October 15 2015

Diane Fraser, CD Collins and Kate Wallace Rogers

Readings

5pm

Diane Fraser writes memoir, personal essays, poetry, and fiction. She published her memoir “Growing Up Supherheroes, The Extraordinary Adventures of Deihlia Nye” about her niece, who had a profound impact on her life and the lives of others. Her essays about writing appear in various online blogs or websites. Diane’s experience and training in tarot, astrology, spirits, and planetary energies inform her writing and sometimes appear as the subject. She’s working on her next book, a young adult novel about confused teenagers with special mystical gifts trying to learn how to work with them. She’s also a cosmic healer and provides healing, insight, and energy for her clients.

CD Collins, a Kentucky native, follows the storytelling traditions of the South, both as a solo artist and when accompanied by musicians. Her short fiction collection Blue Land was published by Polyho Press, and her poetry collection Self Portrait with Severed Head by Ibbetson Street Press. Her work has been archived in four compact discs: Kentucky Stories (winner Best Spoken-Word album Boston Poetry Awards), Subtracting Down, Carousel Lounge and Clean Coal/Big Lie. Afterheat is her first novel.

Collins has received grants and awards from Massachusetts College of Art, Somerville Arts Council, St. Botolph Club, Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Cambridge Arts Council, The Malden Arts Council and Women Waging Peace. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Kentucky where she studied with author and activist Wendell Berry.

Collins was recently a guest at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. for a pilot conference to advance the development of innovative technologies that support the inclusion of people with disabilities. She is currently collaborating on an album of spoken-word with music titled Night Animals with Russian-born Santon, a blind, autistic musical savant and recent graduate of Berklee College of Music.

Kate Wallace Rogers has been writing and performing poetry most all of her life. She co-founded the Dragonfly poetry and music series in Dennis, MA, and is a member of the Workshop for Publishing Poets in Brookline. Her poems have been published in The Beaver and Red Weather. In 2004, she silk-screened a slim volume of poetry on Japanese folding paper. More recently, she has been a frequent participant and feature at the Mews coffeehouse in Provincetown. Kate's poetry weaves together her love of language, nature and women.

October 13 2015

Hot, Deep & Connected: The Art of Sex in Partnership

A conversation with Felice Newman & Constance Clare-Newman

4pm

Sex in the context of a longterm relationship offers richness and depth, and yet can be really challenging. When was the last time you had a refreshingly frank discussion about sex? Let’s talk about what works, what doesn’t, and how can we get more of what we want. Open to all women.

Felice Newman is the author of the best-selling Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us. She co-founded Cleis Press, where she produced many landmark books on sexuality and gender. Felice is a somatic coach and sex educator who helps couples and individuals create satisfying sex lives. She is also an artist whose paintings can be seen at the Hutson Gallery.

Constance Clare-Newman is an Alexander Technique teacher who helps people find ease in their bodies. As a former member of the Good Vibrations cooperative in San Francisco, she is a trained sex educator and an advocate for pleasure. She has a lot to say about the embodied experience of sexuality.

September 5 2015

Michael Klein and Elizabeth Bradfield

Readings

7:30 pm

Michael Klein is a five-time Lambda Literary award finalist and won the award twice for his anthology, "Poets for Life: 76 Poets Respond to AIDS" and for his first book of poems, "1990". His third book of poems, "The Talking Day" is a finalist for both a Lambda Literary Award and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. He is also the author of two books of prose, "Track Conditio"n and "The End of Being Known" both published by the University of Wisconsin Press, as well as a chapbook, "States of Independence" which won the inaugural BLOOM chapbook prize of non-fiction, judged by Rigoberto Gonzalez. He has new work appearing or forthcoming in Little Star, Provincetown Arts, The Awl, Ampersand Review and Poetry magazine and he teaches poetry and non-fiction in the MFA Program at Goddard College and at Castle Hill Center for the Arts. He lives in New York City and Provincetown.

Michael will be reading works in response to Barbara Cohen's "Current Model: New York City Dumpsters" on exhibition at AMP.

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the poetry collections Once Removed, Approaching Ice, and Interpretive Work. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Orion and elsewhere. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, she lives on Cape Cod, works as a naturalist locally as well as on expedition ships, and is the current Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at University of Alaska Anchorage. www.ebradfield.com

About Once Removed: Impelled by assorted desires—by their exhilarations and potential consequences—Once Removed continues poet-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield’s exploration of how we navigate (and sometimes contaminate) our ecological and emotional environments. Set on the waters and shores of Cape Cod with sojourns to Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, and elsewhere, Bradfield’s unflinching poems delve into our complex impulse to connect to nature and each other. Once Removed is a moving chronicle of natural encounters, a masterful confluence of art and life.

August 26 2015

An evening with Kate Clinton - author, actress, stand-up humorist, and activist

Reading

7 pm

Kate Clinton is a faith-based, tax-paying, America-loving political humorist and family entertainer. With a career spanning almost thirty years, Kate Clinton has worked through economic booms and busts, Disneyfication and Walmartization, gay movements and gay markets, lesbian chic and queer eyes, and eight presidential inaugurals. She still believes that humor gets us through peacetime, wartime, scoundrel time and economic down times. This year she celebrates her 33rd year of performing.

Last year Bywater Books published Don’t Get Me Started and What The L? as e-books. Her new third book I Told You So is a hilarious, bittersweet, politically acute survival guide. It is also available as an audiobook. Her second book, What The L? is a laugh-out-loud collection of dangerous humor from one of the all-time-favorite lesbian comics living under one of the all-time-worst presidents. In 2005 it was nominated in the humor category for the prestigious 2005 Lambda Literary Award, considered to be the highest accolade for a book from the LGBT community. Her first book, Don’t Get Me Started, was published by Ballantine in 1998. The audio companion was named one of 1998′s Best Audiobooks by Publishers Weekly. Kate’s work is also included in the following books: The L Life, It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living.

