Twenty Summers

Twenty Summers is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization in Provincetown, Massachusetts, founded to Twenty Summers is a non-profit arts organization founded to foster public engagement with art and artists, and to honor the legacy of art in Provincetown, Mass. It restored the historic Hawthorne Barn where that legacy began and where its programs take place from mid-May to mid-June annually. The programming features concerts, conversations, artist residencies, and art classes, in an effort to further expand and deepen the historical education and cultural offerings available to the year round residents and seasonal visitors on Cape Cod. The historic Hawthorne Barn—a relevant backdrop for these dynamic social exchanges— was built in 1907 by the painter Charles Webster Hawthorne to house his Cape Cod School of Art, and was later used by Hans Hofmann to run a second influential school of art and ideas. In 2012, Twenty Summers found a buyer to renovate the barn, who renovated the barn beautifully, and enabled the organization to host their events annually, and to share them — both in person and online — with the rest of the world.The Twenty Summers events series has, in its first three years of programs, used the Hawthorne Barn as a space for reflections on political life; staged theatrical readings; thrown concerts with diverse styles of music; discussions on literary process and trailblazing literary content; the role of community activism; the many forms of human identity made manifest in photographic study; art historical symposia; and much more.The 60 audience members are seated in the historic space, and gain access to an intimate ninety minute interchange that straddles multiple disciplines, generations, genres, and cultures. In addition to the live audience admitted into the barn, every event is recorded and uploaded to our online video archive which is available for free on our website, www.20summers.org and on YouTube, while audio podcasts are made available through iTunes, Google Play, and SoundCloud. This is an important and ongoing element of Twenty Summers' programming and contribution to the greater community, as the archive has already become, after only three years, a rich resource for creative and intellectual exchange. A selection of our programs are also broadcast on air by local NPR affiliate stations.