Ari Shapiro & Joshua Prager in Conversation

Experience an intimate and engaging event with Ari Shapiro and Joshua Prager at the Hawthorne Barn, closing out our 2025 Season. Take a closer look at Ari’s voice, perspective, and storytelling, filled with insight, nuance, and memorable moments.

Ari Shapiro is an award-winning anchor of NPR’s flagship evening news program All Things Considered and a host of the podcast Consider This. He has reported from above the Arctic Circle and aboard Air Force One. He has been a question on Jeopardy and an answer in the New York Times crossword puzzle. His debut memoir, The Best Strangers in the World: Stories From a Life Spent Listening, was an instant New York Times bestseller. He also hosts the reality competition show, The Mole, on Netflix. As a journalist, he has won three Edward R. Murrow awards - most recently for a 2023 journey through Senegal, Morocco, and Spain connecting the dots between climate change, global migration, and the rise of the political far right. He has won the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award for coverage of the US legal system, and in 2023 he was named “Journalist of the Year” by NLGJA, the association of LGBTQ+ journalists. His 12-part course for Wondrium, “The Power of Storytelling,” received a 2024 Gold Telly award. As a performer, he has sung at Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, and many of the world’s other leading venues with the band Pink Martini. He also tours the country with the actor Alan Cumming in their original two man show, Och & Oy: A Considered Cabaret as well as with his own original solo show, Thank You For Listening: An Evening of Songs and Stories. He was born in Fargo, North Dakota and grew up in Portland, Oregon. He lives in Washington, DC with his husband and two dogs.

Glitterfox in Concert

Get ready for an unforgettable moment as powerhouse band Glitterfox light up the Hawthorne Barn in a show-stopping takeover you won’t want to miss. Captured live during Twenty Summers’ Season Twelve, this newly released video brings all the energy, magic, and raw electricity straight to your screen—press play and experience it for yourself.

The Portland, OR based band Glitterfox has released five singles in just six months under their new record label Kill Rock Stars, with two more arriving this Spring. The band’s been growing steadily since “Drive” came out in August 2023, with their indie rock recipe that deftly balances Southern songwriting shine and nostalgia-fueled anthems. The four-piece band’s songwriters and front persons, married couple Solange Igoa and Andrea Walker, have always channeled their personal struggles as well as experiences as queer, neurodiverse individuals into their songwriting. Bassist Eric Stalker and drummer Blaine Heinonen bring a love of Americana, grunge, and dance music into the mix. All of these influences can be heard on the band’s latest singles, produced by Chris Funk of The Decemberists, and in their spirited live shows as they prepare for their full-length album debut in 2025.

Geraldine Brooks & Patrick Nolan in Conversation

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, attending Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues.

Later she worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. In 1990, with her husband Tony Horwitz, she won the Overseas Press Club Award for best coverage of the Gulf War.

She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March. Her novels People of the Book, Caleb’s Crossing, The Secret Chord and Horse all were New York Times Bestsellers. Her first novel, Year of Wonders is an international bestseller, translated into more than 25 languages.

She is also the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire, Foreign Correspondence and The Idea of Home. Her latest book, Memorial Days was released in 2024.

Michael Mayo in Concert

Enjoy dynamite talent Michael Mayo's concert at the Hawthorn Barn from June 2025 as part of our Season 12 programming.

Michael Mayo leans on his intuition as a vocalist, composer, songwriter, and arranger. Much like molding and shaping a sculpture out of clay, he stretches his voice through layers of heavenly harmonizing, hard-hitting beatboxing, and heartfelt crooning.

The Los Angeles-based phenomenon creates from the heart without filter or pretense, allowing his voice to transmit raw emotion above an ever-evolving backdrop of jazz, neo-soul, and R&B on his second full-length LP, Fly [Mack Avenue Records/Artistry Music], and more to come.

Fragments in Time | Ashley Gilbertson Interview

Ashley Gilbertson joins filmmaker Michael Cestaro at Stanley to discuss his recent exhibition alongside photographer Franco Pagetti, as well as his life, travels, and career as a photographer and writer.

Gilbertson muses on the show’s arrival in Provincetown, the ethical role of the photographer, backstory behind some of his most viral photographs, his books - as well as his time in Iraq, Afghanistan, West Papua, NYC during Covid-19 lockdowns… and even how to escape a minefield. 

As we approach the final days of 'Fragments in Time' living on our walls in Provincetown we are honored to share some of our time with Ashley with you. Please enjoy this engrossing interview with one of the contemporary world’s most wise and heartfelt witnesses.

Chase Strangio & Celeste Lecesne in Conversation

Sit down with lawyer Chase Strangio and artist Celeste Lecesne to revisit some of Chase's most impactful moments, and how these two amazing individuals will look to the future with hope, determination, and love.