Check out this video of Kate talking about her upcoming reading at AMP, plus her fantastic new show called "Hello Katey! A One Woman Pussy Riot" at the Crown & Anchor! Kate Clinton & AMP Gallery in Provincetown 2015

August 22 2015

Tough Girls & Lucid Dreamers #5

Readings by Katrina del Mar and Bobby Miller | Performances by Sarah Greenwood, Karyn Kuhl, Runn Shayo, Anne Stott and Thalia Zedek

7 pm

Artist Katrina del Mar has invited some of her favorite writers and musicians to read, perform (and sometimes show short films) during her exhibitions starting in 2013 at Participant Inc, in NYC and at AMP Gallery in Provincetown. This is the fifth installment of the series.

Writers have included Eileen Myles, Melissa Febos, Katrina del Mar, Amanda Pollock, Tessa Lou Fix, Patty Powers. Filmmakers have included Anne Hanavan and Tessa Lou Fix. Musicians have included Sarah Greenwood, Karyn Kuhl, Sue Metro, Debbie Nadolney, Lola Rocknrolla, Pat Place, and Thalia Zedek.

Katrina del Mar is a New York-based photographer, video artist, writer, and award-winning film director. Her work has been described as “beautiful” exuding an “intimate chemistry” and also as “filth of the highest quality.” Katrina herself has been described as a “major league cutie,” “a wild woman,” “the Lesbian Russ Meyer,” and “apparently, the lesbian stepchild of Kenneth Anger.” Her solo exhibition GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS, first presented at Participant Inc. in New York City, was shown at AMP Gallery in the summer season of 2013. Likewise, her solo exhibition Summer Sang in Me, first presented at Strange Loop Gallery in New York City was exhibited at AMP Gallery in 2014. In 2012, Katrina presented a series of films and photographs from the Golden Age of Performance Art (1988-2000) On the Edge of Society: Moments in Live Art, at Warehouse 9, Copenhagen, Denmark. Her solo exhibition, Gangs of New York, was presented in 2010 at Wrong Weather Gallery in Porto, Portugal. Invited to teach at the University of the Arts in Bremen, Germany, she conducted the first ever Queer Trash Feminist Film Workshop, also in 2010. Katrina has shown her critically acclaimed Girl Gang Trilogy of films internationally, including venues such as the Museum for Contemporary Art (CAPC), Bordeaux, France, the Fringe Film Festival, London, UK, 2012; Nightingale Cinema, co-presented by Chicago Underground Film Festival, the MoMA Dome 2 in Rockaway Beach, and Bio Paradis, Reykjavik, Iceland.

Katrina’s work has garnered numerous awards including a fellowship in video from the New York Foundation for the Arts, “Best Experimental Film” from the Planet Out Short Movie Awards announced at the Sundance Film Festival, the 2010 Accolade Award of Merit, and Winner of Juried Competition, Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, MA, 2012.

Katrina is currently at work on a “non-linear, semi surreal” documentary-style web series called DelMarvelous: A Day in the Life, Katrina del Mar, which will be screened at AMP during this year's Provincetown International Film Festival.

Bobby Miller is a performance poet, writer, actor and photographer. He is the author of four books of poetry; "Benestrific Blonde", "Mouth of Jane",”Troubleblonde” and "Rigamarole". He has been published in many magazines and periodicals including Verbal Abuse, Vice Magazine, UHF Magazine and the Village Voice. He is included in The 1995 American Book Award winning "Aloud: Voices From The Nuyorican Poets Cafe", "Verses That Hurt; Pleasure And Pain From The Poemfone Poets” and “The Outlaw Bible Of American Poetry”, which was listed on the top ten Poetry National Bestseller List. Mr. Miller’s book, "Fabulous! A Photographic Diary Of Studio 54", 144 black and white photographs with text, was published by St. Martin's Press in September 1998, He is also the author “A Downtown State of Mind: NYC 1973 – 1983”, “Wigstock in Black & White: 1985 – 2005”, “Jackie 60 Nights”, “Amina”, “Queer Nation”, “PORTRAITS: Volumes 1 – 3”, ”Ptown Peeps” Volumes 1 , 2 and 3, “Forget Them Not”, ”Fetish and Fairytale Folk”, “Diva’s, Dudes & Dandies”, and “Fabulous! A Photographic Diary of Studio 54: REDUX”.

His work has been exhibited in NYC, Palm Springs and Provincetown at AMP Gallery, Patty DeLuca Gallery and Woodman Shimko Gallery. Bobby has been taking photographs since 1974. He studied photography with Lisette Model in 1976 in NYC at The New School during the last year of her life.

Sarah Greenwood is a songwriter and performer, born in Switzerland to British transplants. Graduate of the prestigious Berklee College of Music, Sarah is the recipient of multiple Professional Writing Division Awards for Songwriting from Berklee. She released several well received eponymous EP's including 24 Hour Shift before forming GSX, known for its fiery live performances. Sarah's full length album Manifest was released in 2005 and GSX headlined and played both internationally, notably to a crowd of 50,000 in Reykjavik, Iceland and nationally, at notable venues including the Gramercy Theater and the notorious CBGB’s, where they opened for Joan Jett. The GSX videos Bringin' Me Down and I Got What I Came For directed by Katrina del Mar, both made the Top Ten on LOGO's Click List(MTV Networks). Sarah is currently working on a new record. She lives in New York City. website

“Greenwood has a knack for transforming pain and anger into edgy songs which alternately smolder and blaze with the eloquently pissed-off attitude of Chrissie Hynde. Her Lyrics are reminiscent of Lou Reed and Patti Smith.” - Boston Phoenix

Karyn Kuhl is a Hoboken based singer, songwriter and guitarist who started out as the front person for 80’s Hoboken post-punk Gut Bank and 90’s rock trio Sexpod. Gut Bank released the LP The Dark Ages on Coyote Records in 1986 which was produced by Roger Miller (Mission Of Burma).

