Members’ Juried

Each year PAAM mounts upwards of 5 members’ open and juried exhibitions in which participants display their work alongside some of America’s most noteworthy artists.

These exhibitions represent the work of PAAM’s contemporary artist-members, many of whom live on Cape Cod either full-time or for part of the year. While the work varies greatly in media and approach, each artist-member joins a long roster of distinguished artists who have studied, taught, and exhibited at PAAM over the past 100 years. There is no submission fee for members’ exhibitions, but membership must be up to date.

Juried exhibitions at PAAM represent a smaller cross-section of member artists whose work has been chosen by a guest curator after being submitted. Each show reflects the aesthetic judgment and curatorial eye of the invited curator. Any member in good standing may submit their work for consideration. Except in special circumstances, Juried exhibitions do not have themes or size restrictions.

INCLUDED ARTISTS

Rosalie Acinapura, Agnes Alberola, Vincent Amicosante, Naya Bricher, Rebecca Bruyn, Ted Chapin, Greg DeLory, John Dillon, Carolyn Dunford, Grace Emmet, Beth Faherty, Tighe Hanson, Megan Hinton, Warren Infield, Sheryl Jaffe, Lauren Kalita, Chris Kilbridge, Edie Leaver, Christopher Nicholson, Nicolas Nobili, Karen Ojala, Neal Personeus, Sky Power, Jackie Reeves, James Ryan, Bert Yarborough, and Joyce Zavorskas.

FROM THE CURATOR

Animism, Josephine Halvorson

It was a pleasure reviewing the submissions by members of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Madeleine helped shift and display the work and Chris shared an overview of the process as well as the rich tradition of member exhibitions. I was surprised to learn that artworks are delivered (and many of them retrieved) during the same week that the show is juried, installed, and opened. This speaks to the goodwill towards PAAM, and the seamlessness of its operation. I was delighted to return here, where I learned to draw over 25 years ago, and to get a glimpse of what artists in this community are making today, drawn together by this storied institution.

All of the submitted works hum with artistic curiosity. I was particularly struck by those which felt like the artist yielded to forces just beyond their fingertips, inviting a sense of animism to enter the frame. As I pored through the submissions, looking at them up-close and from across the galleries, I asked myself, “What defines a sense of animism in the materiality of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs?” The exhibition is loosely organized into six concepts that address this question and emerge from the art itself:

Several pieces present mechanical and electronic components, each evoking a pathetic obsolescence. A tied-up cable in a glass jar, an old-fashioned alarm clock, and a cluster of metal bits are memento mori of a technological past. As art, however, they seem to have something more to say: machines are alive.

Four artworks installed along the west wall are in a suspended state of animation: hands whittling tree branches, a collage finding its composition through its own layered process, a bird in flight, and repeated stationary windmills, none of which are spinning. These artworks present actions, paused in the midst of things. They are verbs, not nouns. 

On the adjacent wall are four pieces which depict ghostly figures turning to confront a viewer. Silhouettes of faces and limbs reach out in moments of recognition. They hover above a city or in front of a fence, neither grounded in this world, nor destined for another one. They appear in a state of passage.

Across the room are more traditional figure paintings. Two portraits pull out the character of a subject through colorful brushwork, and two paintings depict everyday scenes: someone reads a book and another steps out of a shower. We share the artists’ curiosity in looking at other people to learn about human behavior and appearance.

Color plays an important role throughout the exhibition, but especially in four paintings that exude light and temperature. Through abstract and representational approaches, these paintings convey atmosphere and the sensation of heat, humidity, and weather. 

Provincetown is a site of exceptional natural beauty and many of the artworks choose nature as a subject. Several of these transcend the picturesque to pursue a deeper belief that vitality resides in nature’s crevices, shadows, and ephemera. An architectural world nests inside driftwood. A twig dances on a tabletop. An egg hovers in the clouds. Trees and sandy cliffs reveal the contours of a body. The shadows of steps and railings lift and dissolve the picture and its forms into air.

THE JUROR

Josephine Halvorson (she/her) paints from direct observation, foregrounding the firsthand experience of noticing, describing, and learning from the physical world. She works primarily in painting, but also in sculpture and printmaking.

Halvorson received her MFA from Columbia University in 2007, her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2003, and attended Yale Norfolk in 2002. She is the recipient of major international residencies and fellowships, including a US Fulbright to Vienna, Austria; the Harriet Hale Woolley Award at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris, France; the first American pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome at the Villa Medici; and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

Halvorson’s work is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., NY, and Peter Freeman, Paris. She has presented work internationally at such institutions as the Storm King Art Center, the ICA Boston, and the Havana Biennale. In 2021 she presented a solo exhibition of site responsive work at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, NM, where she was the Museum’s first artist in residence. In 2024 she presented a solo exhibition at James Fuentes, Los Angeles, accompanied by a paperback monograph.

Her work and practice have been written about widely and she is a subject of Art21’s documentary series New York Close Up. She has been interviewed by the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and Artforum, and appeared in such publications as Painting Now by Suzanne Hudson, Vitamin P2 edited by Barry Schwabsky, and Prints and Their Makers by Phil Sanders.

Since 2016, Halvorson is Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University. She has also taught at The Cooper Union, Princeton University, the University of Tennessee Knoxville, Columbia University, and Yale University. She lives in western Massachusetts, and works wherever and whenever a subject draws her attention.

Artist Guidelines

PICKING UP WORK

If your piece was not selected for this exhibition, the Pick-Up Days are Thursday, January 16; Friday, January 17; and Saturday, January 18 from 12-5pm.

Pick-Up Day for included works is Tuesday, April 15 from 12-4pm.

We are happy to ship your piece back to you, please fill out the Return Shipping Form below to begin the process. We use USPS, and charge a $15 handling fee in addition to the cost of shipping, which includes insurance determined by the price you list for your piece. PAAM cannot ascertain the shipping costs prior to packaging and weighing the artwork for return. 

Alternatively, you can send us a prepaid label from your preferred shipper (FedEx, UPS, USPS, etc.) and a check for the $15 handling fee, or simply send us a blank check that we will fill out when we have determined your shipping charges.

Return Shipping