Annual Fellowship Visual Arts Exhibition at PAAM

Provincetown, MA (January 8, 2024) – The works of ten artists on the rise, all presently in the same Provincetown arts residency that nurtured contemporary luminaries like Tala Madani, Jacolby Satterwhite, Jennifer Packer, and Firelei Báez, will be showcased in a group exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) from January 19 through March 3, 2024.

The nine artists featured in the exhibit are the 2023-24 Visual Arts Fellows at the Fine Arts Work Center. Currently halfway through their seventh-month-long residency, the Fellows hail from the United States, Egypt, Finland, Iran, The Netherlands, and Venezuela. The exhibition will feature artworks in disciplines from painting and sculpture to video and collage. PAAM will host a public reception celebrating the opening with the artists on January 19 at 6:00 p.m.

The PAAM exhibition provides a unique opportunity for art lovers, creative innovators, and patrons to discover the next generation of artists poised to build on Provincetown’s legacy as the nation’s oldest and most influential artist community. With a 55-year track record of supporting some of the world’s most celebrated artists at the start of their careers, the Work Center selects Fellows by identifying promising emerging artists who have not yet had high-profile museum exhibitions or received awards and accolades for mid-career artists. 

As a fitting tribute to the enduring influence of both the Fine Arts Work Center and Provincetown, the artwork of the Fellows will grace the walls of a museum boasting a collection featuring pieces by many artists who either founded or championed the Work Center in its formative years. This roster includes artists such as Robert Motherwell, Salvatore Del Deo, Elise Asher, and Jack Tworkov.

One of the country’s most significant long-term residencies for artists and writers, the Work Center provides Fellows housing and studio space, a monthly stipend, and unrestricted time free from teaching or other obligations to focus solely on their creative practice. Alumni include one Nobel Prize winner (poet Louise Glück), three U.S. Poet Laureates (Glück, Ada Limón, and Work Center co-founder Stanley Kunitz), and eight Pulitzer Prize winners, as well as recipients of the Rome Prize and Guggenheim Fellowships. 

“This exhibition offers an exciting opportunity to encounter and discover artists who are positioned to shape the future of the art world in the years ahead,” expressed Sharon Polli, the Executive Director of the Work Center. “Their artworks and installations, featured in a museum steeped with the history of the Work Center’s founding artists, seamlessly bridge the past and future of this vibrant creative community.”

“The long-standing partnership between the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Fine Arts Work Center strengthens each year with the annual exhibition of the Visual Arts Fellows,” says Christine McCarthy, the CEO and exhibition curator at PAAM. “It is incredibly enlightening to showcase such important work and share the global creativity of this talented cohort.”

Each visual arts fellow will also have a two-week show of their work at the Work Center’s Hudson D. Walker Gallery at 24 Pearl St. beginning February 9 through April 15, 2024. 

Featured Artists  

• Miguel Braceli (Venezuela), who creates participatory public art projects, is in Provincetown for the first time for the fellowship and has called it a “fairytale town.” Braceli is working on a multi-part project that includes collecting love stories from local residents. His educational and community-based public arts projects have been exhibited across Latin America and the United States, including Here Lies a Flag (2021) in collaboration with New Rochelle High School, and, The Last Swim (2021) in collaboration with the artists from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. 
• Rehab El Sadek (Egypt) is a U.S.–based Egyptian artist whose work utilizes sculpture, light, shadow, and memory to investigate the layered reality of the immigrant experience.
• Jeff Gibbons (United States) is an inter-media artist whose work has been shown internationally in México, Japan, and across Europe.
• Oscar Morel (United States), one of the Boston Globe’s 2022 “6 artists to watch,” has used found materials in his figurative collages of scenes from his Afro-Caribbean Bronx neighborhood. Morel has described his work as, “taking things that existed and reconstructing them and creating an alchemy. It becomes something entirely different.”
• Micha Patiniott, 2nd-Year Fellow (the Netherlands), creates minimalistic and atmospheric paintings of everyday objects and processes in flux, blurring the boundaries of the mundane and the cosmic.
• Tinja Ruusuvuori, 2nd-Year Fellow (Finland), is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker with a focus on subjective and creative documentary-making.
• Zeinab Shahidi Marnani (Iran) is a sculptor who lives and works in Tehran and New York. 
• Agnes Walden (United States) is a painter concerned with transgender subjectivities and the ways in which attempts to describe trans life are conditioned by allegory. 
• Sasha Wortzel (United States) is a visual artist and filmmaker using film, video art, installation, sculpture, and sound to explore how this country’s past and present are inextricably linked through resonant spaces and their hauntings.

What: Fine Arts Work Center Fellows at PAAM 

A group exhibit by the Fine Arts Work Center’s 2023-23 Visual Arts Fellows 

Where:   Provincetown Art Association and Museum

460 Commercial Street, Provincetown

When: January 12 through March 3, 2024. 

Opening public reception with the artists Friday, January 19 at 6 p.m.

The Museum is open Thursday-Sunday from 12-5pm. 

Cost: General Admission is $15, and free on Fridays from 5-8 pm.

Website: https://paam.org/fawc-fellows-at-paam/

About PAAM
PAAM was established in 1914 by a group of artists and townspeople to build a permanent collection of works by artists of outer Cape Cod, and to exhibit art that would allow for unification within the community.

Integral to the community comprising the Provincetown Art Colony, PAAM embodies the qualities that make Provincetown an enduring American center for the arts, and serves as Cape Cod’s most widely-attended art museum. As interest in the region’s contribution to American art history continues to grow, PAAM presents an ever-changing lineup of exhibitions, lectures, workshops and cultural events that seek to promote and cultivate appreciation for all branches of the fine arts for which Provincetown is known.

About The Fine Arts Work Center
The Fine Arts Work Center is an international home for artists and writers in Provincetown, Massachusetts —  the country’s most enduring artists’ community. Founded in 1968 by a group of luminary creators including Stanley Kunitz, Robert Motherwell, Josephine and Salvatore Del Deo, and Hudson and Ione Walker, the Work Center has given artists and writers the space and time to pursue their work within a community of peers for more than half a century. The artist-led Work Center supports emerging artists and writers through its world-renowned Fellowship program, and also offers summer workshops and year-round virtual learning opportunities to advance creative practice. Fine Arts Work Center Fellows who have arrived in Provincetown as emerging writers have gone on to win Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, MacArthur Fellowships, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Visual Arts Fellows have presented their work at the Venice Biennale, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and at other venues around the globe. The Fine Arts Work Center supports artistic freedom, nurtures creative connections, and makes possible artistic achievements important to the larger culture.