The Karyn Kuhl Band was formed in 2010 with Lou Ciarlo on bass and Jonpaul Pantozzi on drums. Songs For The Dead recalls the lush minimalism of Karyn’s earlier solo recordings as well as the fiery guitar work from her Sexpod days. Alicia Godsberg and Lola RocknRolla contributed guitar and sax to the recording. The band has been showcasing material from Songs For The Dead with James Mastro (The Bongos, Ian Hunter) on guitar.

Runn Shayo: "I am a time-based, environmental, site-specific film and performance artist. I use film and video to create installations, sometimes combining multiple channel video projections with live art. My background as a dancer and an actor in theater and film has influenced my work a great deal.

The work I produce for the screen range from experimental documentaries to dance films, and to what I define as environmental site-specific performance art film. These pieces explore environmental aspects of landscapes through filmed performances.

My works usually deal with subjects of gender, immigration, or the environment. They explore the struggle of an artist in contemporary contexts. I discover my characters and their stories through researching archived popular TV shows, classic history films, and archived documentation of conceptualized contemporary performance art. The ancient form of storytelling is what I ultimately honor, yet, in the center of my exploration is the meaninglessness of words, the out-cast, the sidekick; a voice of a mute preacher."

Runn was born and raised in Israel, and moved to New York 19 years ago to attend school. He has lived here ever since.

Anne Stott is a Provincetown, MA based indie rock singer/songwriter whose music is a world unto itself. A place where the 70s rock, 80s alt pop and classical piano of her childhood have lively conversations with the Indian chanting and righteous poet rockers of her adult influences. Over more than ten years of gigs, albums, poetry, and acting, Stott has developed a deeply personal voice that travels from introspection to exultation. Stott’s latest album, LOVE NEVER DIES, has been called “a stunner” (Music Morsels Review) and SHE Magazine said, “Stott’s a bewitching cross between The Pretenders front woman Chrissie Hynde and Joni Mitchell. Run, don’t walk.”

Thalia Zedek started her career as a musician in the groups White Women and Dangerous Birds, whose 1982 singles “Alpha Romeo”, "Smile On Your Face", and "Walking Emergency" are rare finds these days. She really made her mark shortly thereafter with Uzi, whose 1986 Homestead release Sleep Asylum was a landmark not only for the Boston region but for the underground in general. It rightfully put Thalia in the company of other challenging female pioneers such as Kim Gordon, and was reissued by Matador in the mid-1990’s to much acclaim. In 1998, a mere two years after Uzi, Thalia broke new ground again with the NYC band Live Skull. The three records that she released with them more than stand the test of time and laid the groundwork for artists who followed such as PJ Harvey. It was with Come that Thalia rose with the swell of popularity of so called Indie Rock. Fueled by the guitar interplay between herself and bandmate Chris Brokaw, Come released four full length records, Eleven-Eleven, Don't Ask Don't Tell, Near Life Experience, and Gently Down The Stream as well as various EP's and singles and toured extensively throughout the 90s.

After Come ended in 1999, Thalia began writing and recording under her own name, but throughout her career Thalia’s voice has remained a singular calling card. Her songwriting has great depth and a pervading melancholic tone much like the work of Nick Cave. She has chosen unusual instrumentation to compliment her guitar, such as the viola and trumpet contributions of David Michael Curry and Mel Lederman on piano and keyboard. Her songs are rich in texture and reveal with each listen their delicately crafted layers.

On a recent release, Via, Zedek presented a collection of songs that range from the harrowing to the heartfelt. The opener “Walk Away” is a triumphantly melancholic exploration of living with ghosts, with Zedek’s richly emotive voice augmented by David Michael Curry’s gravelly viola and Mel Lederman’s measured piano. Via is an album about recovery, loyalty, chance, and gratitude: universal themes that become stirring in Zedek’s hands.

Along with the Thalia Zedek Bank, she is also in a great new experimental band called "E".

August 18 2015

Runn Shayo

An Act of Disappearance

8:00 pm

An act of Disappearance is a duration piece, 3 hours in length, exploring in addition to the above, public intimacy through digital interfaces and the video conference call, Cam 2 Cam phenomena.

Runn Shayo is a time based site-specific artist. he uses video and other technology to create installations, combined with live art. His work is queer, unapologetic, confronting gender and identity. It’s of the natural body exploring endurance, physical restriction limitations, isolation and pain as ecstasy.

August 14 2015

Gerry Visco

Performance, reading

8pm, 20 minutes

Gerry Visco is a performer, writer, and photographer. She is illegally blonde and lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

She has performed at such venues as the Cutting Room, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, The Museum of Arts and Design, the Creative Time Gala, The Wild Project, Chantal’s House of Shame in Berlin, Envoy Gallery, The Slipper Room, and nightclubs in Brooklyn and Manhattan and acted in several films, music videos, and TV shows, including Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories,” "Mozart In the Jungle," "Oddities," "Love, Lust, or Run," "Hellaware," and Abel Ferrara’s “4.44 Last Day on Earth.” Visco currently writes for Interview Magazine, Vice Media, and online art magazine Hyperallergic. She has written hundreds of articles which have appeared in NY Press and Out. Her photography has appeared in NY Magazine, The Village Voice, The Daily News, and Gawker and has been shown at the Munch Gallery in NYC, and Gallery U in Montclair, NJ and Detroit, Michigan. The Village Voice named her Bravest Nightlife Photographer of 2010. Gerry holds a BA in Literature, an MFA in Writing, and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University and is a certified yoga teacher from the Iyengar Institute. She also has a day job in educational administration.