Chase Strangio is Co-Director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project as well as a nationally recognized expert on transgender rights. Chase’s work includes impact litigation, as well as legislative and administrative advocacy, on behalf of LGBTQ people and people living with HIV across the United States.

Celeste Lecesne (they/he) wrote the short film Trevor, which won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short and they are co-founder of The Trevor Project, the largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention Lifeline for LGBT and Questioning youth. The NYTimes has ranked them “among the most talented solo performers of his (or any) generation.”  They are also the co-founder of The Future Perfect Project, a national arts initiative for LGBTQIA+ youth, and the recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship Award. 

Season Twelve Trailer

We are thrilled to introduce the trailer for Twenty Summers' 2025 Season Twelve. This past summer we welcomed artists and thought-leaders from around the world to take part in workshops, conversations, demonstrations, and performance at the historic Hawthorne Barn.

Kioea in Concert

Kioea (pronounced kēōˈāə) is a music group featuring Carand Burnet (she/her) as lead guitarist and songwriter. Their music blends sounds of surf rock, psychedelia, and global influences. J. Swartwood (Aquarium Drunkard) described Burnet’s music as “simultaneously modern and vintage.”

Kioea has played at 3S Artspace, The Music Hall, The Thing in the Spring Festival, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, SPACE Gallery, WMUR Summer Concert Series, and elsewhere. Burnet received a Maine ARP Grant through SPACE Gallery and the National Endowment for the Arts, which supported the making of Kioea’s album Stand Tall.

20S x Atmos | Embodied Activism

There is no separating equality from ecology, which knows that no member of any natural system has more value than another. In a world of polycrises, what does it mean for activism to be a daily necessity? How can we more deeply integrate it into our lives, allowing our values to shape a more fulfilling and joyful existence? This discussion will bring together advocates who are reframing how we talk about social and environmental justice—and what it means to be an embodied activist.

Banner photograph by Annie Lai for The Overview by Atmos

You + 20S + JU-EH = ?

A Site Specific Milk Tea Opera House Session

‘Milk Tea Opera House’ is an initiative to create opportunities to influence more voices, to awaken them, and to guide them. It is vital to be able to experience more voices and together we ask this question: Where does voice come from, and how does it represent you?

JU-EH creates a live Milk Tea Opera House Session, along with Twenty Summers, to co-create new kinds of interactive spaces from where the voice is born, redefining the term ‘opera house’ for the next 100 years.

The main practice of an MTOH Session focuses on the human voice, and exercise how we use the voice internally in different dimensions. Not the finished flawless performances of an opera singer, but the internal handling of the voice in a much wider spectrum.

With this knowledge that JU-EH has lived, studied, and embodied for decades, it is time to collaborate to reveal the depth of our sonic environments, and the image of voice in various daily activities to a wider creative community.

20S x Atmos | Future of Fashion

At its heart, fashion is a tool of creativity and transformation—we slip into shapes and silhouettes, ever discovering new shades of self. So why is an industry that is so driven by “the new” seemingly incapable of reinventing itself when it comes to the health of people and the planet? This event will bring together two forces within the industry—photographer Camila Falquez and model, author, and organizer Cameron Russell—to share their reflections on creating authentic and meaningful change over the course of their careers.

Banner photograph by Arianna Lago for Atmos Volume 07: Prism

Isle McElroy, Pat Kearns & Patrick Nolan in Conversation

McElroy’s debut novel, “The Atmospherians,” told the clever but slightly insiderly and overfreighted tale of a wellness cult designed to cleanse men of their toxicity. “People Collide” is a more agile, universal book, with its title alluding to the randomness of human connection. It’s a variety of rom-com, really, that somewhat lost art. “Circumstances pinball people together,” the narrator declares. “This is called fate because chance is too scary a word.”

Perhaps no situation is more pinballish than that of in-laws, and McElroy’s unexpected digression into the psyche of Elizabeth’s mother, a frustrated writer herself who unknowingly condemns Eli for abandoning her daughter, is one of the novel’s great gifts.

McElroy, who lives in Brooklyn, seems to aspire as much to flight as to eavesdropping. “People Collide” has some bumpy, odd spots — what body doesn’t? — but its naturalness and ease with the most fundamental questions of existence make it a big project knocking around in a small package, portending even bigger projects ahead.

"Signs from the Mainland" Preview + Q&A with Jeffrey Mansfield and Michael Cestaro

Join 2021 Twenty Summers Fellow Jeffrey Mansfield and director Michael Cestaro for a conversation following the preview of Signs from the Mainland, a documentary short that explores the extraordinary history of the Martha’s Vineyard deaf community.

