Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center Gets $1.5m for $12m Rebuild

Provincetown's municipal board has pledged $1.5m toward a planned $12m transformation of the Fine Arts Work Center's (FAWC) 4 Brewster Street building, an unusual act of official backing for a nonprofit residency program in one of New England's most expensive summer towns.

The pledge came this past summer. It confirms what the center's 58-year track record already suggested: FAWC has become the structural support holding up Provincetown's identity as an artists' haven — an identity under real pressure from the town's lack of affordable housing.

What is the Fine Arts Work Center?

FAWC was founded in 1968 by a group that included the painters Robert Motherwell, Myron Stout, Jack Tworkov and Fritz Bultman. The painter Sam Messer and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver were among its early residents. In the decades since, the roster has run from Lisa Yuskavage, Jack Pierson and Ellen Gallagher to Jeffrey Gibson, Firelei Báez, Elliot Hundley, Jacolby Satterwhite and Jennifer Packer.

The core product is a seven-month residency, running October to April, that gives ten artist fellows and ten writers lodging and studio space. This year's artist residents include Abigail Dudley, Alina Perez, Nasim Hantehzadeh and L.J. Roberts.

Providing room and support for queer artists remains a stated priority. The Venezuelan artist Miguel Braceli closed his 2024 residency with the public performance True Love's Kiss, inviting strangers to kiss at the granite breakwater on the town's western tip.

How did a lumberyard become an arts hub?

The mechanism here is patient real estate. The center acquired a heating supply building in 1972 for around $120,000 and gradually converted its coal bins and other disused areas into its main hub, known as Days Lumberyard. What was once the longtime Provincetown resident Hans Hofmann's studio is now a fraction of a complex that includes living units, studios, offices, an auditorium, a gallery, an outdoor area and a printshop that still houses Motherwell's own press.

The lumberyard's growth, executive director Sharon Polli says, proves "Provincetown being a place where there has always been room for artists and writers who maintain the town's cultural identity" since the middle of the 20th century.

The center operates on an annual budget of around $3m. This year, $600,000 of that was raised at its summer gala held at the Pilgrim Monument at the Provincetown Museum.

What does the $12m project change?

The 4 Brewster Street lot, acquired in 1997 and located around the corner from the main complex, is in line for a totally new build. The Boston-based firm Hacin Architects will double the housing square footage for fellows and staff and add a community space and a rooftop garden.

"We are hoping that the municipal support will help us leverage private funding," Polli says. In other words, the $1.5m is a lever, not a ceiling — the center needs to raise roughly $10.5m more.

Polli and her team of 12 full-time employees also keep the center active year-round, when the summer crowds are gone. The off-season calendar includes FAWC Fridays, group exhibitions with past fellows, Queer Week, and workshops and public talks with artists such as Catherine Opie, Ilana Savdie and Doron Langberg.

That off-season programming is, in Polli's view, even "more important than anything we do rest of the year because we give people a place to engage with high-calibre dialogues where many locals have working practices".

"People have come here for generations to live their identities to the fullest and they have heavily contributed to the artistic creativity that makes Provincetown what is," Polli tells The Art Newspaper. "The unique experience residents feel the second they drive down Route 6 or step off the ferry comes out in the work created here."

Whether that experience survives Provincetown's housing squeeze may now depend on whether the Brewster Street rebuild — and the private money it must attract — keeps the town affordable for the artists who define it.