AFTER THE BREAK

Provincetown has always been an art colony defined by the unexpected — from the early painters and printmakers who made this town a laboratory for seeing differently to the Fluxus-inflected currents that whispered through its summer streets. In that long arc of creative reinvention, the practice of collage has resurfaced not as a trend but as a way of thinking with fragments, a method perfectly tuned to a place where history and lived experience are always in motion. This is the context in which The Provincetown Collagists first came together in 2020, a group that explicitly placed older practitioners and new voices in the same space, tracing an unbroken thread of material curiosity and improvisation through time.

That inaugural Provincetown Collagists presentation — “Old School meets New School” — was itself an articulation of collage as an attitude: not just cut paper, but layered thought. Alongside work by figures whose names stretch back through local art history, a new cohort of makers showed how collage could still be deployed to recombine personal story, place, and edge-of-town sensibility. The medium here is tactile, immediate, and insistently local, speaking from the dunes and piers as much as from studio walls.

Over the past few years, annual exhibitions at The Commons have built on that momentum, most recently with Heresy: A Scrapbook of Rebellion in spring 2025 — a show of forty local collagists that resonated with the punk-like energy of the first Provincetown Outsiders Festival and its embrace of voices on the margins. In both exhibition and workshop, collage has been presented not just as image-making but as a creative ground for community: an accessible form in which participants cut, paste, and recombine imagery, words, and materials as a way of telling stories that might otherwise go unspoken.

All of this now folds into Camp Provincetown’s Missing Time — the 2026 season that expands the idea of collage beyond the gallery into lived experience and townwide activation. The Commons will host a major collage happening led by Karen Cappotto and The Provincetown Collagists, while other installations — from Sal’s Place’s Long Point-inspired work to the phone-booth portals gathering “missing moments” — explore assemblage as collective archaeology of memory and place.

What ties these moments together is Provincetown’s ongoing conversation with collage as process and place, a practice rooted in community but open to wider currents. Here, the edges remain visible — cut paper, pasted fragments, traces of glue — because the town itself is assembled that way: by tides of artists and outsiders, histories and horizons. In that spirit, Provincetown doesn’t just participate in the historic arc of collage; it inhabits it — making, breaking, and remaking the story in real time.

MISSING TIME
2nd ANNUAL OUTSIDER FESTIVAL
APRIL 30 - MAY 12, 2026
campprovincetown.com