A Grab Bag of Goodies from the Edge of the World: The Fine Arts Work Center Fellows at PAAM

We are grateful to Senior Editor Jacqueline Houton for featuring the 2023-2024 Visual Arts Fellows in Boston Art Review.

Every fall, ten artists and ten writers arrive at the end of the earth. They come to the tip of Cape Cod, to a town set sixty miles out to sea, for a fellowship at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center. Established in 1968, it’s an unusually long residency program, running from the start of October through the end of April. Provincetown can seem like a nonstop party in the summer, but the fellows work through the winter months, when the crowds are long gone and storefronts are shuttered and the place can feel peaceful or lonesome, depending on your mood, which may well shift with the tide. The Provincetown Art Association and Museum, set less than half a mile from the center’s campus, hosts an exhibition of the fellows’ work each year. Curated by Christine McCarthy, this year’s installment opened midway through the residency and is on view through March 3. It’s a chance to get a peek at some brand-new pieces on which the paint, proverbial or literal, may be barely dry, as well as previous works that often connect with the fellows’ current projects. It’s also a total grab bag: these aren’t artists linked by subject or theme, medium or style. What they share is the fact that they were selected from a field of nearly eight hundred applicants in a blind submission process juried by former fellows. And they are all creating new work at the same time in the same singular place.

Read the full article here.