She is currently writing a tell-all memoir about her colorful life as muse, fag hag, and rent girl, in the gritty glamorous world of New York City during the 1970s and 1980s.

August 8 2015

Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs

A special evening of readings from their new books, Fanny Says and Pelvis With Distance. Introduction by Elizabeth Bradfield.

5 pm

Nickole Brown grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and Deerfield Beach, Florida. Her books include Fanny Says, a collection of poems forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2015; her debut, Sister, a novel-in-poems published by Red Hen Press in 2007; and an anthology, Air Fare, that she co-edited with Judith Taylor. She graduated from The Vermont College of Fine Arts, studied literature at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She worked at the independent, literary press, Sarabande Books, for ten years, and she was the National Publicity Consultant for Arktoi Books and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She has taught creative writing at the University of Louisville and Bellarmine University. Currently, she is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Series in Prose Poetry at White Pine Press and is on faculty every summer at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference and at the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Murray State. She is an Assistant Professor at University of Arkansas at Little Rock and lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs.

Jessica Jacobs grew up in Central Florida and has since lived in San Francisco and New York, with stints in Greece, Indiana, and Arkansas along the way. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cave Wall, Iron Horse, The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, and Rattle, among other journals and anthologies. She holds a B.A. from Smith College and an M.F.A. from Purdue University. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock climbing instructor, bartender, textbook Acquisitions Editor, Editor-in-Chief of Sycamore Review, and now as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Hendrix College. Jacobs is also on faculty of the Sewanee Young Writers Conference and, in Spring 2016, she will be the Hendrix-Murphy Writer-in-Residence at Hendrix College. She lives in Little Rock, AR with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown. Pelvis With Distance is her debut collection.

July 29 2015

Return to The Salon: A Seance/Script Reading/Fundraiser for "The Ladies Almanack" (by Djuna Barnes) Film Project

7pm

AMP is thrilled to join Heather Kapplow and Stephanie Acosta in hosting Return to The Salon: A Seance/Script Reading/Fundraiser for The Ladies Almanack film project featuring Eileen Myles as Monique Wittig and the ghosts of lesbians past present and future...

Don your sexiest vintage lesbianwear and join writer Eileen Myles, for a trip backwards in and forward through time into the arms and sharp tongued repartee of members of Natalie Clifford Barney's famous literary salon, as captured by Djuna Barnes, Daviel Shy and Stephanie Acosta.

Wordplay, candles and tarot cards, crossed continents, uncrossed legs...we'll have all of that along with opportunities to step into the minds of some of the feistiest lesbians of the 1920s.

THE LADIES ALMANACK is a feature-length experimental narrative film shot on Super 8 and based on the novel of the same title by Djuna Barnes. The film is a kaleidoscopic tribute to women’s writing through the friendships, jealousies, flirtations and publishing woes of authors and artists in 1920’s Paris.

Eileen Myles was born in Boston (1949) and moved to New York in 1974 to be a poet. Snowflake/different streets (poems, 2012) is the latest of her 18 books. Inferno (a poet’s novel) came out in 2010. For The Importance of Being Iceland, travel essays in art she received a Warhol/Creative Capital grant. In 2010 the Poetry Society of America awarded Eileen the Shelley Prize. She is a Prof. Emeritus of Writing at UC San Diego. She’s a 2012 Guggenheim fellow. She lives in New York.

Heather Kapplow is a self-trained conceptual artist based in the United States. She creates engagement experiences that elicit unexpected intimacies using objects, alternative interpretations of existing environments, installation, performance, writing, audio and video. Her work has received government and private grants and has been included in galleries, film and performance festivals in the US and internationally.

Stephanie Acosta is a multi-disciplinary Artist and Curator, and in this film she is the Producer, Art Director, and makes an appearance as Mercedes d’Acosta, a writer and Greta Garbo's great love, who is possibly a distant relative as both their families arrived to Cuba from the same part of Spain! Her work involves unseen histories, performance, and experimental film and radio. She studied Directing, Religion, and Philosophy at the Webster University Theatre Conservatory in St. Louis and later, Performance at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Among her influences are Jerzy Grotowski, Georg Büchner, and the show, “Oh My Goddess,” put on by Michael Clark, set to PJ Harvey’s songs. Sometimes it is the despised substance of divinest show that will teach the most formative Lessons, shaping the contour of one’s current Vision, as was the case when Stephanie worked on her first production after College: gutting, with a group of suburban fearfuls, a magical Spanish text, an unheard Voice, featuring a variety of mind-benders—until there was nothing left but a title that no longer means what it used to. That experience has been informing the themes and issues of Identity, Self-Tokenizing, Biography, and Nationality in her first solo work: a series of pieces titled “Is This What You Wanted” (a question she yelled out during an argument at Art Basel in 2013). A way to be Thoughtful is to set up an Altar, like Stephanie’s: her favorite Tara Healing Tibetan incense is slowly burning over a curation of stories held in glass, crystals, beads, rocks, ceramic, lil bells, holy dirt from the southwest, plants, atop a telephone table her grandmother positioned beside the couch her whole life. http://www.stephanieacosta.org/

