A Brief History of FAWC

Nothing like it had ever existed. At the time, amid the turmoils of the Vietnam War, it seemed a perverse scheme to nay-sayers, who decried the squander of money—however little—on "so-called" promising young artists and writers, while asking nothing in return—a modus operandi so simple, so functional, so completely without institutional fetters or academic requirements, it outraged orthodox opinion, which religiously kept predicting its imminent demise.

But the founders knew whereof to build—what they themselves had largely lacked in their own youth, and what was lacking still—a place where artists and writers at an early critical stage of their careers could live and work in a community of their peers, and profit from the cross-pollination of creative ideas, and the casual comradeship of accomplished elders, in a setting of complete freedom, natural beauty and historic traditions.

A pilot session ran for three months in the spring of 1968. Six Fellows, five local and one from Boston, received $100 a month and studio space at the Provincetown Art Association, which sponsored the project and supplied the vanguard of FAWC builders. A second session of six months— November 1 to April 30, 1968—accepted sixteen Fellows, nine from out of town, all artists.

In the fall of 1969, thanks to the indefatigable urgings of Stanley Kunitz, a writing side was added to the Fellowship mix, a momentous advance. One plus one here made vastly more than two, with profound benefits for Work Center prestige and solidity, but especially for the Fellows, enriched by contact with multiple aesthetics. That year there were 7 writers and 22 artists, an imbalance that swung wildly year by year, until it was equalized at ten and ten in 1972. With Chairman Kunitz came Alan Dugan, Mary Oliver and B. H. Friedman to complement the visual arts staff of Chairman Myron Stout, Jack Tworkov, Richard Florsheim, Fritz Bultman, Phil Malicoat and Jim Forsberg.

A leaky, rented building on the corner of Standish and Bradford Streets made do as a work-space. The top floor was used as a gallery; the bottom floor served as a communal studio, which had to be cleared of easels, etc. for readings and slide presentations, a site without amenities, not a gathering place, a center in name only. The Fellows were scattered in rentals all over town. There was no office. Communications were bad, phones few, stipends minuscule, financial crisis the rule. To the handful of Trustees, mostly artists themselves, 1971’s budget of $30,000 was a heavy burden, despite help from the NEA and the Mass. Council on the Arts & Humanities. Honoraria for visiting artists and writers were offered in the form of a token check, one end firmly pinched between the thumb and first finger of the Executive Secretary, Ruth Hiebert, who, never abashed by a tug of war, would beam and say brightly, “You don’t have to take it, you know.” Smitten visitors not seldom found themselves the ones writing checks.

From Day One the Work Center spawned passionate partisans, generous volunteers, loyal donors, and fierce contentions over original writ among Fellows, staff and the larger arts community itself. A Visionary Dream in Progress: a homeless, formless, fractious chaos, tribal battles over policy and governance, outsize egos that clashed and bled, and always the harsh, unremitting struggle for survival that was hardly to abate in two decades—from sink or swim to grow or die. The town too was poor then, though rich in romance. Almost nothing was open in the luxuriously bleak, empty off-season. One could stand in the middle of Commercial Street and see no one in either direction. Fellows ran into each other at the Post Office or A&P. There was always a familiar face or two in the window of the Foc’s’le, an old time fishermen’s saloon. By daylight the beaches and dunes beckoned. At night the foghorn droned and the Pilgrim Monument vanished in the mist. Life and work became one. The paintings, the pages piled up. It was almost a secret world. People would say, “The Fine Art Center, what’s that?” In 1972 the Work Center acquired the former Days Coal and Lumber Yard at 24 Pearl Street with its storefront, its eleven north-lit studios, where everyone from Hawthorne to Hofmann had painted since 1914, the barn with its three apartments, and five immense coal bins twenty feet high, where poets on summer nights competed with the yellow, yawning beaks of baby swallows screeching from the rafters as their parents flew in with dinner. Several generations of Fellows transformed the storefront into a gallery named for Hudson Walker. In 1988–1992, during the presidency of Burton Wolfman, FAWC acquired and renovated the three little houses on the north edge of the premises, and the coal bins achieved apotheosis as the Stanley Kunitz Common Room. In 1997 the long-sought purchase of the historic studios at 4 Brewster Street made it possible at last to house all twenty Fellows, consolidating mildly hermetic social and working conditions, leavened by an extensive, not to say frenetic, schedule of public events.

In time property and debt paradoxically helped fund-raising for Fellowships and operating expenses, brought new initiatives, new capabilities, and professional administration. By 2002 stipends were $650 a month for the seven months, October 1 to April 30, with lodging and separate studios for visual arts Fellows, who no longer had to eat and sleep amid toxic materials.