Land, Place, Identity: Selections from the Collection

This exhibition is presented in conjunction with Land, Place, Identity: PAAM’s Inaugural Symposium on American Art on Saturday, November 9 and Sunday, November 10.

The symposium will be a gathering of art historians, artists, and curators whose work converges around art’s relationship to land and place. With a particular emphasis on art forms and scholarship that expand beyond western art-historical frameworks, presentation topics include: the advancement of Native art and sovereignty through making, curation, and sustainability practices; Kerry James Marshall and the Black landscape tradition; Seong Moy’s abstracted Outer Cape landscapes, and a collaborative public art project contending with Boston’s urban infrastructure as it intersects with Black histories of displacement and liberation.

FROM THE CURATOR

How close can we come to the heart of a place, when we come from such different places? In this exhibit of art from Provincetown and beyond, we encounter stories of entropy, survival, and reverence, in both image and material. 

Nanno de Groot’s almost-psychedelic Mary Cecil Allen’s Pine Tree (1959) is flanked by the heaping driftwood and debris of Ross Moffett’s Landslide at Highland Light (1953) and the lush, textural print and collage works of Seong Moy and Miriam Fried (n.d.). 

Powerful and iconic in size and emotion, Untitled (Head) (2018-2023) by Alicia Henry is constructed from stitched and stained cloth, evoking scarring, repair, and layers of seen and unseen identity. Nan Goldin’s Bea putting on make-up, Boston (1973) shows the artist’s friend carefully applying her lip gloss and pausing to check her work; an intimate moment capturing a femme ritual of becoming, and also armoring to meet the outside world.

A drawing by Janice Biala (1929) places the figure in the landscape, at an uncannily large scale, so that the body almost becomes the hills behind it. “I always had the feeling that I belong where my easel is,” Biala said, “I never have the feeling of nationality or roots. In the first place, I’m an uprooted person. I’m Jewish. I was born in a country where it was better not to be Jewish. Wherever you go, you’re in a sense a foreigner. I always felt that wherever my easel was, that was my nationality.”

Many of the landscapes in the exhibition are marked by human interaction: a road cuts through Lucy L’Engle’s Dyer’s Hollow (n.d.) and trains puff through scenes of Corn Hill by George Yater and Mary Hackett . Not only do these landscapes serve as documents of bygone transportation, they also point to this land’s history of colonization. The name Corn Hill was given by English settlers, who upon landing in Provincetown, dug up and robbed Wampanoag grave sites and stores of buried beans and corn in that very spot. 

Acknowledging this history, and the different ways we ascribe meaning to location, we can also begin to look at this exhibition in terms of what and who is not present—among them Wampanoag (as well as other) Native art and artists, both historical and contemporary. It is impossible to tell a complete story of land, place, and identity without including the people who were here first, and continue to live and make art on this land today. 

While each artwork here contains a whole world of sensuality and biography, these worlds exist in–and because of–the larger unseen reality of our shared and fraught existence. While no gallery can hold everything at once, this exhibition wants to be a pathway towards a fuller, more angular art history of this place we revere.

THE PERMANENT COLLECTION

The permanent collection is an important measure of any museum’s value. At PAAM, the holdings of local and regional art is extensive and dynamic, comprising more than 4,000 works by over 900 artists who have worked in Provincetown and on Cape Cod. The PAAM collection weaves together at least three major art movements—each a significant strand of American art history—and creates perspectives that uniquely position the Provincetown Art Colony as a pertinent fixture to the larger art world.

Each year, PAAM presents at least two exhibitions showcasing some of the recent gifts donated to our permanent collection. As an actively collecting museum, PAAM receives on average nearly 100 new works each year, and these exhibitions allow us to proudly display a selection of those works, some of which represent our first works by an artist in our permanent collection. We extend our deepest gratitude to our new and continuing donors.

Another measure of a museum is how well it uses its collection. The PAAM collection serves as a foundation for many of our educational programs and exhibitions. Programs for both youth and adults in our Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Museum School use collection works to stimulate creativity. The Museum School courses take advantage of gallery exhibitions to clarify principles and techniques. Additionally, major museums and galleries borrow exemplary works for exhibitions around the country.