Recent exhibitions and performances include Defibrillator Gallery, Links Hall, MDW Fair, Reversible Eye Gallery, SHOP, Cock & Bull Theater, and High Concept Laboratories (Chicago), The Kinsey Institute (Indiana), Verge Fair (Miami Beach), Stockholm Fringe Festival (Stockholm), Dimanche Rouge Festival (Paris), Naherholung Sternchen (Berlin), Galerie KUB (Leipzig), ACC Galerie (Weimar), and at ABC NO RIO, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Fountain Art Fair, LUMEN Festival, The Slipper Room, and the Performance Mix Festival at HERE Arts (NYC). Residencies include The Contemporary Artists Center in Troy, NY, and SOHO20 Chelsea in NYC. She was the Winter 2013 Fellow of the Atelier Program, ACC-Galerie Weimar and the City of Weimar, Germany, on the theme 'Criminality in Art.' She lives and works in New York. https://vimeo.com/caitlinbaucom

July 25 2015

Helen Duberstein, Amy Hoffman and Lori Horvitz

An evening of readings

7 pm

Helen Duberstein is the author of two books of poetry, two novels, a volume of short stories, and several chapbooks. She participated in the early formation of The Living Theatre, and was a founding member of the Circle Repertory Theatre Company. Her plays have also been produced by The Theatre for the New City, as well as other Off-Off Broadway venues, at universities and regional theatres throughout the United States, as well as Europe and South America. She has won many awards. While she is a resident of Westbeth, the artists' community in New York City's Far West Village she spends more and more time in Provincetown.

Amy Hoffman is the author of three memoirs: Hospital Time (Duke University Press, 1997); An Army of Ex-Lovers: My Life at the Gay Community News (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); and Lies About My Family (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). She is currently editor in chief of Women's Review of Books and teaches creative nonfiction in the Solstice MFA Program at Pine Manor College. She has been an editor at Gay Community News, South End Press, and the Unitarian Universalist World magazine. She taught writing and literature at the University of Massachusetts and Emerson College and served as development director for the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and the Women’s Lunch Place, a daytime shelter for homeless women. She has served on the boards of Gay Community News, GLAD, Sojourner, and Boston’s LGBT History Project. Hoffman has a BA in English from Brandeis University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She lives in Boston with her wife, Roberta Stone, and is currently working on a novel set in Provincetown.

Lies About My Family: "The tales in this book, replete with conflicting versions and impeccable comic timing, have clearly been refined over multiple generations. Hoffman is at her hilarious best. Who would have thought that a memoir about a functional family could be so wrenching, and so hysterically funny?" — Alison Bechdel, author of Are You My Mother? and Fun Home

"An all-American coming-of-age story about a nice Jewish lesbian and her large family. Amy Hoffman s wise memoir embraces three generations and the lies (mostly true) they tell about themselves and each other." — Anita Diamant, author of The Red Tent

Lori Horvitz’ short stories, poetry and personal essays have appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including Chattahoochee Review, Epiphany, South Dakota Review, Southeast Review, Hotel Amerika, Thirteenth Moon, Tusculum Review, and Quarter After Eight. Her essays have been included in two Seal Press anthologies: P.S.: What I Didn't Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends and Dear John, I’m in Love With Jane. She has been awarded writing fellowships from Fundación Valparaiso, The Ragdale Foundation, Yaddo, Cottages at Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Blue Mountain Center. Horvitz is Professor of Literature and Language at University of North Carolina at Asheville, where she teaches courses in creative writing, literature, and directs their Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program.

About the book: Lori Horvitz grew up ashamed of her Jewish roots, confused about her sexuality, and idolizing the “shiksa in her living room,” a blonde all-American girl whose photo came in a double frame and was displayed next to a family photo from a bar mitzvah. Unable to join the “happy blonde families,” she becomes a “hippie chick” who travels the world in search of … something. The Girls of Usually chronicles each trip, each romance, each experiment in reinventing herself that draws her closer to discovering the secret door through which she can escape from deep-rooted patterns and accept her own cultural, ethnic, and sexual identity.

Reading Lori Horvitz’s The Girls of Usually feels like calling up an old friend and talking late into the night. Deeply intimate and wickedly funny, these are essays to be treasured. — Stephanie Elizondo Griest, author Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana

July 21 2015

Xray Aims

Performance/installation

7pm

Xray Aims is a Boston, MA based performance artist, temporary piercer and educator. The fight between beauty and pain and the intrigue of breaching the delicate envelope that holds the body together are what lead Xray to this work. Combining these issues and interests with the built environment is what brings this work to public space. Xray Aims has degrees in Art and Architecture and many years of design experience which influence the work produced. Some of the work produced uses the body as a canvas, some create installations in galleries, some are narrative performances with multiple players and some work is created specifically for the camera.

Xray Aims performs and teaches in the US, Canada and Europe.

July 18 2015

Hannah G. Thompson and Arvid Tomayko

Tent Worm, a multi-media performance

7 pm; duration 35 minutes

In Tent Worm Hannah G. Thompson and Arvid Tomayko will perform a fabric installation that controls an interactive soundscape in response to movement. Emerging from their chrysalis, they will strip bare the trees of the mind in spite of the unusual constraints on their bodies.

Hannah G. Thompson and Arvid Tomayko bring their work together to create a wearable two-person fabric sculpture performed as an interactive instrument. A garden of tentacles constitutes a patching interface to control layers of sound.

Hannah Thompson is a mixed media artist whose work questions the constraints of the body through building wearables. Her installations of sculptural objects are taken through unexpected transformations in her performances which create interactions of absurdity and closeness with the audience. The Artist earned her BFA in Soft Sculpture and Installation from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.

Arvid Tomayko is a Providence based experimental musician, composer and multimedia artist interested in exploring the intersection of improvised electronic music with data and process driven composition. His pieces are realized as unique sound and visual performance systems that alternately focus or expand the capabilities of the performer. The Artist earned his BA in Music and Geological Science from Brown University in Providence, RI.

