Antoinette Cooper

Writing the Body with Antoinette Cooper

May 20, 2023 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

Antoinette Cooper is a writer, rainmaker and TEDx speaker committed to the liberation of Black bodies through the arts, ancestral healing, social justice, and medical humanities. She was born on the island of Jamaica, and raised on the island of New York in the New York City Housing Projects. She holds a B.A. from Cornell University, a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, and sits on the board of Narrative Medicine at CUNY School of Medicine. She understands that there is no separation between all the realms of the body, the earth, and the arts so her work explores the intersections of these multiple dimensions. She is currently at work publishing a multi-genre collection that documents the historical and present day violences on the Black female body.

Photography by Debbie Baxter and The NEST Project

Alejandra Cuadra

Estamos Aqui, En Mente, Espiritu, Cuerpo, y Alma

May 23, 2023 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

Alejandra was joined by a collective of artists, movers, and community members in an afternoon of meditation. They led guests in movement, breathing, and bodily exercises which allowed audience to engage and explore the world around them in a variety of different capacities.

Alejandra Cuadra embraces clay, wood, mixed media, and her proud Latina sensibility as she weaves, braids, and knots together her history—what was, what is, and what is to come. Feeling neither from here nor there, Cuadra seeks to reconnect to her roots in Peru. She threads together meditations on identity, displacement, traditions, belonging, and a desire for freedom. Her installations reflect her quest—what it means to belong within the body, soul, community, and the rooted valleys on earth. Through her works, she seeks to create a space where we can hear and feel aspects of the human heart that connect us all.

Cuadra holds a BFA in sculpture with a minor in public engagement from Maine College of Art & Design, where she was a Warren Public Engagement Fellow and received a Pillars Student Award. She also holds an associate degree from Cape Cod Community College. Transplanted from her homeland of Peru, she can never forget where she came from and she works to reclaim her sense of belonging in the U.S. Cuadra has attended residencies at Yale Norfolk School of Art, Monson Arts, Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, and Ellis Beauregard Foundation. She is continuing her creative path honoring her apprenticeship with Steve Kemp and Matthew Kemp while being a part of Mudflat’s Technical Education Program. She currently lives and is finding roots in the Greater Boston community.

At Cross roads, Sitting on Uncertainty, Redefining Identity (2018)

Como canta los Ríos de la Luna. Aluminum, Uprooted roots, wire, sentiments of belonging.

Jon Kung

Third Culture on the Outer Cape: Chef Jon Kung Demo & Fiesta

May 14, 2023 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

Jon Kung is a content creator and self-taught chef hailing from Detroit, Michigan. A self taught Third Culture cook, Jon combines his lifelong experiences growing up in Toronto and Hong Kong as well as his life lived in his adoptive home of Detroit to create a cuisine her truly sees as Chinese American. His current focus is on creating content and teaching people on new media platforms like Tiktok and Youtube how to express themselves in the kitchen. His cookbook is expected to be released this fall. 

Ruth Ozeki

Journaling and the Writing Process with Ruth Ozeki

May 19, 2023 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, whose books have garnered international acclaim for their ability to integrate issues of science, technology, religion, environmental politics, and global pop culture into unique, hybrid, narrative forms.

Her new novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, published by Viking in September 2021, tells the story of a young boy who, after the death of his father, starts to hear voices and finds solace in the companionship of his very own book.

Her novels, My Year of Meats (1998), All Over Creation (2003), A Tale for the Time Being (2013) and The Book of Form and Emptiness (2022) have been translated and published in over thirty countries. Her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being, won the LA Times Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Book of Form and Emptiness is the winner of the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction as well as the 22nd Annual Massachusetts Book Award, the BC Yukon Book Prize, and the Julia Ward Howe Prize for Fiction.

Her work of personal non-fiction, The Face: A Time Code (2016), was published by Restless Books as part of their groundbreaking series called The Face.

Ruth's documentary and dramatic independent films, including Halving the Bones, have been shown on PBS, at the Sundance Film Festival, and at colleges and universities across the country.

A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Ruth was ordained in 2010 and is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and the Everyday Zen Foundation.

She splits her time between Western Massachusetts, New York City, and British Columbia, Canada. She currently teaches creative writing at Smith College, where she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities in the Department of English Language and Literature.

Kate Rich

Feral Business: Kate Rich Artist Talk

May 20, 2023 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

Kate Rich is a trade artist and feral economist, born in Australia and living in Bristol, England. In the 1990s she co-founded the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT), an international agency producing an array of critical information products including economic and ecological indices, event-triggered webcam networks and animal operated emergency broadcast devices. The Bureau's work has been exhibited internationally in museum, educational and corporate contexts. Since 2003 she has run Feral Trade, an art endeavour and long-range economic experiment, using the spare carrying capacity of the art world to transport and transact coffee, olive oil and other vital goods, outside commercial systems.  

