June 24 through July 13

MARTIN R. ANDERSON | SHEZ ARVEDON | LINDA LESLIE BROWN | BARBARA E. COHEN | ANNE CORRSIN | JEANNE-MARIE CREDE | JAY CRITCHLEY | HEATHER KAPPLOW | ZEHRA KHAN | JACKIE LIPTON | NANCY RUBENS | JICKY SCHNEE

Opening reception: Friday, June 24, 6-9 PM

Martin R. Anderson | Confabulations

“My wall-mounted sculpture-collages are fabulated stories, interrelated through arrangements of materials found on the streets or rediscovered among my studio detritus. I take satisfaction in redeeming objects that have been abandoned, discarded and even run over by giving them new life in what I think of as a visual poem.

I challenge myself to unify disparate elements and materials that at first, and perhaps even second, sight seem to defy aesthetic unity. Although the finished pieces express an unexpected elegance (unexpected in light of the materials’ often wildly diverse origins), I tend to leave some subtle roughness around the edges as well, the physical evidence of my process—Making, Un-Making and Re-Making—which sometimes takes place over a year or more.

I admire and am influenced by non-objective artists like Kazimir Malevich and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and, most significantly, by the box constructions of Joseph Cornell. The frames I use—usually of birch wood—enclose a three-dimensional space, into which I invite the viewer to engage with the elemental relationships, the play of light and shadows, and to be stimulated by new visual expressions of improbable, sly connections.”

Martin R. Anderson is an artist based in Brookline, MA. His sculpture/collages, drawings, paper collages and pinhole photographs have been exhibited widely in gallery shows in the greater Boston area as well as Provincetown, including several exhibitions at AMP. He has taught photography at Castle Hill in Truro and had artist residencies in the dune shacks of Provincetown. Martin’s ongoing class in Brookline—Drawing For Pleasure—has had a loyal following for many years.

Shez Arvedon | Openings

“I consider myself an omnivore artist.

I mix multi-media fine art skills with a collection of fertile and found elements gathered from my surroundings. I have lived rather remotely on Hawaii Island for over two decades, which I balance with my lifelong connection to the tumultuous summers of Provincetown MA.

My artwork, as varied as my environment, is reflective in nature, easily revealing my muse. When I paint in the dark, or immerse my hands in wet clay, female forms are often unearthed, transferring energy and memories of seductive fugitive encounters.

For this show, the primary anatomy of the sculptures was created using endemic Koa wood, mingled with native and invasive seed pods. The beauteous and royal wood remnants were donated courtesy of a local furniture maker. The word Koa, in Hawaiian language, means bold, brave, and fearless. However vulnerable after two years in ‘pandemic’ storage, I feel certain that AMP Gallery is the ideal venue for exposing and sharing my intimate and innate portraits. Offering these sacred and savage models also allows an admirer to rendezvous with a different aspect of the natural beauty and influence of Hawaii.

As I rekindle my relationship with this flirtatious town at the tip, I am desirous to release the accumulation of my creative excursion, and perhaps to arouse the onlooker.”

Shez Arvedon is a multi-media artist based in Hawaii. Born in Boston, she studied fine art at R.I.S.D. and S.M.U. Dartmouth, majoring in printmaking. She co-owned Acme Artists in Boston, a silk-screening business, and formatively produced and displayed mostly two-dimensional work in Boston, and San Francisco venues, adding performance art and multi-media installation pieces. After seven years in the Bay Area, Shez visited, and promptly moved to the Big Island of Hawaii. She was absolutely inspired by the tropical surroundings, and began creating sculptures, eventually incorporating traditional art techniques with her self-taught natural fiber assemblages. She exhibited the three-dimensional work in solo and group shows, receiving numerous awards from the Big Island Art Guild, and The East Hawaii Cultural Center.

Returning briefly to the mainland, she submitted a ‘female centric’ sculpture to, and was included in Pink & Bent: Art of Queer Women at the Leslie Lohman Museum in NYC.

She has been honored to show her assemblage work at AMP gallery in Provincetown MA numerous times.

