Mali Obomsawin in Concert | Twenty Summers at Truro Vineyards

Mali Obomsawin

Magdalena Abrego

Antonija Subat

Charles (Chuck) Roldan

Mali Obomsawin (they/she) is an award winning bassist, songwriter and composer from Abenaki First Nation at Odanak. With an expansive background in American roots, rock, and jazz, Obomsawin carries several music traditions. Mali’s debut album Sweet Tooth, has received international acclaim since its release in October of 2022 (Out of Your Head), including rave reviews in The Guardian, JazzTimes, and NPR. A Smithsonian Folkways Recordings artist, she spent the years 2014-2021 touring internationally with beloved folk-rock band Lula Wiles. An in-demand bassist in the US folk and jazz circuits, Mali appears often as an accompanist with contemporaries Jake Blount and Lizzie No, and has performed at festivals like Newport and Philly Folk. She can also be found in galleries and creative music spaces with the likes of Peter Apfelbaum, Taylor Ho Bynum, and Bill Cole's Untempered Ensemble.IG & Twitter: @featherbitchxx

Facebook: facebook.com/maliobomsawin

Pending Memories: Artist Talk with Adrián Fernández

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

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 Presents Diva Dancing, Zen Monk

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.

Devin N. Morris and Jenna Wortham in Conversation

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

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 is continuing 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 will be working on a book about the body and dissociation.

Twenty Summers 2022

Josh Prager / Co-Founder

Aziz Isham / Executive Director

Susan Meiselas / Photographer

Jeremy O. Harris / Playwright

Jeffrey Yasuo Mansfield / Architect

Brenda Zhang (Bz) / Artist & Designer

Adrián Fernández / Artist & Photographer

Fran Lebowitz / Author

V (Eve Ensler) / Playwright & Activist

Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil / Linguist

Raymond Antrobus / Poet

Cynthia Nixon, V Eve Ensler & Kara Swisher in Conversation

Cynthia Nixon is an actress, activist and theatre director best known for her portrayal of Miranda Hobbes in the HBO series Sex and the City. In 2018 she ran for Governor of New York on a platform focused on income inequality, renewable energy, establishing universal health care, stopping mass incarceration in the United States, and protecting undocumented children from deportation. Nixon is also an advocate for LGBT rights and received the Yale University Artist for Equality award in 2013 and a Visibility Award from the Human Rights Campaign in 2018.

V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a Tony Award-winning playwright, activist, performer, and author of the Obie award-winning international theatrical phenomenon The Vagina Monologues, published in over 48 languages, performed in over 140 countries, and was recently heralded by The New York Times as one of the most important plays of the past 25 years. She is the author of many plays and books including her critically acclaimed memoir, In the Body of the World, best-seller The Apology, now available in almost 20 languages, and soon to be released Reckoning by Bloomsbury in 2023. She is the founder of V-Day, the almost 25 year old global activist movement to end violence against all women (cisgender and transgender), gender diverse people, girls and the planet—and founder of One Billion Rising, the largest global mass action to end gender-based violence in over 200 countries, as well as a co-founder of City of Joy.

Kara Swisher is an American journalist. She is an opinion writer for The New York Times, a contributing editor at New York, the host of the podcast Sway, and the co-host of the podcast Pivot.

Roe v. Wade: Joshua Prager & Dr. Felicia Kornbluh

As the Supreme Court was pondering whether to overturn Roe v. Wade early June 2022, journalist Joshua Prager discussed his recent book The Family Roe with activist and feminist scholar Dr. Felicia Kornbluh. Their conversation explores the history of abortion, the unknown lives at the heart of Roe, and the current state of reproductive rights in America.

Dr. Felicia Kornbluh is a writer, activist, and professor who specializes in the histories of feminism, gender, social welfare, and reproductive politics. She is Professor of History and of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Vermont and the author or coauthor of three books, including the forthcoming A WOMAN’S LIFE IS A HUMAN LIFE: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice.

For more than twenty years, Joshua Prager, a former senior writer for The Wall Street Journal, has written about historical secrets—revealing all from the hidden scheme that led to baseball’s most famous moment (Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round the World”) to the only-ever anonymous recipient of a Pulitzer Prize (a photographer he tracked down in Iran). He is also the author of The Echoing Green (a Washington Post Best Book of the Year) and 100 Years, a collaboration with Milton Glaser, the graphic designer who created the I ❤️ NY logo. Joshua has written for the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He was a Nieman fellow at Harvard and a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Hebrew University, and has spoken at venues including TED and Google. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two daughters.

Secret City: James Kirchick and Andrew Sullivan in Conversation

Washington, D.C. has always been a city of secrets. Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in James Kirchick’s Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. James Kirchick is joined by fellow writer Andrew Sullivan to explore how the secret “too loathsome to mention”, since FDR has shaped each successive presidential administration, impacting everything from the creation of America’s earliest civilian intelligence agency to the rise and fall of McCarthyism, the struggle for African American civil rights, and the conservative movement.

“Scrupulously researched and novelistic in style, Secret City is an extraordinary achievement... Not since Robert Caro’s Years of Lyndon Johnson have I been so riveted by a work of history. Secret City is not gay history. It is American history.”

—George Stephanopoulos

James Kirchick is an award-winning journalist and author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age. A visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, he has reported from over 40 countries and is a columnist for Tablet magazine. Kirchick has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung among many other publications, and lives in Washington, D.C.

Andrew Sullivan is one of today’s most provocative social and political commentators. A former editor of The New Republic, he was the founding editor of The Daily Dish, and has been a regular writer for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Time, Newsweek, New York magazine, The Sunday Times (London), and now The Weekly Dish. He lives in Washington, DC, and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

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

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.

Indigenous Futures: A Conversation with Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil

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.