Kate is part of the finance team at Bristol's volunteer-run Cube Microplex, system administrator for the Irational.org art server collective, and a member of the FoAM network of transdisciplinary labs. At FoAM, she is setting up the Institute for Experiments with Business (Ibex), an emergent research entity whose remit is to think about business as a medium for generative experiments. 

In other collective affiliations she is a member of the Community Economies Institute (CEI), a group of scholars, artists, activists and practitioners from around the world who foster thought and practice to help communities survive well together. She is economist in residence with the Sail Cargo Alliance, an assembly of traders, brokers and ship owners who are reinventing the ancient art of running cargo on wind-propelled ships. And she was recently engaged as feral business advisor for the lumbung kios working group, organised by Indonesian art collective ruangrupa for the documenta fifteen international art event. Kate's ongoing preoccupation is to move her art practice deeper into the infrastructure of trade, administration, organisation and economy. To this end, she is currently working on establishing the curriculum for the Feral MBA, a radically different kind of  training course in business for artists and others. 

Julian Saporiti

May 12, 2023 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

No-No Boy is an immersive multimedia concert work blending original folk songs, storytelling, and projected archival images all in service of illuminating hidden American histories. Curated archival images sync up with folk songs about the aforementioned histories. The subject matter of these songs is taken from the artist’s family’s history living through the Vietnam War, as well as many other stories of Asian American experience such as Chinese Exclusion, Japanese American Incarceration, and today’s refugee crises.

Dr. Julian Saporiti is a Vietnamese Italian American songwriter and scholar born in Nashville, Tennessee. His multi-media work "No-No Boy" has transformed his PhD research on Asian American history into concerts, albums, and films which have reached a broad and diverse public audience. His latest album "1975" released through Smithsonian Folkways has been hailed by  NPR as "one of the most insurgent pieces of music you'll ever hear" which "re-examines Americana with devastating effect" and American Songwriter called it "insanely listenable and gorgeous." By using art to dive into highly divisive issues such as race, refugees, and immigration, Saporiti aims to allow audience members to sit with complication as music and visuals open doorways to difficult histories.  

Saporiti currently lives in Portland, Oregon. As a teacher, he has taught courses in songwriting, music, literature, history, Asian American Studies, and ethnic studies at the University of Wyoming, Colorado College, Brown University and has served as artist/scholar in residence at many universities and high schools across the country. Saporiti holds degrees from Berklee College of Music, University of Wyoming, and Brown University and has been commissioned by cultural institutions such as Lincoln Center, the LA Philharmonic, the National Parks, and Carnegie Hall. 

Kit Zauhar

"Actual People": Film Screening + Conversation with Kit Zauhar

May 13, 2023 at the Hawthorne Barn, Provincetown, MA

Kit Zauhar is a Chinese-American writer, director, and actress originally from Philadelphia. She attended NYU Tisch School of the Arts where she majored in Film & Television Production and minored in creative writing and philosophy. Her work explores intimacy, sex, belonging, and the everyday victories and humiliations we all experience.  

Kit’s first feature, Actual People, was a microbudget indie that she wrote, directed, produced, and starred in. Made for only ten thousand dollars, the film has had a remarkable festival run. After premiering in competition at Locarno’s cineasti del presente, it went on to win the Aprile Award  at Milano Film Festival, Best Screenplay at Indie Memphis, and also screened at Jeonju Film Festival, Slamdance, New Hampshire Film Festival, and BAMcinemaFest, to name a few.  

It was lauded as:  

“[capturing] actual truths about the ways that young people behave.” 

“an auspicious start to a very promising career for someone who is likely to become an essential  voice in contemporary cinema.” 

“...an ironic and illuminating film, which captures the anxieties and enthusiasm, intimate desires, and loneliness of contemporary youth with incredible authenticity and involvement.”  

It is being distributed by Factory25 (North America/Europe), Parallax Films (Asia), and will stream worldwide through MUBI in January 2023. She is also in development for a television show of the same name. Both works follow a bi-racial young woman coming of age between New York and her hometown of Philadelphia, as she navigates her early-twenties with messy sincerity, dark humor, and moments of quiet grace and humanity.  

Her second feature, This Closeness, is currently in post-production. The film was made in collaboration with Neon Heart Productions (Shiva Baby, Palm Trees and Power Lines), and  Discordia Cine.