The two have toured their work nationally, performing in collaboration with their wearable sculptures and data based sounds. Their work has been recently preformed at Listen Hear (Indianapolis, IN), Borg Ward (Milwaukee, WI), The Grease Diner (Oakland, CA), ArtSTRAND (Provincetown, MA), Eclipse Mill (North Adams, MA),The Silent Barn (Brooklyn, NY) and AS220 (Providence, RI).

July 18 2015

TABBOO! Starring in The Laziest Girl in Town

A Super 8 film by Mark Morrisroe on video

9 pm, with an introduction by TABBOO! Stephen Tashjian. Film duration, approx. 23 minutes

The Laziest Girl in Town, made in Provincetown in 1981, is now having its' long overdue debut in the place of its' origin!

Along with TABOO!, the film also features Jack Pierson and Mark Morrisroe.

TABBOO! Stephen Tashjian's Tiles, 20 black and white works on paper, are also on exhibition at AMP from July 10 through July 22.

TABBOO! has been working as an artist, writer, and performer for almost 60 years. He lives in New York City, but spent his childhood in Massachusetts. Tashjian has exhibited his paintings and performances in London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Hollywood, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Memphis, Miami, Baltimore, Boston and Provincetown. Some recent shows include Paul Kasmin Gallery in 2006, Participant, Inc. NYC in 2008, Contemporary Art Museum in Satiago de Compostela, Spain in 2009, Vox Populi, Philadelphia in 2010, and the Matthew Marks Gallery NYC in 2014. In 2013, a retrospective monograph collection of Tashjian’s career works was published in Italy by Damiani.

June 30 2015

sam smiley

Open house, skill share and new zine reading

3 pm

sam smiley and AMP invite you to join her and members of the B Street Garden in an open house/skill share and new zine reading about growing Japanese Not-Weed!

Sam currently has 2 installations, one entitled 'Weed Science Theater' in the +14inches gallery, and one outdoors entitled 'Folius Electronicus'. Each deal with invasive species, as real and imagined conceptual metaphors.

sam smiley’s intersectional identities include media artist and educator, forager, and gardener. She is also a doctoral student at Tilburg University through the Taos Institute. Her dissertation, called “From Ornamental to Invasive: The Secret Lives of Weeds” explores weed and plant subjectivity. smiley uses STS, cultural studies, history of science and arts-based research to do a cross cultural comparison of the development of Japanese knotweed as “invasive species”.

June 26 2015

Tammy Faye Starlite

A performance derived from her piece Nico: Underground, accompanied by Monica "Mony" Falcone

8pm

Tammy Faye Starlite

Honed in club and concert performances in New York, Los Angeles, Palm Springs and in Pittsburgh under the auspices of The Andy Warhol Foundation, Tammy Faye Starlite brings her musical portrayal of Nico to AMP Gallery the evening of Friday, June 26 at 8 PM. She’ll be accompanied by guitarist Monica Falcone in an intimate program drawing from her “Nico: Underground” piece that the New York Times called “remarkable — and howlingly funny,” characterizing the performance as “a funny, morbidly fascinating night of theater. Named a member of “Downtown underground royalty” by The Villager, Tammy Faye will perform songs associated with Nico that were written by Lou Reed, Jim Morrison, Jackson Browne, David Bowie, Gordon Lightfoot, Bob Dylan, Rogers and Hart as well as Nico’s own original material.

Rolling Stone’s David Fricke, who met Nico several years before her death in 1988, wrote of Tammy’s performance, "All of those Nicos – the lethal venus of 1966-67; the stoic sorceress of “The Marble Index” and 1970's “Desertshore”; the commanding matron I saw that night in New York – are present, with affectionate and gently comic detail, in performance by the colorful New York alternative-country-and-cabaret singer Tammy Faye Starlite, Starlite has the proper blonde hair and packs an accent just the right side of exaggeration. She punctuates Nico's fondly blunt and drolly unforgiving characterizations of Bob Dylan (who gave her the immortal 'I'll Keep It With Mine') the Velvets' Lou Reed ('a usurper of souls') and the teenage Jackson Browne (her accompanist for a spell after the Velvets) with regal sweeps of hair and exasperated stares, her eyes as wide as headlights. The show mocks and honors its subject with loving regard; it certainly captures the woman I met in 1978.”

David Keeps, in the Los Angeles Times, noted "Tammy Faye Starlite channels the chanteuse's languid essence" and characterized the singer/actor as "a performer who thrives on spontaneity and improvisation.” Roy Trakin, writing in HITS, commented "Starlite is Nico in perfectly coiffed frosted blonde-hair, blackened eyeliner and gravelly Germanic drawl, launching an eerily note-perfect rendition of 'Femme Fatale.' It’s a brilliant, nuanced performance, completely convincing, at once a sly parody, but also an admiring nod to the original. Tammy Faye’s singular creation is a loving rendition of a pop culture icon…” Veteran MTV News anchor Kurt Loder commented, "The show’s extraordinary: a Nico tribute - so unexpected! But Tammy Faye’s a fine singer, and she really nails Nico’s deadpan/narcotized delivery…” Danny Fields, the Warhol era scenester and title character in the Ramones song "Danny Says" famously, signed Nico to Elektra Records. He is a fan of Tammy’s performance, characterizing it as "not an imitation but a rediscovery of Nico." He adds, "I love what she does, she's wonderful."

