With Love, From Provincetown to New York

During his two consecutive seven-month residencies at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in early 2010s, Matt Bollinger attended a few film script-themed parties with fellow residents. The concept was simple: each guest was given a copy of an iconic script and would take turns playing the part of a risk-taking paleobotanist or a flesh-hungry T-rex. “We were a bunch of extroverts and outside the studio hour, we had to construct these amazing and weird things to spend time,” he tells Family Style. The Ithaca-based painter is not only among the hundreds of artists and writers who sojourned at the residency from mid-fall into late spring—he is also among the lucky few to return to Cape Cod’s jewel town to curate the center’s annual summer group show. 

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Titled "Edge Condition,” Bollinger’s outing returned previous residents who are largely painters, including Lisa Yuskavage, Heidi Hahn, Angela Dufresne, Sam Messer, Arghavan Khosravi, and Amy Brener. After closing at FAWC at the end of August, the show arrives in New York this week at the center’s inaugural booth at the Armory Show. A salon style hang elevates the visual and personal threads Bollinger imagined between the grouping of contemplative vistas and portraits. The fair’s Not-For-Profit section positions the center with global heavyweights such as Tate and Whitechapel Gallery as well as New York’s own Creative Time which each claims a booth.  

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Bollinger landed on the show’s name after years of conversations with his landscape architect and urban designer wife. “I’ve always liked the term ‘edge condition,’ which describes the meeting point of two different landscapes like a park and a waterway,” he says. For the curator and artist, the arts center signals a similar idea of encounter, “an intersection for each artist with a unique natural environment.”  

Provincetown (“Ptown” among the regulars) has long been a haven for queer reverie. A charming decades-old refuge from the outside world’s homophobia, the beach hideaway is a sanctuary of no-holds-barred sexual and bodily expression, and a welcome respite for queer artists like Dufresne and Alexandria Smith. There, an otherworldly spread of ample dunes lead to the beach where nude bathing is common ground, while on the other side of the hook-shaped land, a thin stretch of oyster-serving restaurants, sea-viewed bars, and quaint storefronts cater for gay bliss. Only on this patch of land, Boomer Banks will tell you about the dog he adopted from Puerto Vallarta and young families with kids will march the main Commercial Street along with buff gay men in harnesses, potentially stopping for ice cream or poppers. 

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Unsurprisingly, this very tip of Cape Cod peninsula has long lured creative types, too. Throughout the 1940s, Tennessee Williams spent four summers of writing plays, poems, and falling in love; Eugene O’Neill staged dramas in the ‘60s; it was the FAWC residency that made a fresh-off-the college Michael Cunningham fall in love with the town, eventually buying a beach house and write his 2002 travelog Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. None other than John Waters still religiously summers here. “There is a feeling of freedom that this landscape evokes, with expansiveness of the dunes by the ocean opening up new creative possibilities and helping artists transform their practices in a short amount of time,” says FAWC’s Executive Director Sharon Polli. 

Flood’s Dune (March, West), 2022 embodies any resident artist’s raw encounter with the land’s disarming natural wonder. Generous piles of sand-mounts wash the upstate-based artist’s painting in which the sky slowly falls onto the land like a lazy stage curtain. “An endurance painting,” Polli describes the work for which Flood hauled her canvas and paint to the dunes before the 7 a.m. light and ceaselessly painted the vistas for 10 to 12 hours. “Besides capturing being physically out there in the cold winter, the painting is an incredible expression of the interplay between the artist and the wind, sand, and ocean,” adds Polli. Dufresne’s humorously titled nocturnal-hued painting, Is this Sam fuller or Paul verhoven. Neither - it’s Mr Monotony, (2008-23), is a horizontal landscape of feminine performance. Satirizing famous directors of films where the woman's body is objectified, the Brooklyn-based artist’s hazy cinematic handling of the canvas shows five dancers through a sapphic dream.   

“A running thread among the works is the constant dialogue between the touch of making and the fingerprints of being present,” says Bollinger. Given how swirling pastels inhabit the Provincetown sky with every sunset, many artists instinctively gravitate towards reds, blues, and purples in their palette. “It must be about that time of the day when the blue sea and purple sky meet,” he muses.

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Bollinger took a long walk on the main street this summer after installing the show. “I walked until the land ran out and I reached the breakwater,” he remembers. The joy of doing nothing but watching the waves resonated with two seven-months he spent in Ptown, as well as his return to leave his mark in an unexpected way: “I once again realized how such a unique landscape this was to spend time in and what a privilege it is to be back.”

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Fine Arts Work Center: "Edge Condition” is on view from September 6-8, 2024 at the Armory Show at the Javits Center, Booth N10 429 11th Avenue, New York, NY.