Only Connect: The Art of Castle Hill by Hamilton Kahn

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The Early Days of Castle Hill by Joyce Johnson

Summer 2010

Painting

Drawing

Clay

Printmaking/ Book Arts

Sculpture

Jewelry & Glass

Photography

Writing

Mixed Media

Performance

Teens

Kids

If it weren't for the tower - the three-story structure that houses its main office-it would be easy to overlook Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, located in an old barn in a hollow beneath a hill, tucked behind a private home near the corner of Castle and Meetinghouse Roads. There's a carved wooden sign above the sliding door, and another small sign on the tower-a former windmill-but none on the road, or anywhere leading up to the place.

Living in the shadow of the Provincetown art colony has made it hard for Castle Hill to get noticed, considered, or recognized as the first-rate and somewhat unique cultural resource that it is, even though many of the artists who have taught at Castle Hill over the years have had close ties to Provincetown. Provincetown is where the galleries are, where the museums are, where the openings are, where the action is. Meanwhile, Castle Hill has quietly gone about its business, producing classes across a wide spectrum of interests, evening programs, exhibits, and special events both on- and off-site.

Not that getting noticed is always a good thing. Town regulations? Parking? Neighbors? Behind-the-scenes politics? It's all happened over the years, and Castle Hill has learned some important lessons in order to survive. It was seen as an elitist organization, so it learned how to serve the year-round community, not just the summer set. It was perceived as an organization whose growth could affect the quality of life for neighbors, so it learned the difference between innovation and expansion. It was limited to relying entirely on talent at hand, so it learned to look beyond the horizon for inspiration.

Now pushing almost 30, Castle Hill has matured from youthful spontaneity to deliberate connectedness. It's a cultural resource that touches and feeds the Lower Cape aesthetic, if there is such a thing, perhaps even embodies it. Casual yet serious, small-town yet world-class, Castle Hill provides the common ground for exchanging high ideas at sea level, and serves as a launching pad for flights of fancy to many destinations.

The basic concept is simple enough, and still primarily in place. Each year, the call goes out: "Are there any craftspeople, artists, and writers around here who want to teach a class?" In some towns, that might not amount to much, but in Truro it has meant a remarkable level of both talent and continuity-the likes of sculptor Sidney Simon, poet Alan Dugan, photographer Joel Meyerowitz, writer Anne Bernays, artists Xavier Gonzales and Ethel Edwards, all of them longtime residents, all of them Castle Hill faculty members. That concept has been expanded to include some of the best younger Outer Cape artists, such as Donald Beal and Paul Bowen, visiting artists like rustic furniture-maker Daniel Mack, ceramic artist Bennett Bean and, this summer, multicultural installation artist Maria Magdalena Compos-Pons. And through its Teichman Chair (named for the late Sabina Teichman, an artist and teacher involved in the local art community for many years), Castle Hill has presented lectures and workshops by a stellar galaxy of contemporary American artists, including Helen Frankenthaler, Mary Frank, Grace Hartigan, Will Barnet, George Segal, Faith Ringgold, and Robert Blackburn.

Castle Hill has been propped up, shut down, upgraded, trimmed back, retrenched, revived, and watched over by arts councils and guardian angels through the years, almost always living on a shoestring, almost always accomplishing and expanding its mission. It has endured, more than anything, through a connectedness to the people, towns, environment, and culture of the Outer Cape.

Charting the Path

In the beginning, Peter Brown, a local builder, suggested that a group of artists led by painter Harry Hollander use Pop Snow's old barn as artists' studios. That germinated into the idea of a school, and by the summer of 1972, the Boston Globe was touting Castle Hill as the "Cape's first art center" in a page-one story that emphasized founding director Joyce Johnson's early-1970s wilderness spirit. "I've learned to live on practically nothing," Johnson told Globe writer Gloria Negri. "Money isn't important to me except to live by and I've reduced my overhead to my gas bill."

Castle Hill was certainly not the first art school on Cape Cod-roll over, Charles Hawthorne-but it was one of only a handful anywhere offering courses across such a wide range of disciplines. The 1972 program had a 15-member faculty teaching 17 classes in printmaking, drawing, painting, sculpture, wood technology (described as the "study of the fundamental nature of wood's cellular structure"), plastics, weaving, etching, writing, fencing (!), jewelry and ceramics. The faculty included some distinguished artists and craftsmen who lived on the Cape, including egg tempera expert Robert Vickrey of Orleans and Dennis potter Harry Holl. The following year, the program ballooned to 37 teachers teaching 37 classes, including four for children and teenagers. Joining the faculty, among others, were ceramic artist Mikhail Zakin, who still teaches, abstract painter (and future UFO abduction expert) Budd Hopkins, painter Ella Jackson, children's teacher Nene Schardt, and watercolorist George Yater. By 1973, enrollment had more than doubled, from 184 the first year to 275 the second, and 389 the third.

