Glisson, Reedy, and Salas Return to Alden Gallery
Over the years, an exhibition for the artists Robert Glisson, Linda Reedy, and Anne Salas has become the summer season opening tradition at Alden Gallery, says owner and director Howard Karren.
The respective styles of the artists have remained consistent throughout past shows, but that does not mean their work is old news. They are “in love with what they do,” says Karren. “They keep exploring it, and it’s fulfilling to them.”
In this exhibition, which opens with a reception at the gallery on June 28 at 7 p.m., Karren expects to include about five or six new paintings by each artist, who come at painting from a range of backgrounds and approaches.
Glisson is from Syracuse, N.Y. and has focused his painting on the landscapes of the nearby Finger Lakes. A typical landscape is often only the starting point for Glisson, who dips into abstraction through an emphasis on the use of color to convey emotion. Karren says that Glisson’s experiments with color can partially be attributed to his frequent plein air painting and the corresponding exposure to natural light.
“He’ll take a really odd color for the landscape like a pink or a deep lilac and somehow work the painting around it,” says Karren.
Originally a weaver, Reedy now works in landscapes as well. She lives in Fort Worth, Texas, but she regularly returns to Provincetown to paint in what Karren characterizes as her “unique feathery impressionist style.” She often uses it to depict weather like storms and fog.
Salas, the lone Cape-based artist of the trio, primarily paints flowers in compositions she calls botanicals. She transitioned into the medium after working as a glass blower. Salas is known to add 23-karat gold leaf to the background of some of her works. She previously studied with Provincetown artists Selina Trieff and Robert Henry, and Karren notes their influence on her work.
The reception is free and open to the public, and the exhibition is on display through July 11. —Jacob Smollen
Dario Acosta Teich’s Sounds of Argentina
If you were to show up in an Argentinian town in the late afternoon, the odds are good you’d find yourself called to the town square where a crowd has gathered around local folk musicians. It’s not so much a performance as a storytelling event, in which the musicians weave the history of their region through its living sounds: the guitar, the flute, the bombo legüero, a horn, an old man singing an old Spanish song his grandfather taught him.
“Folk music genres are different in each region,” says the Argentinian composer and musician Dario Acosta Teich, who is now based in New York.
Acosta Teich grew up in Tucumán, Argentina — “one of the folk centers” — with a folk musician for a father and surrounded by the tradition of the peña, a local folk music gathering. At 11, he began studying classical guitar at a conservatory in Tucumán. Later, after finishing a bachelor’s degree at the conservatory, he moved to Buenos Aires to study composition at the University of La Plata and won a scholarship for a master’s in jazz performance in Israel at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.
He will bring these sounds — traditional mixed with international and the jazz hand’s penchant for improvisation — to the Outer Cape in two performances with his jazz quartet at Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main St., on Thursday, June 27 at 7 p.m. and the Truro Public Library, 7 Standish Way, on Saturday, June 29 at 2 p.m.
The quartet includes Yulia Musayelyan on flute, Fernando Huergo on bass, and Steve Langone on drums, with Eleanor Dubinsky as vocalist.
Music from Tierra Infinita, a forthcoming album recorded last year with Musayelyan, Huergo, and other collaborators in Argentina, will be featured in a kind of experimental and improvisational “jazz tour” that incorporates the varied sonic regions of Argentina. It follows the 2023 album, Acostango, which mixed tango with jazz.
“Tierra Infinita has a modern sound with a lot of different influences,” says Acosta Teich.
Tickets for the Wellfleet Preservation Hall performance are $25. The performance at Truro Public Library is free. For more information, visit wellfleetpreservationhall.org or trurolibrary.org. —Aden Choate
On the Election, Four Months Away
Journalist Peter Slevin will join writer Sarah Schulman to discuss the upcoming U.S. presidential election at the third summer salon at the Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., on Friday, June 28 at 6 p.m.
Slevin, who covered the Bush-Gore recount and foreign policy during the Iraq War for the Washington Post and wrote a biography of former First Lady Michelle Obama, now covers swing states and election politics as a contributing politics writer for the New Yorker. Schulman, who teaches at FAWC each summer, invited Slevin to participate in the salon to address what she says is “on everyone’s mind.” Both Slevin and Schulman are professors at Northwestern University.
“I just thought it would be an incredible opportunity to hear from a person who’s on the front line of all of these questions about what’s going on in the country and what’s going to happen in November,” says Schulman. “It expands the coverage that FAWC presents.”
