Hosted by trans trickster Gnarlie Hose (Joey Soloway) & Billy's Bush (Marval Rex), a roundtable talk show where no topics are off-limits.

Doors at 6:30 PM | Show at 7:00 PM

No recording of any kind. We’re serious.

Yes debauchery of every kind. Period.

The Gnarlie Hose Show is, for better and for worse, a roundtable talk show where no topics are off-limits. Hosted by trans trickster Gnarlie Hose (Joey Soloway) himself and co-hosted by Billy's Bush (Marval Rex), with special guests Dolly Wells, Jari Jones and John Cameron Mitchell, the Gnarlie Hose Show discusses, dissects, and queers the news and events of the moment– from pop cultural dramatics to sociopolitical disasters, from intersectional feminist discourses to half-baked existential qualms, and from spiritual-cum-existential qualms to valiant visions for the fall of the failing patriarchy. Gnarlie Hose is the show you sat down to watch at the end of the night thinking it was Rachel Maddow and then realized that the Ketamine-LSD cocktail hadn’t worn off yet... or had it? This show weaves the legacy of iconic shows like Charlie Rose with trans performance art, like Harry Dodge’s Love Streams and Zackary Drucker’s The Skew.

Joey Soloway is best known for creating, writing, executive producing and directing the Emmy award-winning Transparent; directing and writing the film Afternoon Delight, which won Best Director award at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival; and producing Six Feet Under.

The show will be followed by a special dinner with the performers and Twenty Summers' member at Bacchus, a French bistro nearby. If you would like to join us for dinner, please reach out to development@20summers.org for more information.

Join us for KAINA in concert at Truro Vineyards, an intimate and COVID-safe outdoor show, with a full bar and the delicious eats of Blackfish's Crush Pad food truck on offer.

7pm doors | 8pm show

KAINA is a first-generation Latina, born and raised in Chicago. Since the release of her debut EP sweet asl in 2016, she has created generational music that surpasses borders, a unified expression of her native Chicago coupled with her Venezuelan and Guatemalan heritage. From collaborating with peers like Saba, The O’My’s, and Sen Morimoto, and through multidisciplinary work around the city with various organizations, she has found a sound for herself that is gentle, yet full of intent. A listener can feel the intimacy resonating in her lyrics, as she pens odes about love, legacy, and ancestry, and how those concepts become more complex as one grows older. Her 2019 album Next to the Sun (Sooper Records) was featured in Pitchfork, Fader, Teen Vogue, and NPR and resulted in her touring as support with Cuco, Sleater-Kinney, and Durand Jones and the Indications. Her forthcoming album, It Was a Home (City Slang Records), releases March 4, 2022 and will be followed by both North America and European headline tours.

“The Chicago artist makes music for complex first-generation Latinas like herself—and anyone who’s ever felt less than enough.”
- Pitchfork

“KAINA delivers soothing reflections on Latinx identity and feelings of purposelessness atop music that fuses pop, R&B, jazz and salsa, the album feels as expansive as countless longer collections.”
- Paste Magazine

Join us for Celeste Lecesne in *POOF!* at Truro Vineyards, an intimate and COVID-safe outdoor show, with a full bar and the delicious eats of Blackfish's Crush Pad food truck on offer.

7pm doors | 8pm show

Fairies have always enjoyed a close association with the natural world. But with so much of the natural world under threat from Climate Change, the fairies are not pleased, and they are beginning to show up in surprising ways. In addition to making everything more fabulous just by simply being, fairies have come to pass along a few spells that will be needed in the days to come. One such fairy is scheduled to make a rare appearance in Truro and they will have their say. Join them.

Development of POOF! has been supported, in part, through a residency and workshop performance at Ancram Opera House (Jeffrey Mousseau and Paul Ricciardi, Directors), Ancram, New York. Costume design by Michael Krass.

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Celeste Lecesne

I've been telling stories for over 25 years.

Whether I'm writing, acting, producing or trying to create social change, it's usually the story that gets me involved. But in the process of getting things done and trying to make the world a better place, I've also been telling the story of my life. My hope is that you find something here that will inspire you to live your life more fully and continue to tell your story.