Her current collection ‘Openings’ was created at an artist residency program in Hawi, Hawaii, and was boxed to make an appearance at a Florida art residency when the pandemic halted the world.

Shez is looking forward to continuing her creative lifestyle as the world reopens and knows that wherever she lives is an artist’s residency.

Linda Leslie Brown | Selected Works

“I have been thinking about connection, community and mutation: the ways that we and all our fellow beings are entangled, as Mr. Darwin noted so vividly in his “Origin of Species.” Darwin’s notion was that sexual reproduction, by providing access to greater genetic variation, ensures a broader set of genetic capabilities for survival. Natural biological communities or symbiota have regulated life on this planet for millions of years.

Recently, human modification of Earth's environments has resulted in massive ecocide, as well as a rapidly developing new set of possibilities for connecting, responding, and adapting; including a proliferation of genetically modified organisms and technologically mutated life forms.

My recent ceramic sculptural work suggests the plastic, provisional, and uncertain world of a new and transgenic nature, where corporeal and manufactured entities recombine. These works serve as relics of possible futures and of the effect of human actions on earth systems. Today, countless species are at risk of extinction. How will life forms adapt and survive in a hot ocean of poisoned plastic?”

Linda Leslie Brown engages fragmented and reassembled remnants of a society hell-bent on technological progress, heedless of the warnings that are all around us. Her recent sculptural work draws upon the transformative exchanges between nature, discarded objects and viewers’ creative perception.

Brown is the recipient of grants from The Artists’ Resource Trust / Berkshire Taconic Foundation, School of the Museum of Fine Arts Travelling Fellowship, St. Botolph Club Foundation, among others. Fellowship Residencies include Haystack Mountain School, Ballinglen Foundation, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Popop Studios International Artists’ Residency, Women’s Studio Center, Hambidge Center for the Arts, and I-Park, among others. She is represented by Kingston Gallery, Boston and AMP Gallery, Provincetown.

Brown is a Professor of Art + Design at Suffolk University, Boston, MA.

Barbara E. Cohen | Cube Series: Homes of Uncertainty; No Way In, No Way Out

“It’s about a roof over one’s head…how quickly a home can be taken away from oneself, or from families.

A shelter could be a simple word, an easy concept even though it is a place for comfort and safety … not as easy as one would think. In primitive times a tent, or lento served nomadic travelers with food and water. In modern times, a home is now a point of “uncertainty”, from climate change, pandemics, war and employment, etc.

These cube paintings are containers… houses floating and having no foundation or settling…people walking for freedom and grace.”

Barbara E. Cohen received her B.F.A. from Tufts University and the School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with earlier studies in art history at Oxford University. She has received numerous grants including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Artists Foundation Mass Fellowship Program, Polaroid Artist Support Program, Blanche E. Colman Award and grants from the Cambridge and Massachusetts Arts Councils. She received two artist's residencies from the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy; and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Barbara has exhibited her paintings and sculptures in numerous galleries and museums across the country. Barbara is traveling to Skopelos, Greece for a residency this summer.

Barbara's books to date, Our Provincetown, including 60 writers alongside her painted Polaroids of Provincetown, published by Provincetown Arts Press, 2021, Venezia: Essenze, is a series of oil painted Polaroids of Venice, Italy, published in 2013 by the Italian editor, Damocle. She is the author New York Love Affair, 2010, a collection of painted Polaroids of New York City, and Dog in the Dunes Revisited, 2005, published by Fields Publishing. The original Dog in the Dunes 1998, a series of painted photographs of her black Labrador, Gabe, set in the dunes of Cape Cod, was published by Andrews McMeel. Provincetown 'East West', a selection of her painted Polaroid landscapes of this small seaside town, was published in 2002 by University Press of New England. Additional books include Woman's Best Friend; A Celebration of Dogs and their Women 1996, published by Little Brown and Company, Dogs and their Women 1989, Cats and their Women 1992, and Horses and Their Women 1993. Barbara is currently working on a new book of painted photos of Yofi, her 3 1/2 lb., year old Markie, living an Upper West Side life in the famous French hundred-year-old building, the Ansonia, in New York.