Starting as far back as the early 1700s, genetic deafness took a foothold on Martha's Vineyard where as many as one in four residents were deaf and a majority of hearing residents also were able to communicate in what is considered one of the precursors to modern American Sign Language.

The film explores the deeper meaning and lessons to be learned from this unique enclave where deaf and hearing individuals coexisted seamlessly. Through interviews with historians and community members, the documentary asks, “why did this happen?”, “what was it like?”, and also “where did it go?” The story of the MV deaf community’s eventual conclusion shows us the first steps of the ASL movement, the establishment of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford CT, and bigger lessons about connection over time.

Signs from the Mainland reflects on the legacy of the MV Deaf community, the implications for the broader society, and its relevance to contemporary conversations about inclusivity and diversity.

Synchronous: Creative Process + Presentation

Take a look at Synchronous Creative in an evening of site-specific movement and exploration surrounding the idea of “safe spaces” at the Hawthorne Barn. The evening is an inside look at their creative process, where they led audience members through a few prompts and exercises utilized through their process at Twenty Summers.

"Simmering: A Kitchen Memoir" Rebecca Orchant & Bill Hough in Conversation

Join Rebecca Orchant & Bill Hough for a conversation celebrating Rebecca’s new book Simmering, A Kitchen Memoir . “

There are somethings that you just can’t do in front of other people. You can’t look at magazines with boobs in them; you can’t eat condoms on your mom’s nightstand; and you most certainly can’t stick your finger into the Duncan-Hines vanilla frosting tub. And so I waited.”

Jake Blount in Concert

A powerfully gifted musician and a scholar of Black American music, Jake Blount speaks ardently about the African roots of the banjo and the subtle, yet profound ways African Americans have shaped and defined the amorphous categories of roots music and Americana. His 2020 album Spider Tales (named one of the year’s best albums by NPR and The New Yorker, earned a perfect 5-star review from The Guardian) highlighted the Black and Indigenous histories of popular American folk tunes, as well as revived songs unjustly forgotten in the whitewashing of the canon.

Jake Blount’s music is rooted in care and confrontation. On stage, each song he and his band play is chosen for a reason - because it highlights important elements about the stories we tell ourselves of our shared history and our endlessly complicated present moment. The more we learn about where we’ve been, the better equipped we are to face the future.

The Art of Journalism

Journalism informs. It investigates. It holds the powerful accountable. But can it also be art? Adam Moss makes that case in his new book, The Work of Art, featuring visual artists, novelists, poets, musicians, and journalists like Gay Talese, Ira Glass, and the front-page editors of the New York Times. Join Moss and Provincetown Independent editor Ed Miller, along with journalist and historian Dan Okrent, journalist and podcaster Andrew Sullivan, and journalist and artist Tessera C. Knowles, as they discuss the creative side of journalism — as it is practiced now, as it has flourished historically, and as it takes ever-new forms on the way to an indefinite future.

This event benefited the Local Journalism Project — the nonprofit organization that supports next-generation journalists at the Provincetown Independent.

Brandee Younger Trio in Concert

This sonically-innovative harpist is revolutionizing her instrument for the digital era. Over the past 15 years, she has worked relentlessly to stretch boundaries and limitations for harpists. In 2022, she made history by becoming the first black woman to be nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition. That same year, she was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

“No harpist thus far has been more capable of combining all of the modern harp traditions—from Salzedo, through Dorothy Ashby, through Alice Coltrane—with such strength, grace and commitment.” —saxophonist Ravi Coltrane

Impermanence: Sian Robertson Artist Talk

Over the past six or seven years I have focused on cutting away certain areas of maps, creating lace-like pages of roads, rivers, and other geographical features. These are then protected between sheets of acrylic, in boxes, or safely mounted on panels.

For my site-specific installation at Twenty Summers, I embraced the fragility of the pages, leaving them unprotected and open to whatever might happen when people also enter the space. I envisioned hundreds of cut maps hanging from the beams, perhaps randomly, perhaps in a specific layout.

I have a sense of the installation being somewhat representative of the world, in particular the fragility of the planet and how we are failing to take care of it. But I also like the idea that it spreads through the community and parts of it live on wherever people put the pieces that they take. I see the whole as ephemeral and removing some of the individual elements does not diminish it. And maybe, during future iterations of the installation, more will be added, and it will continually evolve; perhaps becoming a permanent part of my art practice.

20S x Atmos | Oceans Between Us

All life once rose from the ocean, and all life still depends on it today. From melting glaciers and rising sea levels to plastic pollution and overfishing, our common origin is in danger. This group of marine biologists, ocean advocates, and researchers of the local coastal ecosystem venture into a discussion about how the ocean connects us—and what we can do to protect it.