Nature and ecology classes were introduced in 1974, as Johnson accented Castle Hill's connection with its surroundings. "Castle Hill is fortunate to exist in the midst of one of nature's most beautiful and unusual environments," the 1976 brochure declares. "Glacial hillocks and valleys protect the solitude of the Truro resident. Castle Hill exists as a meeting place to learn and share. It is felt that neither age nor experience limits the creative process; creativity is an innate human function. Our goal is to provide the environment in which to make this possible." Castle Hill was always spilling out of its barn doors, with an outdoor kiln firing in the back, a writing group on the deck, or a sketching class out on a Pamet Valley hillside. Castle Hill also began a relationship with the Cape Cod National Seashore in 1978 by co-sponsoring an environmental poster contest for schoolchildren-a precursor for a deeper involvement with local schools that began in the mid-1980s. The intriguing 1994 Castle Hill-Seashore collaboration, "Artists Map of the Cape Cod National Seashore," a travelling installation that charted the conceptual bond between the landscape and those who interpret it is another example.

Purchasing the barn and the tower in 1976, Castle Hill began tapping into state arts funding and continued to grow. The program's emphasis then was on crafts: in 1978, eight courses in weaving were offered, (none have been taught since 1994), along with four classes in jewelry-making (one in '96), in addition to classes in drawing, painting, ceramics, and sculpture.

At the turn of the decade, Johnson decided Castle Hill was strong enough to pass on to other, capable hands. Soon after, she began working as a news reporter, first for the Advocate, and then, for the past 10 years, for the Cape Codder, while continuing to teach at Castle Hill each summer. Dan Ranalli, a photographer, took over as director in 1980, and, not surprisingly, more photography courses were added to the schedule. Barbara Baker, who took the reins in '83, introduced art history seminars with Tony Vevers and Eleanor Munro, Saturday classes, and a course entitled "Sculptor/Scavenger," taught by a young Welsh sculptor and former Fine Arts Work Center fellow, Paul Bowen. Baker's four-year tenure as director continued to be marked by innovation and ambition-leading, in 1986, to an announcement of plans to enlarge the building to accommodate growing enrollment. But those plans were rejected by the Truro Zoning Board of Appeals and, in 1987, Castle Hill found itself shut down for violating building codes. The center relocated to the Schoolhouse Gallery in North Truro for the summer of '87 during a major renovation of the barn, and by the time it reopened in 1988, Castle Hill was already looking for other ways to grow.

Community Connections

Struggle with the town and neighbors over expansion and parking plans had opened some wounds between Castle Hill and the year-round population, and the best method of healing proved to be the Artists in the Schools program started by Baker in 1985. With funding from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and the Humanities, Castle Hill had been sending local artists, writers, and craftspeople into local schools during the off-season, with exciting results. At a time when schools were increasingly cutting art programs to reduce budgets, Castle Hill artists were bringing in fresh ideas, techniques, and projects that could be finished in a week or two or three, and the program was rewarding for everyone-students, artists, teachers, and administrators. Under Baker's successor Christina Fenton-a former arts administrator in Pittsburgh and assistant director at the Fine Arts Work Center, who was hired in 1987-the program expanded, receiving an impressive $18,000 grant from the Council in 1989. When that funding dried up, it was replaced with gifts and then a bequest from the late Ruth Yochelson, a long-time Castle Hill board member and Truro summer resident.

Fenton also relocated the summer lecture series to Wellfleet and hired more Provincetown artists, including Sal Del Deo and Jim Peters, raising the Center's profile and prestige as much as possible, without increasing its size. Under Mary Stackhouse, a ceramic artist hired as "interim co-director" with Kathryn Manson in 1990 and named director the following year, Castle Hill has found ways to expand the boundaries of what it can be while remaining true to its history. Legendary ceramic artist Toshiko Takaezu came as the Teichman Chair in 1991, and the lines dividing crafts and fine art began to blur. Artists such as Bowen, Anna Poor, Sally Fine, and Harvey Sadow defied categorization and countered lowest-common-denominator momentum. Castle Hill was a place of excitement, where at any given time, wood pulp could be churning in a papermaking workshop while, in the next rooms, a drawing class concentrated on the figure of a live model, a ceramics class threw pots, and a writing class met out on the deck. Free fall classes for seniors were introduced, and the newly inaugurated Ella Jackson Artists and Scholars Fund, named for the former faculty member, brought workshops with print maker Michael Mazur in 1992, collagist Varujan Boghosian in '93, multi-faceted feminist artist Miriam Schapiro in '94, and sculptor Judy Pfaff in '95.

By all rights, this 25th year should be a time for Castle Hill to stand up and take its bows, but it is probably going to be up to others to blow its horn. While the rest of the local art scene will be clamoring to get attention for this event or that, Castle Hill will quietly offer one class after another, along with abundant special workshops, events, performances-boom, boom, boom, something different almost every day, an inseparable component of the summer experience for hundreds, no, thousands of people every year.

That connectedness is not unlike the Roy Staab reed sculpture installed last summer on a steep slope behind the Castle Hill barn, which graces the cover of this year's catalog in a pinhole photograph by Marian Roth and now lies, collapsed, on the same hillside. More than happenstance, it is the creative assembly of ideas, materials, and energy in harmony with, and interpretive of, the natural environment. You wouldn't want to overlook it and, to see the true beauty of the Outer Cape, you can't overlook Castle Hill.

Hamilton Kahn is editor of the Provincetown Banner. This article was published by Provincetown Arts magazine.

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© 2010 TRURO CENTER FOR THE ARTS AT CASTLE HILL
10 Meetinghouse Road, P.O. Box 756, Truro, MA 02666
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