More than 30 years after his death, Robert Motherwell's legacy lives on here as a gift to budding creatives at the revered Fine Arts Work Center, which the artist cofounded in 1968.
A bequest from the estate of Motherwell and his wife, Renate Ponsold, is supporting a new generation of artists, as the Center's executive director, Sharon Polli, told CAI's Morning Edition.
Here's their conversation:
Patrick Flanary For those who aren't familiar with the work of Robert Motherwell, tell us about him and his role in cofounding the Fine Arts Work Center back in the late '60s.
Sharon Polli Robert Motherwell is one of the leading abstract expressionists of the 20th century. And so we are incredibly honored that Robert Motherwell had a studio space in the historic Days Barn Lumberyard on our campus. Going back 100 years, the owners rented space to artists during the winter seasons. That's a very exciting piece of our legacy and a moment of our history that we we treasure quite dearly.
In the late 1960s, a group of artists, writers and patrons, including Robert Motherwell, came together and they started to realize that Provincetown, even at that time, was becoming too expensive and too unaffordable for the artists and writers who had been drawn here for so long to the creative community. And so that group started to think about launching a residency program that would bring emerging writers and artists to Provincetown and allow them to fall in love with this place and develop their creative practice.
PF What sort of impact will this money immediately have on the aspiring artists?
SP The most important thing that I'm incredibly excited about is that a bequest of $200,000 will fuel and get injected right back into working artists and writers. And so when we invite fellows here from October through April, we provide them with live-work space, and a studio in the case of our visual artists, who receive a material stipend of $1,000. We also provide a monthly stipend in order to make their time here easier. And so all our artists and writers are provided $1,250 per month, and they also receive a transition stipend in April as they're leaving Provincetown in order to go back into their work life.
Each of our 20 fellows is provided essentially with $10,000 while they're here. And so a gift of $200,000 really is the amount that we're contributing directly to those fellows. In addition, the funding will help support our summer workshop scholars program, which is an opportunity in the summer season when we invite people to participate in an open-enrollment educational opportunity with world-class faculty. And so each summer we have about 65 workshops in creative writing, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, memoir and painting. And so the bequest is going to also support that program to ensure that Provincetown is accessible in the summer to low-income, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC artists and writers.
PF And this seven-month fellowship is one of the nation's only long-term residency programs, right?
SP That's right. It's one of the longest residency programs in our country, and that's what really sets it apart and makes it have such an extraordinary impact. Our founders really believed that seven months was about the amount of time that it took a young artist or writer to have unstructured time and space in order to develop their creative practice and face what it means to be a working artist for a lifetime.
PF I don't want to leave out Renate Ponsold, who died last year. Tell us a bit about her and her relationship with with Robert.
SP Renate Ponsold was full of life and a creative spirit herself. She was an acclaimed photographer who, throughout her lifetime, discovered her love of photography and natural light. She came to New York City and photographed many artists including Louis Armstrong at interesting moments in their lives. They included Robert Motherwell himself. And she documented a lot of his practice and work, and really left behind an impressive body of work herself.
PF I know there's plenty to see and do in Provincetown. Are people who visit for the summer able to visit the Fine Arts Work Center, and what might they expect to see?
SP Yes, we have a wonderful summer workshop program where we have our world-class faculty give artist talks or readings that are free and open to the public at 5:00 p.m. You can always come by and participate in one of those really extraordinary artist talks and readings. We also have a gallery with an exhibition on view called Edge Condition, which features the work of past fellows. And so you can come and take a look at that incredible exhibition that explores what the fellowship has meant to artists and how it has affected their practice. Any work sold through that exhibition supports the mission of this place. And so it's a real gift from those participating artists.