I’m using my middle name from now on - Celeste. As a child I was terrified people would discover Celeste. Throughout my life I’ve ghosted that part of myself and kept them out of sight. No more.

When I co-founded The Trevor Project 22 years ago along with Peggy Rajski and Randy Stone, our intention was to save the lives of LGBT and Questioning youth and provide them with a place to turn in crisis. But one of my personal hopes for the Trevor Lifeline was that it might become the means by which older LGBT people could appropriately express their love and support for queer and questioning youth, a channel through which the wisdom and experience of one generation could be passed along to the next. For too many generations, young people have had to figure out in secret what it means to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. As adolescents, many of us had to search for proof that we weren’t crazy, we had to find our gay history by reading between the lines and we had to locate one another in a world that required us to be practically invisible. My own journey was not exceptional in this regard. I found my way to queerness by feeling my way forward alone and without the support of mentors or teachers. Friends and lovers certainly helped, but it was basically a DIY situation. Only in the last decade have gay youth been able to be more than just beginners at being queer. In fact in many respects, they are showing us how it’s done in this brave new world.

For the past three years I’ve been working closely with LGBTQ+ youth, and I’ve been so impressed by their ability to express who they are. It’s ironic that these young people are now encouraging me to be more myself and proving to me that it’s never too late to become yourself.

–Celeste

Join us for Mali Obomsawin in concert at Truro Vineyards, an intimate and COVID-safe outdoor show, with a full bar and the delicious eats of Blackfish's Crush Pad food truck on offer.

7pm doors | 8pm show

Mali Obomsawin is an award winning songwriter, bassist and composer from Odanak First Nation. With an eclectic background in indie rock, American roots/folk and jazz, Obomsawin carries several music traditions. A Smithsonian Folkways Recordings artist, Mali has toured internationally, receiving acclaim from NPR and RollingStone and several Boston Music Awards nominations with her band Lula Wiles. Obomsawin frequents the folk/roots circuit as a frontwoman and sidewoman, appearing several times at Newport and Philly Folk festival, and also performs as bassist/singer in the creative music scene with Peter Apfelbaum, Taylor Ho Bynum and with her Sextet project, Sweet Tooth. Known for her striking, sardonic lyricism and sonic dreamscapes, Mali’s songwriting delivers the lush, anti-imperialist rock show we’ve all been craving.

IG & Twitter: @featherbitchxx

Facebook: facebook.com/maliobomsawin

photo credit: Nolan Altvater (Passamaquoddy Tribe)

in-photo art: Jo Povi Romero (Pojoaque Pueblo Tribe)

Thank you to the New England States Touring (NEST) program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Regional Touring Program and the six New England state arts agencies.

Join us for Roots Meltdown with New Sheriff, featuring percussionist Jon Joly and special guests. Twenty Summers Concerts at Truro Vineyards, intimate and COVID-safe outdoor shows, with a full bar and the delicious eats of Blackfish's Crush Pad food truck on offer.

7pm doors | 8pm show

From early roots to rockers, deep dub, rub-a-dub and early Dancehall, New Sheriff (Andrew Sloan)  brings the heavyweight sounds of Jamaica, curated from his personal collection of over 6000 pieces. All vinyl. All ways. With 25 years of collecting and more than a decade immersed in the business of Jamaican music, New Sheriff has a deep knowledge of the history of Jamaican music from Studio One and Treasure Isle in the 60s to the digital takeover of the late 80s.

“I am blessed with a life's work of amazing music from the island of Jamaica. Music that was never meant to be streamed or downloaded, but that must be played and enjoyed in its original vinyl format with all its snaps, crackles and pops.”

First exposed to the sounds of Jamaica working at RAS Records in Washington in the early 90s, New Sheriff spent most of that decade traveling the world as tour manager with Israel Vibration and the Roots Radics Band.  Sharing stages with all the top international bands from Jamaica, England, and Europe, and buying records.  In 2000, he moved to Miami to work with the producer Joe Gibbs for two years and continued to build his knowledge of the history of Jamaican music and grow his sound with more than a dozen trips to Kingston.