Monica "Mony" Falcone is originally from New Jersey and started playing guitar at age 13. In the 90's, Mony played among New York's garage scene in the all-female garage-a-billy band, Sit n' Spin, opening for some of their favorite bands such as The Muffs, Link Wray and touring with the 5678's. After 10 years of touring and recording she landed in Brooklyn where she met Tammy Faye Starlite. Over the past 10 years, she's played with Tammy in The Stay-at-Homes (covering the Runaways), Prima Ballerina (covering the NY Dolls) and most recently The Pretty Babies (covering Blondie.) Mony has also filled in on bass guitar for Tammy's Nico performances and frequently duets with Tammy for special events.

June 17 thru 21 2015

The Provincetown International Film Festival

Screenings + Live Appearances at AMP Gallery

THURSDAY, JUNE 18, 9PM

Ethan Shoshan: Saudade, 2014, a super 8mm film performance (approx 15 min)

Saudade is a word in Portuguese and Galician that claims no direct translation in English. It describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone. It often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return. Its the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. It can be described as an emptiness, like someone or something that should be there in a particular moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence. It brings sad and happy feelings all together, sadness for missing and happiness for having experienced the feeling.

Through each showing, the film is manipulated live through a series of analog to digital processes. Originally a performance ritual act where the artist tries to control their body through a single repetitive motion and documented in Super 8mm. Inspired by the process of film, “Saudade” becomes a hypnotic trance of the moving body as an internal dialog of intentions, desires and experiences are exposed. Each film screening is unique and highlights different aspects of the film. PHOTOSENSITIVITY WARNING. Camera: Nung-Hsin Hu

Ethan Shoshan is an awkwardly shy social ecologist. He has volunteered with Visual AIDS, Democracy NOW!, MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Food Not Bombs, and Sylvia’s Place. He co-runs a free drop-in art workshop with Quito Ziegler at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, which started as a way to facilitate and create art projects with the transient LGBTQ youth he volunteers for at Sylvia’s Place homeless shelter. He has collaborated with Carlo Quispe and other artists; exhibited and performed on the streets and at the Kitchen, Aljira, Envoy Enterprises, Commonwealth & Council, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Judson Memorial Church, The Center for Book Arts, La Mama La Galleria, Dixon Place, Le Petit Versailles, and other venues. His previous projects have been reviewed in The New York Times, Art In America, LA Weekly, Huffington Post, BlackBook, The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Washington Post, and have aired on Public Access TV. Shoshan’s projects bring back art and life to our human condition – the need to share and connect with others on something deeply personal, political, and social in a heartfelt experience. More at www.disiterate.com

FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 3PM

Jennie Livingston: (Talk and Screening) Jennie Livingston will give a short talk about nonfiction filmmaking, and its relationship to fiction, and will show a 15 minute demo of her work-in-progress Earth Camp One, along with a never-before-seen sequence from the film. Earth Camp One has been made possible so far by foundations like the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rosenthal Family Foundation, by Netflix, and by 540 Kickstarter backers. It’s a predictably long process, making an independent nonfiction film, particularly if that work is not a conventional “doc,” but more of a memoir and essay. After years of work, we’re ready to bring in an editor, and are looking for allies and donors to join us to make that happen. This is a film that’s likely to do for conversations about loss and impermanence what Paris is Burning did for conversations about gender, race, class, and identity. Is there anything cooler than reflection? Than complexity? Come check it out.

SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 4pm

Katrina del Mar: delMarvelous: A Day In the Life is an experimental documentary webseries by NYC photographer and filmmaker Katrina del Mar. Expect it to be "artless, non-narrative, non-linear, semi-surreal." Thirty episodes ranging in length from about one to four minutes in length, the series documents a slice of life from the perspective of a working class New York City artist. Whether she’s surfing, shooting photos, talking to fellow artists or dancing in a midtown store all around unsuspecting shoppers, Katrina remains engaged and curious about life although periodically somewhat depressed.

"Like visual poems from a speedy person” - Eileen Myles

“DelMarvelous is witty without trying to be overtly comical. Like a Warholian interview where the faggoty disdain has been replaced by nonplussed compassion. There's probably some place Del Mar would rather be but her fascination with humanity's foibles simply won't allow her to go there.” -Michelley Cartaya Iglesias

"Erotic, empowered and electric—think the best parts of feminism and queer theory mixed with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.” -Phillip Miner, Huffington Post “Katrina Del Mar has been active in underground film, photography and erotic fiction for two decades, and her vision is as transcendent as it is transgressive” -Carlo McCormick Photograph Magazine “Del Mar has captured New York’s last gasp of authenticity, transforming it for eternity…” – JP Borum

Ethan Shoshan: Saudade, 2014, a super 8mm film performance (approx 15 min)

(see above, Thursday, June 18, for details)

June 6 2015

Melanie Braverman, Michael Klein, Toby Olson, and Fred Fried

Neil Silberblatt brings his Voices of Poetry series to AMP Gallery

5-7 pm

Melanie Braverman is the author of "RED" (Perugia Press, 2002), winner of the Publishers Triangle Poetry Award. She has been working with Olga Broumas since 1982.

Michael Klein is a five-time Lambda Literary award finalist and won the award twice for his anthology, "Poets for Life: 76 Poets Respond to AIDS" and for his first book of poems, "1990". His third book of poems, "The Talking Day" is a finalist for both a Lambda Literary Award and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. He is also the author of two books of prose, "Track Conditio"n and "The End of Being Known" both published by the University of Wisconsin Press, as well as a chapbook, "States of Independence" which won the inaugural BLOOM chapbook prize of non-fiction, judged by Rigoberto Gonzalez. He has new work appearing or forthcoming in Little Star, Provincetown Arts, The Awl, Ampersand Review and Poetry magazine and he teaches poetry and non-fiction in the MFA Program at Goddard College and at Castle Hill Center for the Arts. He lives in New York City and Provincetown.