Barbara divides her artistic time between Provincetown, MA and New York. She travels extensively enhancing her continued work on the lives of displaced people. Her personal politics are projected throughout her abstract paintings and sculpture from her past and present surroundings.

Anne Corrsin | Inflatables

“My recent work reveals an investigation of the function of breath (air) and its relation to language and liberation. The inflatable concept evokes forms expanded and animated by the “inspiration” of air.”

Anne Corrsin is a visual artist who graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/ Tufts program. She has exhibited her work at venues including Krakow Witkin Gallery (Boston), Real Art Ways (Hartford, Ct.), BF Annex Gallery (Boston), Sikkema Jenkins + Co. (NYC) and AMP Gallery (Provincetown, Ma.).

Her work is held in numerous private collections. Anne has been awarded Fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (Individual Grant), Boston Athenaeum (Travel Grant to study Glassmaking in Copenhagen and Ebeltoft, Denmark) and the Vermont Studio Center (Residency).

Jeanne-Marie Crede | Stage Sets For Unknown Plays

“Here’s a story I am going to tell you. Once upon a time I was walking in the woods not far from my house. As I wandered, I came across a path I had never noticed before. It wasn’t a well trodden path – more like something a deer or a pack of coyotes might have created in their treks at night. Narrow and rough, I had to bush whack my way through overgrown bushes and trees. Finally, after one final push from the under growth, I found myself in a clearing.

In the middle of the clearing was a large cabin. The roof slanted upwards from the doorway to the top the cabin’s back wall. The outside walls were weather beaten, showing only faint signs of it’s original rainbow colors. Over the lintel was the faded remnants of a partial word: ea er. The front door was secured with a rusty padlock that broke easily in my hand.

As I entered, I was surprised to find myself in a small theatre. A bare stage ran the length of the back wall. There were a few wooden chairs scattered through what I determined was the area for the audience. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw that there were shelves mounted on one of the walls. Placed on each shelf were small stage set designs.

Each set was a mystery to me. What stories were the designers trying to tell? Here was a world of myths, of Goddesses, Superheroes, pagan rituals and sacred animals. I saw small figures wandering around the scenes oblivious to the magic that surrounded them. Each piece was filled with hope and despair, redemption and rebirth. Here was where magic appeared in the realm of the ordinary. I immediately felt they were part of me, and I had to take them home. They live with me now inviting me to imagine the unknown plays.

And that is the story of what I found.”

Jeanne-Marie Crede is an artist who was born in NJ and spent her childhood 10 minutes from the George Washington Bridge. She was lucky enough to grow up in a working-class neighborhood with easy access to dumps and swamps filled with the rich gold mines of found objects. (No, bodies) As an older teen she attended Pace University in lower Manhattan studying theatre and poetry. After college she wandered between the coasts finally settling in the Boston area at the height of the Punk Movement. It was in MA that she started making visual art from objects she found on the streets and 2nd hand shops. She is mainly a self-taught artist who also studied with various teachers. She helped create and run the Roseland Studio Art Collective as well was the Associate Director and Director of The Gallery of Social and Political Art. She is an award-winning artist who has shown in galleries and venues all over New England and New York.

Jeanne-Marie has been married to the illustrator and architect, Michael Hatfield for 43 years. Together they gave birth to their daughter, Phaea H. Crede, a children’s book author – who in turn gave birth with her husband, a TV script writer and teacher, Justin Shatraw, to their grandchildren Harvey and Mabel (who’s creative careers are still unknown.) Jeanne-Marie now resides in the semi-rural town of Hopkinton, MA where there are lots of woods and mysterious paths to follow.

Jay Critchley | Baby Boomers

"Baby Boomers? Often called the Greatest Generation despite overseeing unequaled climate catastrophe, economic and racial inequality, unbridled neoliberal globalism, the Viet Nam, the Iraq/Afghanistan wars and “American exceptualism.”

And the children?

At an artist residency last fall in County Kerry, Ireland on a ruin-strewn cliff overlooking the Atlantic with Provincetown across the pond, I created work related to the potato famine genocide, utilizing the very potato and the revered turf, honoring, in particular, the children who starved to death under British colonial domination.

