Provincetown hosts inaugural Outsiders Festival

Boston Globe

01-05-2025

It was Harry Kemp, the 'hobo poet,' who coined the phrase 'the Art of Spectacularism,' which the organizers have taken as their mantra, says the festival's primary instigator, Chuck White. He is the chief archivist at the
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
'The whole thing is a big improv stunt on one level,' explains White, who began working in a Provincetown T-shirt shop as a teenager from Quincy.
Advertisement
The makers and doers behind the Outsiders Festival are carrying on a long tradition of willful eccentricity in the town, White says.
'We're a collective of misfits, even in a misfit town.'
Kemp, who died in Provincetown at age 76 in 1960, was a notorious scalawag. He hung out with the Lost Generation in Paris, ran off with Upton Sinclair's wife, and wrote the memoir 'Tramping on Life' (1922).
Advertisement
Kemp is one of several largely forgotten Provincetown characters whose lives and work will be celebrated at the festival. Another, the late Al Hansen, ran local art galleries for several years in the early 1960s. An early member of the experimental art collective known as Fluxus, he once pushed a piano off a building in Germany while serving in the US military during World War II. That stunt inspired Yoko Ono, John Cage, and possibly the annual
Hansen — the grandfather of the musician Beck — lived by an 'anything goes' ethos that inspired the planning for the Outsiders Festival's opening night. On the Provincetown Commons, several dozen artists will be creating live work as part of a spectacle called HERESY: The Happening. In the centerpiece, participants will dismantle an old upright piano, creating new art and sound sculptures in the process.
An intrepid group of locals has convened to stage the town's inaugural Outsiders Festival, from May 8-11, to honor Provincetown's history as a magnet for artists.
Courtesy photos
Works representing the 'modern Provincetown Collagist movement' will be on display through May 12 in the community room at the Commons. That show is also called 'Heresy,' a variation on Hansen's own
Karen Cappotto, who first met White decades ago at the Rat, is a Provincetown-based visual artist who has been curating an annual show of locally produced collage art for years.
'For some of the artists, it's their first time doing collage,' she says. 'I kind of tease it out of them.'
Recent generations of Provincetown artists have embraced the medium because it's a more modern form of art than, say, plein-air painting, she believes: 'Collage wasn't, like, [painting] sailboats.'
Advertisement
The Outsiders Festival honors Provincetown's history as a magnet for artists.
Courtesy photos
On Friday, a Provincetown cast will stage a reading of 'Vain Victory: The Vicissitudes of the Damned' (1971), an outrageous off-off-Broadway musical written by the late Warhol 'superstar' Jackie Curtis. The cast has been coached by Lary Chaplan, the show's original composer, who lives on Cape Cod.
At Provincetown Town Hall on Saturday, the town's
In that old edition of Newsweek, Hansen is critical of the Art Association, calling their advocacy work 'a great case of arteriosclerosis.' Once White stumbled on that article, he went down a rabbit hole on Hansen's life, he says.
A decade after Hansen's time in Provincetown, he cofounded the Los Angeles nightclub the Masque and managed some of the city's earliest punk bands.
'He started the punk movement in LA,' White says. 'It's the best story, but it's untold.'
James Sullivan can be reached at
.