How We Found Laughter and Comfort in the Storm
by Mary Beth Bongiovanni via The Provincetown Independent
Artists don’t disappear when the lights go out
For four days in February, I lived with a group of artists inside the storm — the storm on Johnson Street. I sat with them inside the snow fort that the White Porch Inn had become. On the first night, we called it Pop-Up Igloo. After several nights, it felt more like a meetinghouse than a warming station.
Tadhg Slater, a New York School painter living in Provincetown, blew in the door. He has a fabulous way of elevating the space and shifting the energy. “Amazing things happen when artists and blizzards combine,” he laughed. “Not one town on the Cape has power, but this place is our pop-up sanctuary for warmth and great conversation.”
Slater wrote on social media: “We gathered. … Sitting together while the wind tried to rearrange the town. That’s Provincetown. Galleries shuttered. Streets empty. Joe Coffee closed, five-foot drifts in places, a Nespresso machine on a generator, and still we are here. Artists don’t disappear when the lights go out. We walk into the storm … We absorb it. Because later it becomes something. Another painting. Another song.”
What whirled through the space were excerpts from drafts, hybrids of new concepts, and curious collaborations. Slater finalized the PR for his Concrete Winter series. The generator kept laptops powered and heaters warm. Community filled the void left by the absence of convenience. People power, the interplay of distinct, even sacred, human resources, fueled conversations and created wonder amid fear, comfort in the cold, joy in the silence.