While sneaking into the Truro swap shop back home, undetected (only Truro residents may partake), I spotted a large, surprising photomontage of baby girls (1948, left side) and baby boys (1950, right side). I carted it off and stared at it daily at home. It became, the Baby Boomers project.

What did cute, white, happy, privileged babies have to look forward to in their lives? And their disenfranchised peers? What did we create? What part did we play in the shaping of our post WWII world? What do today’s children have to look forward to?"

Jay Critchley continues his multidisciplinary work with the 39th year of his Re-Rooters Day Ceremony in Provincetown Harbor’s east end, held on January 7: META-PURSE (edrup-etaM).

From May 27-June 24, at a show at Berta Walker Galley, Jay will introduce Provincetown’s unknown, self-taught artist, Michael J. Andrews. Jay writes:

“I was immediately fascinated and overpowered by Michael’s paintings - their complex simplicity and visual brilliance. It is an anthropology dig in real time, discovering a treasure trove in the shifting sand dune culture of the Cape Tip.”

Jay will transport the special strand of Prayer Ribbons created to honor the 49 victims of the Pulse Nightclub massacre to Orlando, Florida for the sixth anniversary on June 12. They will be installed in front of Orlando City Hall for a week, with a gathering of families and community leaders. The Prayer Ribbons were created at the Provincetown Community Compact’s Swim for Life and have traveled to the State House in Boston and to the US Congress.

Bound East for Easter Rebellion, a play adapted by Jay from Eugene O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff, will be performed at the International Eugene O’Neill Society’s conference in Boston in July. The play, which includes rewritten lyrics to standard Irish-American songs, was first performed at AMP Gallery in 2016, the centennial of both O’Neill’s debut in Provincetown and the Irish Rebellion. O’Neill and Padraig Pease, revolutionary poet, meet as lonely, overworked mates on the S.S. Glencairn.

The play will be performed with one by Susan Rand Brown: Eugene O’Neill and Marsden Hartley on the Backshore (“The Great Summer”), both directed by Margaret Van Sant.

Join Jay at the 35th Provincetown Swim for Life on September 10, 2022. Jaycritchley.com

Jay is a longtime resident of Provincetown and the shifting dunes, landscape and the sea are his palette. He has utilized sand, Christmas trees, fish skins, plastic tampon applicators washed up on beaches, pre-demolition buildings and selected sites in his work. He is a conceptual and multi-media artist, writer and activist whose work has traversed the globe, showing across the US and in Argentina, Japan, England, Spain, France, Holland, Ireland, Germany and Columbia.

He gave a TEDx Talk: Portrait of the artist as a corporation.

At Jay’s two-month residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in 2017, he created, The Whiteness House: tarred & feathered, about race, ethnicity and whiteness Other residencies include Fundacion Valparaiso, Mojacar, Andalucia, Spain, CAMAC, Marnay-sur-Seine, France, and Harvard University where he has also lectured.

His movie, Toilet Treatments, won an HBO Award and his 2015 survey show at the Provincetown Art Association & Museum traveled to Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL. He has received awards from the Boston Society of Architects and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in NYC for his environmental projects.

Jay was honored in 2012 by the Massachusetts State Legislature as an artist and founder and director of the Provincetown Community Compact, producer of the Swim for Life, which raises funds for AIDS and women’s health and the community. The 2020 fundraiser is a “Swimming in Place Challenge - our place, your place”, summerlong through September 12 - for a virtual event (swim4life.org).

During the early pandemic Jay worked on a major project about pathogens with recycled, plastic, Commercial Street promotional banners, and, a performance installation project, “36 Solar Lights: reflections on nature and civic society”.

Heather Kapplow | QPL (Queer Platonic Love)

"QPL is a meditation on and homage to the nature and value of queer platonic love—a fierce force, and a modeling of expansive care-in-community, which doesn’t rely on the tradition of nuclear family units to ascribe arcs of love.

QPL takes a mundane tool of caregiving and elevates it into something radically mysterious and mystical, celebrating the elegance of this constantly unfurling way of expressing love."

