Twenty Summers

An evening of original music and interviews inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Provincetown edition with special guest Jay Critchley.

An evening of original music and interviews inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Provincetown edition with special guest Jay Critchley.

Artist talk & reception celebrating "Commodity", art installation of life-size animals created by the local artist Gin Stone.

An allegorical art installation employing life-size animals created by the artist Gin Stone in a ‘diorama’ that explores the environmental consequences of patriarchal-driven capitalism through human evolution. The unfolding artwork advances its timeline with each consecutive install location it occupies, the results of which are an evolving narrative. In three acts, the installation creates an apt metaphor for the exploitation of living beings, the environment, and ultimately, the planet. The Hawthorne Barn is the setting for the initial installation or 'act'.

Gin Stone was born in 1971 in Binghamton, NY. She now lives and works in studio based on coastal Massachusetts. She is a transdisciplinary artist using sculpture, installation and science to convey themes regarding nature and myth. She attended the Hartford Art School.

With work that conveys environmental activism while incorporating material based sub-text, animals become allegorical characters used to highlight - and reject- women and nature as commodities exploited by a largely patriarchal capitalist society (ecofeminism).

Stone’s creatures are created with materials including commercially fished line, ghost gear, recycled and antique textiles as well as found objects. Her work has explored the myth of ancient religion and goddess worship, channeling her immense interest in myth and mysticism. The resulting effect is a cocktail of politics, culture, history and ritual, inhabiting the space of its viewers with intrigue while inspiring thoughtful dialogue of how texture can be both physical as well as abstract. The beauty inherent in nature is brought to life to craft a portrait of meaning and movement, while building chapters on evolution and ecology.

Kat Wright, whose voice is both sultry and dynamic, delicate yet powerful; gritty but highly emotive and nuanced, has been described as “a young Bonnie Raitt meets Amy Winehouse”. Add to that voice enough stage presence to tame lions, and the combination of feline femininity proves immediately enchanting. There’s soul flowing in and out of her rock ‘n’ roll with a serpentine seduction. Some of soul music’s sweet, grand dames belt, shout, seethe, and succumb, while Wright sings gently like a heartache’s apology. It’s funky in spots and beautiful all over. And it hurts a little … like it should.

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Here novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the Maddaddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry in a decade, followed in 2022 with Burning Questions, a selection of essays from 2004 - 2021. Her next collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood was published in March 2023. Atwood has won numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright, and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

Vivian Gornick is one of the world’s most distinguished and respected women writers and feminists, very much in the first person. She has written several books, including two memoirs, Fierce Attachments and The Odd Woman and the City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987 and 2015), the biography of feminist revolutionary Emma Goldman (Emma Goldman. Revolution as a way of life, Yale University Press, 2013) and three collections of essays, two of which, The Men in My Life (Mit Press, 2008) and The End of the Novel of Love(Beacon Press, 1998), were finalists in the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches creative writing at the New School, writes for various media, and still lives in New York. In 2017 Vivian Gornick won the prize for the Best Work of Fiction awarded by the Gremio de Libreros de Madrid for the Spanish-language version of Fierce Attachments (Apegos feroces, Sexto Piso, 2017).

Katha Pollitt is a poet, essayist and a longstanding columnist for The Nation, where she writes about feminism, politics, and culture. She has won many prizes and awards for her writing, including two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her most recent book of poetry is The Mind-Body Problem; her most recent book of prose is Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights. She lives in New York City with her husband and cat.

“Ever since 1996, when I started working on my first novel, I’ve kept a detailed process journal, where I analyze and develop ideas, and write informally about writing. I think of my journal as a friend, one who never tires of listening to me whine, boast, complain and vent, who is a little bit wiser than me, and often finds solutions to the problems of plot or character that I’m struggling with.

I will do a reading from my novels and share some of the corresponding excerpts from the journal. This is not material I usually share with the public, but I think the focus on process might interest the writers and other creative artists in the Twenty Summers community. It’s always fun to see the gears and cogs malfunctioning and to expose the ridiculous amount of effort it takes to make the work seem effortless!”

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, whose books have garnered international acclaim for their ability to integrate issues of science, technology, religion, environmental politics, and global pop culture into unique, hybrid, narrative forms.

For the past twenty years, the unique queer and artistic enclave of Provincetown has been threatened by the forces of climate change, gentrification, a lack of affordable housing and the homogenization of culture. Marc Norman, Dr. Mika Tosca & Jay Coburn imagine a more equitable and sustainable future for Provincetown, and beyond, that preserves the people and this place for generations to come.

