Twenty Summers

Enjoy dynamite talent Michael Mayo's concert at the Hawthorn Barn from June 2025 as part of our Season 12 programming.

Michael Mayo leans on his intuition as a vocalist, composer, songwriter, and arranger. Much like molding and shaping a sculpture out of clay, he stretches his voice through layers of heavenly harmonizing, hard-hitting beatboxing, and heartfelt crooning.

The Los Angeles-based phenomenon creates from the heart without filter or pretense, allowing his voice to transmit raw emotion above an ever-evolving backdrop of jazz, neo-soul, and R&B on his second full-length LP, Fly [Mack Avenue Records/Artistry Music], and more to come.

Ashley Gilbertson joins filmmaker Michael Cestaro at Stanley to discuss his recent exhibition alongside photographer Franco Pagetti, as well as his life, travels, and career as a photographer and writer.

Sit down with lawyer Chase Strangio and artist Celeste Lecesne to revisit some of Chase's most impactful moments, and how these two amazing individuals will look to the future with hope, determination, and love.

Kioea (pronounced kēōˈāə) is a music group featuring Carand Burnet (she/her) as lead guitarist and songwriter. Their music blends sounds of surf rock, psychedelia, and global influences. J. Swartwood (Aquarium Drunkard) described Burnet’s music as “simultaneously modern and vintage.”

Kioea has played at 3S Artspace, The Music Hall, The Thing in the Spring Festival, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, SPACE Gallery, WMUR Summer Concert Series, and elsewhere. Burnet received a Maine ARP Grant through SPACE Gallery and the National Endowment for the Arts, which supported the making of Kioea’s album Stand Tall.

There is no separating equality from ecology, which knows that no member of any natural system has more value than another. In a world of polycrises, what does it mean for activism to be a daily necessity? How can we more deeply integrate it into our lives, allowing our values to shape a more fulfilling and joyful existence? This discussion will bring together advocates who are reframing how we talk about social and environmental justice—and what it means to be an embodied activist.

‘Milk Tea Opera House’ is an initiative to create opportunities to influence more voices, to awaken them, and to guide them. It is vital to be able to experience more voices and together we ask this question: Where does voice come from, and how does it represent you?

JU-EH creates a live Milk Tea Opera House Session, along with Twenty Summers, to co-create new kinds of interactive spaces from where the voice is born, redefining the term ‘opera house’ for the next 100 years.

The main practice of an MTOH Session focuses on the human voice, and exercise how we use the voice internally in different dimensions. Not the finished flawless performances of an opera singer, but the internal handling of the voice in a much wider spectrum.

With this knowledge that JU-EH has lived, studied, and embodied for decades, it is time to collaborate to reveal the depth of our sonic environments, and the image of voice in various daily activities to a wider creative community.

At its heart, fashion is a tool of creativity and transformation—we slip into shapes and silhouettes, ever discovering new shades of self. So why is an industry that is so driven by “the new” seemingly incapable of reinventing itself when it comes to the health of people and the planet? This event will bring together two forces within the industry—photographer Camila Falquez and model, author, and organizer Cameron Russell—to share their reflections on creating authentic and meaningful change over the course of their careers.

McElroy’s debut novel, “The Atmospherians,” told the clever but slightly insiderly and overfreighted tale of a wellness cult designed to cleanse men of their toxicity. “People Collide” is a more agile, universal book, with its title alluding to the randomness of human connection. It’s a variety of rom-com, really, that somewhat lost art. “Circumstances pinball people together,” the narrator declares. “This is called fate because chance is too scary a word.”

Perhaps no situation is more pinballish than that of in-laws, and McElroy’s unexpected digression into the psyche of Elizabeth’s mother, a frustrated writer herself who unknowingly condemns Eli for abandoning her daughter, is one of the novel’s great gifts.

McElroy, who lives in Brooklyn, seems to aspire as much to flight as to eavesdropping. “People Collide” has some bumpy, odd spots — what body doesn’t? — but its naturalness and ease with the most fundamental questions of existence make it a big project knocking around in a small package, portending even bigger projects ahead.

Join 2021 Twenty Summers Fellow Jeffrey Mansfield and director Michael Cestaro for a conversation following the preview of Signs from the Mainland, a documentary short that explores the extraordinary history of the Martha’s Vineyard deaf community.

Starting as far back as the early 1700s, genetic deafness took a foothold on Martha's Vineyard where as many as one in four residents were deaf and a majority of hearing residents also were able to communicate in what is considered one of the precursors to modern American Sign Language. The film explores the deeper meaning and lessons to be learned from this unique enclave where deaf and hearing individuals coexisted seamlessly.

Through interviews with historians and community members, the documentary asks, “why did this happen?”, “what was it like?”, and also “where did it go?” The story of the MV deaf community’s eventual conclusion shows us the first steps of the ASL movement, the establishment of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford CT, and bigger lessons about connection over time.

Signs from the Mainland reflects on the legacy of the MV Deaf community, the implications for the broader society, and its relevance to contemporary conversations about inclusivity and diversity.

Take a look at Synchronous Creative in an evening of site-specific movement and exploration surrounding the idea of “safe spaces” at the Hawthorne Barn. The evening is an inside look at their creative process, where they led audience members through a few prompts and exercises utilized through their process at Twenty Summers.