REINVENTING WINTER: PROVINCETOWN GALLERIES TEAM UP AT MARY HEATON VORSE HOUSE
Artscope
Friday, March 1st, 2024 // Features, March/April 2024
By Lee Roscoe
Robert Henry, Moonlight in Vermont, 2023, oil on canvas, 30” x 40” and Selina’s Louie, 2000, oil on canvas, 30” x 40”, installation view at The Parlor in the Mary Heaton Vorse House; presented by Berta Walker Gallery. Photograph by Bruce Ployer.Robert Henry, Moonlight in Vermont, 2023, oil on canvas, 30” x 40” and Selina’s Louie, 2000, oil on canvas, 30” x 40”, installation view at The Parlor in the Mary Heaton Vorse House; presented by Berta Walker Gallery. Photograph by Bruce Ployer.
Should you go to the Mary Heaton Vorse House for the exhibition of art from 12 galleries that are members of the Provincetown Art Gallery Association (PAGA), you will have the rare experience of seeing art in an impeccably restored 18th century home. Run by the Provincetown Arts Society (PAS), the house has been exhibiting art, hosting films and offering residencies to artists of any kind since 2020.
The Society’s director, Gene Tartaglia, said that the Provincetown Arts Society supports the existing arts in Provincetown, and gives space for the community to gather, celebrate and talk about art in many forms.
“The fiscal sponsor is the St. Joseph’s Art Society Foundation in San Francisco that was founded by Ken Fulk, who was approached by the granddaughters of Mary Heaton Vorse who wanted to sell him the home because they felt he’d be a good guardian,” by keeping it intact, restoring but not renovating it, and by an aesthetic sensibility “which knows when to stop,” Tartiglia explained.
It helped that Fulk was a community leader in Provincetown and runs a design firm in San Francisco and New York City. Tartaglia also praised carpenter Nate McKean for the restoration of the house.
To curate this exhibition, Tartaglia scoured PAGA galleries and artists’ studios in Boston to select over 100 pieces. It took him a week to hang them on rain-colored plaster walls, as well as on wooden boards that are exposed to “reveal the soul of the house.” The choices are eclectic, from “contemporary to historical,” Tartaglia said. He had no particular intention but to furnish the walls with art which he loves, a subjective choice, and “a labor of love” — and which is compatible with the feel of the rooms in the house. He hoped that the way that he’s arranged pieces will be “harmonious, make sense in the house, have a continuity and flow,” stressing that the home is not a gallery and so the gestalt is different, more intimate, more surprising.
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