Heather Kapplow is a self-trained conceptual artist based in the United States. Kapplow creates participatory experiences that elicit unxpected intimacies using objects, alternative interpretations of existing environments, installation, performance, writing, audio and video.

Kapplow’s work has received support from US, EU, Scandinavian and Slavic governments and from private foundations including The Goethe-Institut, MassMOCA, Barr Foundation, LEF Foundation, Robert Flaherty Foundation, Tanne Foundation and others, and has been commissioned for galleries, film and performance festivals including MIT’s List Center for Visual Art, Ann Arbor Film Festival, ANTI-Festival, Datscha Radio Festival, Illuminus Boston, ISEA International, Kulturmødet Mors Festival, MEM Experimental Art Festival, and Open Engagement Conference.

Kapplow has performed with ensembles at the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Guggenheim Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Museo Arte Moderno, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Queens Museum, and within works by La Pocha Nostra, Paul Ramirez Jonas, and On Kawara.

Kapplow is an active member of two international art communities that produce work collectively: Flux Factory and Mobius Artists Group, and an affiliate artist at metaLAB at Harvard University.

In addition to practicing art, Kapplow writes about art for Hyperallergic and others, and recently co-authored an arts-heavy travel guide to Boston for Emons-Verlag GmbH.

"Using prompts, conversations, objects, sound, installation, walks and every kind of circumstance that I can wrangle, I invite people to pause their usual ways of operating, and to participate in embodied, anti-capitalist discovery processes with me. Together, we experiment with alternative ways of being and understanding, in an effort to reduce suffering bred by the social structures around us.” - Heather Kapplow

Zehra Khan | Hot Glue Hang

"I simulate traditional wall hangings and textiles with mass-produced materials such as hot glue. I look to undermine the dichotomies of luxury and austerity, art and craft, form and function. I look to challenge perceptions of women’s work and the craft cultures of my mixed heritage; pioneer America and pattern heavy Pakistan."

Zehra Khan is a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes drawing, sculpture, performance, and painting—the latter often on her fellow humans. Always playful, often absurdist and provocative, Khan uses unconventional and found materials and methods to explore relationships—those between individuals as well as those between humans and the flora and fauna of the world around us.

Khan is American and Pakistani, born in Indonesia. She lived in Paris and Switzerland before moving to the US at age eleven. Zehra received a BS from Skidmore College, and an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 2009.

She has been awarded art residencies at Yaddo, the Studios of Key West, Ox-Bow, I-Park, the Vermont Studio Center, Art Space Sonahmoo in Korea, and most recently Space A in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Zehra lived in Provincetown from 2007-2018, during which time she was represented by Gallery Ehva, then ArtStrand, and then AMP. She moved to Chicago in 2018, where she is represented by Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Her first solo museum exhibition, "Zehra Khan: Your Everyday Myths" is at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, June 24 - August 28.

Jackie Lipton | Communication and Courage

Jackie Lipton’s paintings are vibrant, dynamic and immersive. Her variable marks and curious forms, and the ways in which her textures, treatments and layers obscure, peer through, and seep into and over one another, pull viewers in and lure them along. One sees Lipton’s paintings as somehow more than just painted, and rightly so. Her works, emerging from a place of courage, are intensely, visibly wrought. And on several deeper levels, her immersive works are themselves immersed in thought.

Thought is indeed a crucial component of Lipton’s art, whether it’s of the sort of that explains things or calms us down, or that stokes our emotions or confounds. Through vivid colors, stark contrasts, textured strata and sometimes florid, sometimes slashing marks, Lipton channels the energetic churn of her opinions and passions regarding society and sanity, politics and equality, gender and diversity, and the potential for abstract paintings to effectively comment on – or feature marks in response to – any such matters. In certain works, Lipton discretely invites her viewers to question these things along with her by way of embedded, elusive, snipped, or only partially revealed texts. As the artist herself notes:

“My art acknowledges that the inner life has tremendous power to exert on the external world. It is about feeling and trust. It is a demonstration of the forces of the inner life and the imagination, of courage. It has energy and power. It has complexity, and it has simplicity – much like people do, too.”