Toby Olson Toby Olson has published eight novels, the most recent of which – "The Blond Box" – appeared from Fiction Collective-2 in 2003; and numerous books of poetry, including "Human Nature" (New Directions). A new novel, "The Bitter Half", is forthcoming. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olson’s novel "Seaview" received the PEN/Faulkner award for The Most Distinguished Work of American Fiction in 1983. Toby Olson lives in Philadelphia and in North Truro, on Cape Cod.

Fred Fried is acclaimed for his pianistic style, harmonic depth and originality, 8-string master Fred Fried is among the best of today's modern jazz guitarists.

May 24 2015

'The Four Sisters: The Eye, the Ear, the Brain, and the Mouth'

A play in homage to Anton Chekhov and Samuel Beckett, written by Jicky Schnee and directed by Sande Shurin

Sunday, 7pm

The Four Sisters: The Eye, the Ear, the Brain, and the Mouth is a one act play written in homage to both Anton Chekov and Samuel Beckett. Both playwrights explored the theme of futility, of trying one’s best to move forward but getting nowhere. Sisters Mouth, Brain, Eye, and Ear each possess unique strengths which lend them an asset for living, but these strengths often turn upon each to then become their greatest source of distraction and undoing. The piece was created as an exploration into talent, beauty, nature, sustenance, distraction, futility, mortality, and hope

Jicky Schnee (Playwright & EYE) received her B.A. in Art and Art History from Rice University and studied drama at BADA in Oxford, England. She works as both a painter and actress. Her most notable roles as an actor have been a supporting role to Marion Cotillard in “The Immigrant” which premiered in NYC in April 2014, the lead role in “The Afterlight” also starring Rip Torn, and the title role in “Arabian Nights” at The Classic Stage Company in NY. She recently did a small part across from Peter Saarsgard in the yet to premiere film, “Experimenter.” Jicky will have her first solo art show this summer at the McDaris Gallery in Hudson, NY from June 27th to August 30th. Jicky lives and works between NYC and Woodstock, NY.

Sande Shurin (Director) directed the Broadway play THE PRICE OF GENIUS as well as a number of off and off-off Broadway plays at such theaters as BAM, Lincoln Center, Playwrights Horizon, The Flea Theater, Carnegie Hall and LaMama and Woodstocks Byrdcliffe Theater as well the Tony and Pulitzer winning play Clybourne Park for Performing Arts Of Woodstock’s 50th Anniversary. Shurin directed the short films TRUE LOVE & MUSEUM SCANDALS by husband Bruce Levy. She has private coached, taught and directed many notable actors including Anthony Rapp, Matthew Modine, Sylvia Miles, Jai Rodriquez, William Sanderson, Shalom Harlow, Jicky Schnee and Tony winners Casey Nicholaw (director Book Of Mormon, Aladin) and Amy Spanger to name a few. Ms. Shurin authored the books TRANSFORMATIONAL ACTING and STAR POWER. She currently teaches her acting technique in NYC as well as Woodstock, NY. Shurin was seen on OPRAH and has appeared on several reality shows including AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MODEL with co-star Taye Diggs. Ms Shurin was one of the original founding members of the off-off Broadway theater movement in NYC which became OOBA (Off-off Broadway Theater Alliance). Ms Shurin currently offers her acting technique, Transformational Acting, in New York as well as Woodstock, NY and lectures, coaches and offers her workshops internationally.

Jadah Carroll (EAR) is a founding member of Impulse Dance Company, the principal soloist in Rael Lamb’s “Dance for the New World”, has a background in Musical Theater from Emerson College’s grad department, is a long-time student and teacher at Sande Shurin’s Acting Studio, NY, and is the co-founder of BrazenHeart Productions. She is so grateful to be a part of this wonderful production, to work with people she treasures, and would like to thank Jicky, Sande, Melissa and Maria. Still overwhelmed by the beauty of movement.

Maria Elena Maurin (BRAIN) is honored to be working with such talented and amazing women and would like to express her gratitude and appreciation to Jicky Schnee for writing “4 Sisters”. Anton Checkov’s “3 Sisters” will always hold a warm place in her heart from her experience of performing the role of Olga with Classics at the Point in Upstate New York. She has studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in NYC and is currently with Sande Shurin Acting Studio. Her recent credits also include appearing in feature film, “No Pay, Nudity” with Gabriel Byrne and short films “Paper Boats”, “Five Census” and “Pipe Down”. At present she is producing and acting in “Brilliant Traces” by Cindy Lou Johnson, which will be performed in NYC and Upstate New York in the Fall of 2015.

Melissa Skirboll (MOUTH) is a NY based actor, writer, director and occasional producer who has been working in theater professionally since 1989. You can see her on stage again in her play "Blizzard: a Love Story" this June at the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity in NYC. Favorite roles include Mrs Kirby in "You Can't Take it With You", Miss Maudie in "To Kill a Mockingbird", Julia in "A Delicate Balance" and Liz in "Hell is where the Heart Is".

Recent directing highlights include "I Have it" which won the audience vote for best play at 2014's Estrogenius Festival, Father's Day which was a semi-finalist at Manhattan Rep's 2014 spring 1-Act Festival, and NOLA: Three Plays About Home at the 2013 Estrogenius Festival. In 2013 she was also nominated for best director for her work on Mark Jason William's "Straight Faced Lies" and in 2012 she won best director for her work on "The Closet" (both at Planet Connections Theater Festivit).

Her plays "Hell is Where the Heart Is" and "Pizza for Life" have been produced in NY and there have been staged readings of her plays "Blood is Thicker", "Show and Tell Tango" and " Not as I Do" by the Abingdon Theater Co.