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(Visual Arts Fellow 00-01) The stay at Provincetown was ideal for getting work done. It allowed me to do a body of work on a central theme, which was a luxury when one considers that normally I teach and time is limited. It is difficult to estimate the importance of it, but I'd like to say that the gift of time was very useful, and that the series I began at the Work Center is now continuing into a broader idea. I liked the winter months in particular when it was too cold to enjoy the marvelous landscape and became great for focusing on the work at hand.
(Visual Arts Fellow 86-87, 87-88) When I arrived in Provincetown as a first year Fellow, I felt as if I had come home. Instantly I felt the creative energy of working artists around me. I fell into the gift of time, community and support that the Work Center provided. The interaction among my visual and writing peers stimulated and broadened my creative life. The beauty of the ocean and dunes filled my spirit and presented new possibilities for my work. Being selected as a Fellow gave me a sense of myself as an artist and a belief in the work I was doing. I thrived and my work became, very naturally, my priority. Currently, I hold the position of the Visual Arts Program Coordinator. Again the Fine Arts Work Center has filled my life with community, support, artistic energy and (although not in the same amount) time. In a very different way I am able to reap the benefits of this unique place and residency. In a strange way, I feel that I have come into myself as an artist and a human being on these very grounds. It will always be very dear to me.
(Writing Fellow 89-90, 93-94) Before I ever set foot in Provincetown, the FAWC fellowship had already helped me as a writer by providing an important intangible -- a sense of validation. I don't know a writer worth reading who doesn't frequently struggle with self-doubt; but when a jury of distinguished literary sensibilities deems one's work worthy of support, it certainly helps mute the chorus of skeptical voices ever on tap in a young writer's head. Of course, the most valuable commodity for any artist is time -- in my case, the many hours needed to write and rewrite (and rewrite) fiction. Seven months of fully sponsored, uninterrupted art-making is an immeasurably precious gift. The fact that those months occur within a community of kindred spirits makes the gift all the more rare. For me, though, the Work Center Fellowships were more, even, than invaluable seven-month writing stints; they have been gifts of continuing rewards. First, because Provincetown (a place now unimaginable without the Fine Arts Work Center) has become my home -- and a place where I feel more at home than anywhere else in America. Bound up with my embrace of the town is the fact that most of my dearest friends are now people whose paths I first crossed as a result, directly or indirectly, of setting out for that rustic little enclave at 24 Pearl Street.
(Visual Arts Fellow 98-99, 99-00) Coming to the Fine Arts Work Center right after graduate school, the Fellowship provided me with plenty of institutionally unmediated time and space; enabling me to establish an individual working process for myself. FAWC fosters independence, and that is a quality I hope to carry with me my entire life. JACKPIERSON
(Writing Fellow 91-92, 99-00) The Fine Arts Work Center offered a life: belief in my writing before I had much; a support system of like-minded peers, each of us dazed by our good fortune; and a fall that turned into winter and then became spring -- months unbroken to try on this offered life. In its simplicity, it changed me forever.
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