LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

Each person who has come to live in Provincetown has a memory of that time being special. Maybe it was the discovery of an unknown terrain, new friendships or fun rituals unique to the period (like the nightly free movies and popcorn at the old Holiday Inn). People will say “Oh the 70s were the best.” or “There will never be anything as wondrous as the 50s in Provincetown.”

My time was the early 90s. I spent my first summer here with the express purpose of taking art classes. The Chamber of Commerce and the Art Association mailed requested brochures to my East Village apartment and I enthusiastically planned my summer like a trip abroad.

I took an etching class with the talented Bill Behnken. Unknown to me at the time was the fact that my fellow students were equally well-known artists: Sal Del Deo, Joan Pereira, Connie Black and Helen Daphnis. They didn’t really need the class. They were probably only there to use the press. I took a white-line printmaking class with Kathryn Lee Smith, granddaughter of Ferol Sibley Warthen, an internationally famous Provincetown white-line printmaker. It was my own golden era of art education.

This year, Art Guide invited well-known Provincetown white-line artist and historian Bill Evaul to write about another special time in Provincetown—the winter of 1915/16, when a group of artists fled Paris in the midst of WWI and created a new and unique art form, the Provincetown Print. Today the output from this relatively small group of artists, a result of close companionship and creative collaboration, is now exhibited in major museums around the world. We celebrate these printers, and their own golden age in Provincetown, in the pages of this year’s Art Guide.

-Patricia Zur