Jon Joly is a local percussionist and hand drummer, and a member of the Shango Axe.

How can art shape the narrative and change human behavior around marine debris? The Center for Coastal Studies Marine Debris and Plastics program collects thousands of pounds of refuse from the ocean and coastline each year, including derelict fishing gear from local waters and trash collected during volunteer beach cleanups all over the Cape. Some of this discarded material is repurposed by innovative artists to create beautiful, thought-provoking works of art. Join CCS and Twenty Summers for a special gathering at the Hiebert Marine Laboratory, featuring unique art inspired by and created with reclaimed marine debris and a panel discussion on the intersections of artistic inspiration and human impacts on the ocean. The event will begin with a reception under the majestic Spinnaker display.

Featured artists:

Emsaki

Annie Lewandowski

Jackie Kilroe

Sarah J. Thornington

$20 Suggested Donation

As the Supreme Court ponders whether to overturn Roe v. Wade at the end of its current term, come hear journalist Joshua Prager discuss his recent book The Family Roe with journalist Jessica Bruder. The book explores the unknown lives at the heart of Roe, and what they tell us about the current state of abortion in America. The New York Times called it “an honest glimpse into the American soul," and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

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.

Hailed by The New Yorker as “an acute and compassionate observer,” Jessica Bruder is a journalist who writes about social issues and subcultures. She is the New York Times best-selling author of three books, including Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, which was translated into two-dozen languages and adapted into an Oscar-winning film. Her other books are Snowden’s Box: Trust in The Age of Surveillance, co-authored with Dale Maharidge, and Burning Book. She has written cover stories for magazines including Harper’s, WIRED, Audubon and, most recently, The Atlantic (“The Abortion Underground,” May 2022). She teaches narrative nonfiction at Columbia Journalism School and lives in Brooklyn, New York with her partner, a spaniel named Max and more plants than you can shake a leafy stick at.

$20 Suggested Donation

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.

$20 Suggested Donation

Sharon Mashihi will present a 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.

$20 Suggested Donation

In Pending Memories, Adrian Fernandez 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.

Adrian Fernandez 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 Milanés

$20 Suggested Donation

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.

This event is part of ART | FUTURE: 20S x FAWC, a weekend of programming presented by Twenty Summers and the Fine Arts Work Center. Glitches and culture hackers, climate change, mass migration, hope and healing…. What lies ahead for art and the future?

$20 Suggested Donation

Join us to celebrate the publication of Ben Shattuck’s Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau (Tin House), and Julia Glass’ Vigil Harbor (Pantheon).

This event is part of ART | FUTURE: 20S x FAWC, a weekend of programming co-presented with our friends at the Fine Arts Work Center. Glitches and culture hackers, climate change, mass migration, hope and healing…. What lies ahead for art and the future?

***This event is at the Fine Arts Work Center.***

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About Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau:

On an autumn morning in 1849, Henry David Thoreau stepped out his front door to walk the beaches of Cape Cod. Over a century and a half later, Ben Shattuck does the same. With little more than a loaf of bread, brick of cheese, and a notebook, Shattuck sets out to retrace Thoreau’s path through the Cape’s outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown’s fingertip.

Ben Shattuck, author of the debut nonfiction book Six Walks, is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and a 2019 Pushcart Prize. He lives with his wife and daughter on the coast of Massachusetts, where he owns and operates a general store built in 1793.

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About Vigil Harbor

When two unexpected visitors arrive in an insular coastal village, they threaten the equilibrium of a community already confronting climate instability, political violence, and domestic upheavals—a cast of unforgettable characters from the rich imagination of the National Book Award–winning, best-selling author of Three Junes.

Julia Glass is the author of the novels A House Among the Trees, And the Dark Sacred Night, The Widower’s Tale, The Whole World Over, and the National Book Award–winning Three Junes, as well as the Kindle Single “Chairs in the Rafters.” Her third book, I See You Everywhere, a collection of linked stories, won the 2009 SUNY John Gardner Fiction Award. She has also won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She taught for more than ten years at the Fine Arts Work Center’s Summer Program and is now a Senior Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College. Julia lives with her family in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

$20 Suggested Donation

Mixed media artist Devin N. Morris explores collage making through painting, photography, writings, and video. His works prioritize displays of personal innocence and acts of kindness within surreal landscapes and elaborate draped environments.The work is made during its process, the resulting images reflect the artist's engagement with changing environments where space, kinship, social interrogation and available materialities are explored and reflected.