The conversation-style salon series is being piloted at FAWC for the first time this summer. To fill out each of the weekend programs, FAWC programs director David Simpson says they asked people already involved in the organization to select a co-presenter.
When asked who she would like to share the stage with, Simpson says, Schulman did not hesitate in suggesting Slevin. “He really understands where we’re at,” Schulman says.
Following the discussion on Friday evening, Slevin and Schulman will hold separate workshops on Saturday, June 29 at 2 p.m.: Slevin will teach a virtual workshop on interviewing and Schulman — a playwright and activist in addition to the author of 20 books — will teach a class on prose craft.
Their Friday conversation will be held at the Stanley Kunitz Common Room in Provincetown. Tickets for students and teachers are discounted, and regular tickets begin at $75 at fawc.org. —Cam Kettles
Andrea Sawyer Captures the Essence of the Portuguese Festival
The first time that painter Andrea Sawyer came to the Cape, she cried. When she opened the shutters of her hotel room, she says, her view was flooded with sunlight, endless ocean, and sky. Maybe it was the way the light reflected off the water, or how it came through the window at just the right angle, filling every corner of the cozy room, but Sawyer was entranced.
“I will live here, I will live here,” she says she repeated as a promise to herself.
In 2012, she fulfilled that vow and moved to Provincetown. Now, she captures the Cape’s light in her dreamy oil paintings, from close-ups of the frothy shoreline and moments where light makes mundane objects muse-worthy to landscapes of the Cape that stretch on forever.
This year, Sawyer was selected to create a painting for Provincetown’s annual Portuguese Festival, from June 28 to 30. Her painting of the fishing boat F/V Glutton is showcased on the festival’s commemorative T-shirt and pamphlet cover.
In this painting, the sky and water are painted with a soft blue glow, which makes the Glutton’s red accents proudly pop. “It’s late in the day,” Sawyer says of the scene. “They just untied from the mooring, and they’re heading out to work.”
This isn’t imagination: the Glutton is a real boat, and the Gribbin family that owns it has a long history of fishing here. “It’s a real working boat, which I love,” she says.
Sawyer adds that the vibrancy and vividness of the painting reflect the nature of the festival, which is “full of light and color and energy and enthusiasm.” The painting also honors the history of Provincetown’s hardworking Portuguese fishermen, whose legacies are the festival’s heart.
For more information about the Portuguese Festival and a full schedule of events, visit provincetownportuguesefestival.com. —Kiran Johnson
Friendships and Fine Art
Nearly every week for the past decade, artists Marian Strangfeld, Pam Turnbull, Tish Dodge, and Helen Baldwin have gathered to paint, share ideas, and offer critiques. They call themselves the Painters’ Group. During July, 15 works by each woman will be exhibited at the Marion Craine Gallery at Snow Library in Orleans.
Strangfeld and Baldwin are lifelong artists, the former a retired high school art teacher and the latter a graphic designer. Despite their longtime devotion to the arts, Strangfeld and Baldwin both say they lost touch with their love of painting in late middle age. By allowing them to discover new skills every week, the group has given them a chance to rediscover painting.
For Dodge and Turnbull, picking up paintbrushes was a later-in-life endeavor. “When I got the kids out of the house, I said, ‘I’ve got to do something for myself,’ ” says Turnbull.
Both she and Dodge took art classes at the Chatham Creative Arts Center, where they honed their skills and passion for painting — and met Strangfeld, their teacher.
The women describe their paintings as interpretations of nature. Strangfeld is inspired by Asian art and the Rocky Mountains. Dodge enjoys bold, bright colors, while Turnbull prefers to paint landscapes and flowers. For Baldwin, membership in the Painters’ Group has birthed a more abstract style.
The four women — who now share private jokes, bounce off each other effortlessly, and go out every year for each other’s birthdays — were strangers before forming the group. Promotional materials Baldwin created for the exhibition assert that during the group’s decade of existence, “friendships have emerged along with fine art.” Their relationships with each other are now just as layered as their canvases.
“As opposed to competitive, it’s supportive,” says Dodge. “We are really just there to support each other as artists.”
“When we get together as a group, it pushes our styles to keep growing,” adds Turnbull.
The exhibition is on display from July 2 through 30. See snowlibrary.org for more information. —Molly Reinmann