Lipton’s creative drives have made her a painter, and her life experiences as an artist and human being have led her to make paintings to unravel tensions, abate anxieties, counteract chaos, and defuse confusion. Frenetic energies might factor into and remain apparent in her abstract compositions, but her works are purposefully composed, and at rest as such. It is in these places of pause, these moments of painted calm, where Lipton finds the language and courage to both commune and communicate with her audience.

– Paul D’Agostino

Jackie Lipton is a painter living and working in New York City. In addition to exhibiting at AMP Gallery and Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, MA, she has exhibited in many venues in New York and elsewhere, including shows at ARC at the Whitney Museum, the Art Resources Center of the Whitney Museum, the Aldrich Museum, Condeso/Lawler Gallery, WARM Gallery, the Art Resources Transfer Gallery, Gale/Martin Gallery, Gallery Boreas, Corinne Robbins Gallery, Life on Mars Gallery, and Westbeth Gallery.

Lipton has received grants and awards from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, NYFA, and NYFAI, among others. Her fellowships and residencies include the MacDowell Colony, the Cummington Community of the Arts, and the Virginia Center for Creative Art. She was also awarded a grant toward a residency program in Reykjavik, Iceland, through Gallery Boreas.

Nancy Rubens | Selected Works

“Gathering lots of new materials over the years —all sorts of papers, wallpaper, old, new, patterned, textured — I relish in discovering ways to combine and pull together disparate and at times clashing elements into harmonious resolution. Seeking out affinities, reverberations and resonance between seemingly incompatible elements has led me to bring more life and nature into my work. Over time, a pencil sketch comes to life after having been set aside for months or years when a sudden flash of insight sparks a single change that transforms it into something new.

I believe the inspiration for this work came to me in India in 2012. The freshness and visual richness, complexity, patterns, and contradictions I encountered in Delhi in particular, all had a powerful effect on me, and I was transfixed by the kaleidoscopic colors, rhythms, trees, birds and beauty moving around me every day. It was like walking into a living poem, and this striking experience became the catalyst for me to allow another layer to be folded into my thoughts about memory and the passage of time, renewal, and looking ahead to forming new experience.”

Nancy Rubens has lived and worked in New York City and Wellfleet for decades focusing on abstract collages on panels, the insides of vintage book covers, and multimedia works on canvas.

Rubens received a BA at Connecticut College where she first studied collage and went on to study at the Art Students League of New York, where she began to focus more deeply on collage while studying with Leo Manso. Bruce Dorfman was an important mentor after she left the ASL, and years later she was inspired by Mike Mazur while studying monotype with him at The Fine Arts Work Center, and subsequently made a radical shift in her work. More recent exhibitions have been at The Painting Center, Kathryn Markel Fine Art, Lori Bookstein Fine Art, Susan Eley Fine Art, and Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art in NY, at AMP Gallery, Cherry Stone Gallery, Schoolhouse Gallery, and Cahoon Museum of American Art in Provincetown, Wellfleet and Cotuit, and at Yale University.

Jicky Schnee | Cicatrize

Cicatrize: to heal by scar formation. (Selected from a series of 10)

Made intentionally to the dimensions of the human torso, these works were a reflection on the wounds that we have inflicted upon ourselves, each other and our planet. The gashes are often wishbone shaped in hope that the wounds will eventually cicatrize.

Jicky Schnee is a multidisciplinary artist working in both the visual arts and the performing arts. Schnee shows with AMP gallery in Provincetown and Stable Gallery in Woodstock, NY. She most recently showed Your Name in Lights at The Spring Break Art Fair curated by Anthony Haden-Guest.

Her most notable roles as an actor have been a supporting role to Marion Cotillard and Joaquin Phoenix in The Immigrant directed by James Gray; the female lead role in The Afterlight opposite Rip Torn and Michael Kelly; the female lead across from F. Murray Abraham in Perestroika; and the title role in Arabian Nights at Classic Stage Company in NYC directed by Tripp Culman.

Jicky received her B.A. in Art and Art History from Rice University and studied drama at the British American Drama Academy in England.

A LIVE GALLERY SPACE