Tuesday, August 4 at 6:00 pm in the Marc Jacobs Reading Room
Join Amy Heller and Gail Browne in the Marc Jacobs Reading Room for a talk on their recent book "Lost and Found: Time, Tide, and Treasures," about six artists and their Provincetown beachcombing collections. Event will include an overview with PowerPoint visuals, Q&A, "show and tell", and book signing. Books can be purchased at the Library!
Amy Heller, a native of Washington, DC, has been coming to Provincetown every summer since she was a child, walking and combing the beaches with her mother. Amy earned her BA in fine art at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA and her MFA in fine art photography at George Washington University in Washington, DC. She has been an exhibit specialist for the Smithsonian Museums, Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art, and a photo editor/researcher/curator for U.S. News & World Report, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, Washington Post, Microsoft, and the Newseum in Washington, DC. She moved to Provincetown in 2003, her second ancestral home, and lives year-round on Cape Cod with her husband.
Her earlier photographs were black-and-white time/motion studies of the human figure à la Eadweard Muybridge. She is drawn to the natural world, and finds beauty and grace in the simplest discoveries: intertwining seaweeds, dancing skate egg cases, patterns in the sand; all lyrical forms of sand and sea. More recently she has been making cyanotype photographs on fabric, inspired by the blue sky, using figures resembling skate egg cases and, in some artworks, using the actual egg cases. In addition, she incorporates LED light, motion, and three-dimensional figures.
Her work is included in collections both here and abroad, including the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, the Dimock Gallery at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and many private collections.
Gail Browne initially arrived in Provincetown in 1966 to study, on scholarship, with Henry Hensche before making Provincetown her home year-round in 1970. Her early years in Provincetown exposed her to the influences of the many dynamic living artists. They inspired her to embrace the daily life of productivity necessary to develop toward artistic maturity.
Browne's career as a productive artist has manifested itself in many mediums, as she feels it satisfies a natural curiosity toward development: ceramics, printmaking, drawing, and painting.
Recent accomplishments include the execution and design of the Blessing of the Fleet logo, 2009, and the Woman of the Year sculptural award. In 2008, Browne received an award for her work in the Printmakers of Cape Cod exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Most recently, in the Covid era, Browne has navigated running Eelgrass, a co-operative ceramic studio in Provincetown.
