Portals and Perspectives: Recent Gifts to the Collection

Every winter, PAAM features recent gifts to the permanent collection in a series of exhibitions.

Acquisitions are considered by PAAM’s Collections Committee, which ensures PAAM responsibly collects a representative body of artwork that preserves the history and enriches the contemporary state of the Provincetown Art Colony, the country’s longest continuous art colony, since 1899.

FROM THE CURATOR

The artwork in this first of 3 Recent Gifts exhibitions explores the motif of windows, from literal panes of glass to metaphorical frames of perception. A window in a literal sense is a frame, a boundary, and a threshold that marks separation or transition. By definition it separates you–your physical body, as well as your consciousness–from an other, an outside. Even a mirror creates a psychological splinter of self, inverting your features and distancing yourself from your body. The window is also a powerful tool figuratively to explore questions of perspective, reality, and transition.

This exhibition groups artwork by the window’s literal and metaphoric function:
View from here – as a reflection of the artist’s unique historical or cultural context
Through the glass – as the artist’s personal visual perspective
Framed narratives – as a compositional device
Between worlds – as a liminal space

When you look at these artworks, do you see yourself, or do you see someone you do not recognize? Do you feel longing to peer through the window, or do you feel relief at the separation from the scene? Are you able to be an observer in one scene and intervener in another? By drawing attention to your own art-viewing process through the window motif, notice whether you find yourself wondering about new inquiries into our world, history, or an artist’s perspective or creative process. While a single artwork sits static on the gallery wall, it can be used as a window into a different world an infinite number of times.

From my desk in the PAAM office, I look out onto Commercial Street, Provincetown Harbor, and the shores of Truro in the distance. My window lets me be a silent observer of the street below catching momentary glimpses of people’s lives, as well as a stoic witness to the ever-changing sea and sky as seasons change. Each day, I can watch visitors bustle in and out of Angel Foods, kayakers out in the harbor, and the ferry rounding the corner of Long Point toward town. Each day, I can peer into both new and familiar scenes, recognize friends and admire strangers framed in a white colonial grid.

Each day from that window is a new work of art.

Image: Michael Mazur, Window on the Bay 5, 2008, Oil on canvas, Gift of Gail Mazur, 2025