Marc Norman is an internationally recognized expert on policy and finance for affordable housing and community development. Since July, 2022, Marc has been the Larry & Klara Silverstein Chair of Real Estate Development & Investment, and Associate Dean of the Schack Institute of Real Estate at NYU. Trained as an urban planner, he has worked in the field of community development and finance for over 20 years. With degrees in political economics (University of California Berkeley, Bachelors of Art, 1989) and urban planning (University of California Los Angeles, Master of Art, 1992) and experience with for-profit and non-profit organizations, consulting firms and investment banks, Norman has worked collaboratively to develop or finance over 2,000 units totaling more than $400 million in total development costs.

Dr. Mika Tosca is a climate scientist and Associate Professor, having completed her Ph.D in “Earth System Science” in 2012 at the University of California, Irvine, and her postdoctoral work at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. In 2017 she took a faculty position at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in addition to her ongoing work investigating the link between climate and wildfire, she imagines ways that artists and designers can collaborate with climate scientists in an effort to better communicate and conduct climate science research. She has written about the emerging synthesis of art and science and has been invited to speak on the ways art-science collaborations can help us build post-climate change worlds, including a role as Plenary speaker at the 2022 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting. In 2021, Mika was named to the Grist 50 Fixers list and in 2023 she was interviewed by both the BBC’s Science in Action and HEATED’s Arielle Samuelson about her work and activism. Mika works with young artists to push the boundaries of collaboration, including a new project that explores the potential of Solarpunk. She continues to be vocal about the urgency of addressing the climate crisis.

Jay Coburn has had an unusual career as an advocate, community activist, and chef/small business owner. Since 2012, Jay has served as President and CEO of the Community Development Partnership – the non-profit community development corporation serving the eight towns of lower Cape Cod. He oversees the CDP’s affordable housing and economic development programs designed to build a diverse year-round community of people who can afford to live, work and thrive here. Jay lives in Provincetown and on winter weekends he can be found on the Alpine and Nordic ski trails of northern Vermont.

Fire has emerged as one of the most visible and devastating impacts of climate change. Fire intensity and area burned are increasing around the globe, in many cases earlier and faster than previously expected. Human activities are to blame -- deforestation, land management, and not least, fossil fuel burning -- which points to potential solutions. Explore how fire is changing and what we can do about it with a diverse panel of perspectives spanning the Arctic to the Amazon.

Featuring Woodwell Climate Research Scientists from the Arctic and Amazon Programs.

Sean and Jamie Oshima perform on an evening in the Barn in concert for Twenty Summers Season 10.

Maine-based indie duo Oshima Brothers have been creating music together since childhood. The brothers blend songs from the heart with blood harmonies to produce a "roots-based pop sound that is infectious." (NPR) On stage, Sean and Jamie offer lush vocals, live looping, foot percussion, electric and acoustic guitars, vintage keyboard and bass - often all at once. They want every show to feel like a deep breath, a dance party and a sonic embrace. When not recording or touring they find time to film and produce their own music videos, tie their own shoes and cook elaborate feasts.

A writing workshop, poetry discussion, and contemplative practice.

“I write the body, yet once someone attempted to correct my English to say that I must have meant that I write about the body. No. I give the body voice. Or rather, I honor that the body innately has voice and create the conditions that allow me to connect to that voice.

This embodied journey can then expand until I touch the ancestral edges of myself to find the stories embedded in my DNA. And if I am willing to continue the journey, I can gently brush against the voice of collective bodies that often feel like wind, or the storms. There were stories buried in the tumor that the doctors cut out of me. There are generations worth of stories that have yet to be told, that do not know how to be told, and even when told, have no witness for the telling. The body has infinite stories to tell, and as one who moves through the world in a Black female body, writing her is an act of reclamation. As one who occupies a world built on the exploitation of our Black bodies, writing us is an act of reparation. As one who has disembodied often in order to survive, writing the body is an act of love. Black notions of resistance and fugitivity include the retention of memory.”

Antoinette Cooper is a writer, rainmaker and TEDx speaker committed to the liberation of Black bodies through the arts, ancestral healing, social justice, and medical humanities. She was born on the island of Jamaica, and raised on the island of New York in the New York City Housing Projects. She holds a B.A. from Cornell University, a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, and sits on the board of Narrative Medicine at CUNY School of Medicine. She understands that there is no separation between all the realms of the body, the earth, and the arts so her work explores the intersections of these multiple dimensions. She is currently at work publishing a multi-genre collection that documents the historical and present day violences on the Black female body.