circumvention of global inequality and persecution and ways to use art to aid refugees and migrants.

Jelka Kretzschmar of Peng! Collective

Jelka Kretzschmar is a feminist human rights activist who has spent the past years working on media and advocacy projects for the civilian rescue fleet and human rights networks. Her personal work uses design as a central element for critical engagement and political investigation. She spends her time fighting the border regime.

The Peng! Collective members feminist human rights activist Jelka Kretzschmar, digital artist and up-cycling designer Dominick Mouroz and writer and performer Rebecca Nea Alemee Meyer, will continue their work of Golden NFT Project. The project began with a larger collective of creatives to raise enough funds through the sale and circulation of NFTs to buy a “Golden Visa” for a family from Afghanistan stuck in the misery of Moria Refugee Camp on Lesvos, Greece. At the Barn, the work will expand on the possibilities of a creative circumvention of global inequality and persecution and ways to use art to aid refugees and migrants.

Rebecca Nea Alemee Meyer of Peng! Collective

Rebecca Nea Alemee Meyer is a writer and performer of poetic essays and lyrical documentaries of their reality of living in a queer, non-white body. Since 2018 they curate multimedial events and political exhibitions on the intersection of relationships between the body, spaces and technology.

The Peng! Collective members feminist human rights activist Jelka Kretzschmar, digital artist and up-cycling designer Dominick Mouroz and writer and performer Rebecca Nea Alemee Meyer, will continue their work of Golden NFT Project. The project began with a larger collective of creatives to raise enough funds through the sale and circulation of NFTs to buy a “Golden Visa” for a family from Afghanistan stuck in the misery of Moria Refugee Camp on Lesvos, Greece. At the Barn, the work will expand on the possibilities of a creative circumvention of global inequality and persecution and ways to use art to aid refugees and migrants.

Adrián Fernández

In Pending Memories, Adrián Fernández combines photographic media, three-dimensional installation, digital art and elements of architecture and engineering software to achieve images that challenge the viewer's perception by proposing a new imaginary reality. The viewer is called to consider the motives that led to the existence of each construction, reframing a fabricated past to dream of a utopian future

Adrián Fernández studied visual arts at the San Alejandro Fine Arts Academy (2004) and later at the Superior Institute of Arts (2010) in Havana. From 2010 to 2012, he trained at The Ludwig Foundation of Cuba and New York University, Tisch School of the Arts Special Programs, where he also taught. He has exhibited extensively, from Berlin to New York, Houston to Antwerp, including ongoing representation at Provincetown’s Schoolhouse Gallery.

From a conceptual point of view, I believe this work connects with my perception of the Cuban reality and the crisis this country has lived with for such a long time. The current paradigm crisis, from a social  and ideological point of view, drives the creation of these photographs. The accumulation of similar  images reveals a reality that shows structures in disuse, abandoned within the idleness of a depleted  territory. The ‘photographed’ constructions function as metaphors for the inert remains of a society  sustained by the spectral foundation of memory. The residues of the epic past and the current  precariousness of the current moment appear as ruins of the fiction that we still have to live with today. 

—Adrián Fernández

Sharon Mashihi

June 4, 2022 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

The opening excerpt of Sharon Mashihi’s performative lecture on Story Structure, and what becomes of the tenets of Three Act Structure when the story you are telling is about your own life. Does it then become imperative to live a more interesting life, a life where you want things and go on journeys to get them? And what happens when you realize the Self who is living that story you are trying to tell is comprised of about a dozen separate mini-selves, each of them with its own wants, needs, and potential trajectories?

Sharon Mashihi works in the mediums of audio, film, and performance. In 2018, Sharon won the Third Coast International Audio Prize Silver Award for her audio documentary, Man Choubam (I Am Good.) In 2020, she released the metafictional audio series, Appearances, in which she performed as 36 distinct characters. Described by New York Magazine as "a breakthrough for the podcast form", Appearances named a best podcast of the year by The New York Times, Vulture, Indiewire, The L.A. Review of Books, and others. Sharon is a former editor of the podcasts,The Heart and Bodies.

This is a story about my mom and me. 

My mom is a very private person, so I am deeply grateful to her that she let me tell this story.  As far as I know, she hasn't listened, and doesn't feel ready to do so.  So if this is mom reading right now, hello, I love you, and I hope you feel ok about this.

Appearances is a one woman audio show that straddles the line between fiction and truth. It brings to life an Iranian American family and community through the real and fantastical mental machinations of Melanie Barzadeh.