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.

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.