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.

Suggested Donation

Join us at the Barn for an evening toast with our friends and neighbors at the Center for Coastal Studies. How can the arts change the narrative around climate change and coastal sustainability? How can conservation and arts-oriented organizations work together to imagine a more sustainable future for Cape Cod and beyond? An evening of informal conversations, poetry and collaboration.

Kathy Shorr is Development Officer at the Center for Coastal Studies. She is the author of the book Provincetown: Stories from Land's End, and wrote the text for the book Provincetown Truro Wellfleet, with photographs by Charles Fields. She is the recipient of a Writers at Work Fellowship in poetry. and her poetry has appeared in many publications including Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, One (Jacar Press) The Nebraska Review, Passenger, the Cape Cod Times, and on Cape & Islands NPR. She received an MFA in writing from Vermont College. 

Len Germinara is the co-founder of Spoken Word Nantucket and a Cambridge Poetry Award winner. Author of two collections of poetry, his books are available on Amazon, his most recent title is Back Story. Len is on the board (Emeritus) of the Sacramento Poetry Center and is the current host of the Poets Corner on WOMR in Provincetown.

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Toward Antarctica and Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro. She is also editor of Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic / Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020, just out from Provincetown Arts Press. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry and many anthologies, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.  Founder of Broadsided Press, Liz works as a naturalist and teaches creative writing at Brandeis University. 

Amy Jenness is a journalist and nonfiction writer and joined the Center in January as director of Marketing & Communications. She is the author of On This Day In Nantucket History (The History Press, 2014) and has poems in several chap.

Sarah Oktay, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Center for Coastal Studies, is a chemical oceanographer specializing in climate change research. She is the co-founder of Spoken Word Nantucket, a poetry venue that operated for 12 years on the island of Nantucket, and author of the poetry collection Sifting Light from the Darkness. The majority of her career has been based at field stations and marine labs where land and sea is preserved for science, education, and outreach.

$20 Suggested Donation

Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil is an indigenous Mexican writer, translator, and Linguistic Rights Activist whose research centers indigenous languages and knowledge. Join us in exploring how indigenous peoples are using lessons learned from past challenges to propose alternative futures in the face of climate change.

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. Shee 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.

$20 Suggested Donation

Through a series of exercises, Twenty Summers Fellow Brenda Zhang (Bz) will guide 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.

$30 | 6pm doors, 7pm show

Anna Mieke is an Irish musician and songwriter, based in county Wicklow. Her debut album ‘Idle Mind’, described as “a strikingly confident collection of songs, full of blue sky thinking and wide open horizons” by the Irish Times, was released independently in April 2019. Inspiration for her writing stems from a colorful background of experience: learning Maori songs at school in New Zealand, cycling through Europe, living in Granada, learning folk songs in Bulgaria and performing cello in the Cork-based experimental improv group, HEX.

“A deliciously bearable lightness of being defines Anna Mieke’s debut album. It’s a strikingly confident collection of 10 songs, full of blue sky thinking and wide open horizons... Idle Mind is a slow burner (in the very best sense) that promises many fresh revelations with each return visit. A deliriously renewable energy source”

- Siobhan Long, The Irish Times ★★★★

“Indeed, Idle Mind is not just a stunning debut record, nor is it just an amazing Irish record: it’s a record that proves Mieke to be one of the most promising artists on the Irish independent sphere and mature musician and songwriter whose work deserves to be heard far and wide”

- The Thin Air

Kick off Season Nine of Twenty Summers at our Opening Party at Provincetown Brewing Co. Thursday, May 12 from 4-6 pm! Come by to learn about who's coming to the Hawthorne Barn this spring, and enjoy *complimentary* appetizers, and beers. Space is limited, RSVP early!