Making Light: A Conversation with Artists on Sustaining Creativity, Courage, and Connection in Difficult Times
I don’t have to tell you how frightening this time is. I’ve had to really force myself every day to move out of that fear and back into a space in which I can create. You may be experiencing something similar. I felt that we as creatives needed to have some conversations about it. To support each other. To find ways to carry on. And so I created a program called Making Light—because in dark times, artists make light.
We meet monthly at the Provincetown Commons (46 Bradford St., Provincetown, MA) and have a conversation together—visual artists, musicians, writers, poets, performers—to support our own practices as well as those of everyone in our community. Everyone is welcome to participate.
Future dates: Mar 17, Apr 21, May 19, June 23
As I fill in topics and panelists, I’ll include that information here. I’m also updating this page regularly with resources; if there’s something you’d like to share, feel free to send it to me at jeannettedebeauvoir@gmail.com.
March 17, 6:00pm
Helen Grimm is an artist who embraces the shifting nature of the infinite present, surrendering to each moment that is all moments within a universe of constant change. Using a visual language evolved from nature, she explores cycles of attachment and release by moving paint around her canvases, layering color and texture, and cutting away form. With degrees in painting and art history from Cornell University (1990), Helen is also an herbalist, nurse, and parent who returned to her painting practice in 2006. Represented in Provincetown by Four Eleven Gallery since 2010, her work is in private collections all around the world.
Grace Emmett is a visual artist, writer, naturalist, educator, and serves as PAAM’s the Curator of Community Education. Her place-based art practice is dependent on an intimate relationship with the land informed by her foraging and natural ink making process. She has shown in galleries, museums, and universities across the Northeast and her artwork can be found at Frying Pan Gallery and Farm Projects. Grace has taught workshops at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Cultural Center of Cape Cod, and the Arlington Center for the Arts. She is the author of Solstice Tree: A Story of a Forest in Times of Darkness and Light and the substack Sundog published seasonally.
Susan Lambert has acted and sung in Off-Broadway, stock, regional, and European tours. Her newest solo show is a musical memoir, If You Could Read My Mind. She will appear in next year's short The Hot Club (Claude Kervin). This spring she continues to tour her solo shows The Couch and Moons and Junes and Moments in the Woods and will appear as Sharon in The Roommate from In The Balance Productions and Woods Hole Theatre Company. She played JoJo in the world premiere of Meryl Cohn's The Fade Away Advantage and Masha in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. She is the creator/host of the podcast In The Balance and producer and narrator of The Wild Edge of The Heart audio book to benefit women’s reproductive rights.
April 21
Candace Perry is a writer, teacher, and social justice activist who holds the audacious hope that writing can change the world. Over fifty of her short plays have been produced in the US and Ireland; her five full length plays have had readings, workshops and productions in New York and Cape Cod theaters; and a dozen of her short plays have been produced online. Her short stories have been published in Ms. Magazine, The Sun, Best of THE SUN, Cape Cod Review, Cape Cod Women, Roanoke Review, and Summer Home Review. She lives in Wellfleet with her husband, Charles Thibodeau. More info at www.candaceperryplaywright.info.
Candy Hammond grew up and still lives on Cape Cod, but will forever be considered a washashore for not having been born here. She is a journalist, playwright, novelist, social media manager, and PR person. She also hosts Arts Week twice a month on WOMR. She works with the Orleans Cultural District, and is passionate about promoting the arts and the vital community they create. She is the mother of three adult children who are scattered around the globe, and lives with her musician partner and their very large cat on the Lower Cape.
Frank Poranski has been playing music on the Cape for over 25 years. He was half of Frank and Chev, Blu Central, and is now, along with Kami Lyle, Bella Ciao. He is also a member of the band The Bitter and Broken Men’s Chorus. He is the artistic director of the Pop-Up Practices in the Park in Orleans, a program he co-created to give local musicians an opportunity to try out new material in front of an audience. It runs all fall and spring in downtown Orleans. Originally from New Jersey and New York City, Frank has been on the Cape for 36 years.
Past Events
Check out past events on the Making Light: Past Events page.
Resources
Aren’t you just breaking your heart for the courage and selflessness of the people of Minneapolis? I so hope that future generations will lift them. Don’t invade a winter people in the winter… all that you have is your soul!
The week after Alex Pretti was killed, Bruce Springsteen wrote and released a song: The Streets of Minneapolis. One artist who understood how he could respond.
If you’d like to hear me and Art Devine interviewed about Making Light over on WOMR, you can listen here.
Recommended books:
Imagination in an Age of Crisis: a collection of essays, poems, and short reflections. This book explores the vital role of the imagination in today’s complex climates—cultural, environmental, political, racial, religious, spiritual, intellectual, etc. It asks: What contribution do the arts make in a world facing the impacts of globalism, climate change, pandemics, and losses of culture?
Read This When Things Fall Apart, Kelly Hayes, ed. is a care package for activists and organizers building power under fascistic, demoralizing conditions; offers history lessons, personal anecdotes, and practical advice.
Poems for Political Disaster from the Boston Review.
What can we do to protect our neighbors? Heidi Jon Schmidt has some ideas here.
“Seek joy in each dawn that breaks—let it be your daily practice, your sacred ritual, your intentional act of defiance against the weight of the world. Make it your healer, your compass, your quiet revolution against despair and all that would diminish the spark within you.” (Gurdeep Pandher)
Another Pandher quote: “Joy begins within, but protecting it demands vigilance at the borders of our attention. This isn’t about numbing ourselves to the world’s suffering—the injustices still pierce my heart, still call me to witness. But compassion without boundaries becomes martyrdom. We must learn to step back from the fire, not to abandon those in the flames, but to preserve the strength needed to return.”
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair. No place for self-pity. No need for silence. No room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” (Toni Morrison)
“The promise of change drives creativity everywhere. Those happy with the world and the status quo don’t strive to make things anew, as they’re content with what exists.” (Hrag Vartanian)
Artists nationwide unite against the Trump administration. Discover these voices!
Listen to this new protest song as many times as you can, and whenever your heart hurts. And then listen to this one, written in the 1840s. They both are lifting my spirits.
How artists resisted fascism a century ago: links to a review of a new book by Andy Friend (the book title is Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism 1933-1943) “for a future worth the struggle.”
Maria Popova’s wonderfully uplifting newsletter mixes science with art; subscribe and read back issues here. (There are both free and paid versions.)
“I listen to the news and, when I get nauseous from the political games, escape into my novels: within their pages I find shelter from the bitterness of life. To keep a small light burning against the swallowing darkness, I also write. I hold the hand of the writer within me tightly because I believe that more than any politician, it is this writer who will be of more use to my homeland.” (Afghani author Maryam Mahjoba)
Here’s a moving essay on the dangers of dehumanizing others by Jake Norton—I found it very helpful.
In 1995, Italian novelist and critic Umberto Eco perceived a “ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world).” That ghost was fascism. This is an important read.
Some suggestions for staying creative no matter what.
Anne Sebba chronicles how the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz survived the death camps and considers the role of music amidst genocide.