Twenty Summers

Experience an intimate and engaging event with Ari Shapiro and Joshua Prager at the Hawthorne Barn, closing out our 2025 Season. Take a closer look at Ari’s voice, perspective, and storytelling, filled with insight, nuance, and memorable moments.

Get ready for an unforgettable moment as powerhouse band Glitterfox light up the Hawthorne Barn in a show-stopping takeover you won’t want to miss. Captured live during Twenty Summers’ Season Twelve, this newly released video brings all the energy, magic, and raw electricity straight to your screen—press play and experience it for yourself. The Portland, OR based band Glitterfox has released five...

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, attending Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues. Later she worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the Middle E...

Enjoy dynamite talent Michael Mayo's concert at the Hawthorn Barn from June 2025 as part of our Season 12 programming. Michael Mayo leans on his intuition as a vocalist, composer, songwriter, and arranger. Much like molding and shaping a sculpture out of clay, he stretches his voice through layers of heavenly harmonizing, hard-hitting beatboxing, and heartfelt crooning. The Los Angeles-based pheno...

Ashley Gilbertson joins filmmaker Michael Cestaro at Stanley to discuss his recent exhibition alongside photographer Franco Pagetti, as well as his life, travels, and career as a photographer and writer.

Sit down with lawyer Chase Strangio and artist Celeste Lecesne to revisit some of Chase's most impactful moments, and how these two amazing individuals will look to the future with hope, determination, and love.

Kioea (pronounced kēōˈāə) is a music group featuring Carand Burnet (she/her) as lead guitarist and songwriter. Their music blends sounds of surf rock, psychedelia, and global influences. J. Swartwood (Aquarium Drunkard) described Burnet’s music as “simultaneously modern and vintage.” Kioea has played at 3S Artspace, The Music Hall, The Thing in the Spring Festival, Center for Maine Contemporary Ar...

There is no separating equality from ecology, which knows that no member of any natural system has more value than another. In a world of polycrises, what does it mean for activism to be a daily necessity? How can we more deeply integrate it into our lives, allowing our values to shape a more fulfilling and joyful existence? This discussion will bring together advocates who are reframing how we ta...

‘Milk Tea Opera House’ is an initiative to create opportunities to influence more voices, to awaken them, and to guide them. It is vital to be able to experience more voices and together we ask this question: Where does voice come from, and how does it represent you? JU-EH creates a live Milk Tea Opera House Session, along with Twenty Summers, to co-create new kinds of interactive spaces from wher...

At its heart, fashion is a tool of creativity and transformation—we slip into shapes and silhouettes, ever discovering new shades of self. So why is an industry that is so driven by “the new” seemingly incapable of reinventing itself when it comes to the health of people and the planet? This event will bring together two forces within the industry—photographer Camila Falquez and model, author, and...

McElroy’s debut novel, “The Atmospherians,” told the clever but slightly insiderly and overfreighted tale of a wellness cult designed to cleanse men of their toxicity. “People Collide” is a more agile, universal book, with its title alluding to the randomness of human connection. It’s a variety of rom-com, really, that somewhat lost art. “Circumstances pinball people together,” the narrator declar...

Join 2021 Twenty Summers Fellow Jeffrey Mansfield and director Michael Cestaro for a conversation following the preview of Signs from the Mainland, a documentary short that explores the extraordinary history of the Martha’s Vineyard deaf community. Starting as far back as the early 1700s, genetic deafness took a foothold on Martha's Vineyard where as many as one in four residents were deaf and a m...

Take a look at Synchronous Creative in an evening of site-specific movement and exploration surrounding the idea of “safe spaces” at the Hawthorne Barn. The evening is an inside look at their creative process, where they led audience members through a few prompts and exercises utilized through their process at Twenty Summers.

Join Rebecca Orchant & Bill Hough for a conversation celebrating Rebecca’s new book Simmering, A Kitchen Memoir . “There are somethings that you just can’t do in front of other people. You can’t look at magazines with boobs in them; you can’t eat condoms on your mom’s nightstand; and you most certainly can’t stick your finger into the Duncan-Hines vanilla frosting tub. And so I waited.”

A powerfully gifted musician and a scholar of Black American music, Jake Blount speaks ardently about the African roots of the banjo and the subtle, yet profound ways African Americans have shaped and defined the amorphous categories of roots music and Americana. His 2020 album Spider Tales (named one of the year’s best albums by NPR and The New Yorker, earned a perfect 5-star review from The Guar...

Journalism informs. It investigates. It holds the powerful accountable. But can it also be art? Adam Moss makes that case in his new book, The Work of Art, featuring visual artists, novelists, poets, musicians, and journalists like Gay Talese, Ira Glass, and the front-page editors of the New York Times. Join Moss and Provincetown Independent editor Ed Miller, along with journalist and historian Da...

This sonically-innovative harpist is revolutionizing her instrument for the digital era. Over the past 15 years, she has worked relentlessly to stretch boundaries and limitations for harpists. In 2022, she made history by becoming the first black woman to be nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition. That same year, she was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award. “No harpist...

Over the past six or seven years I have focused on cutting away certain areas of maps, creating lace-like pages of roads, rivers, and other geographical features. These are then protected between sheets of acrylic, in boxes, or safely mounted on panels. For my site-specific installation at Twenty Summers, I embraced the fragility of the pages, leaving them unprotected and open to whatever might ha...

All life once rose from the ocean, and all life still depends on it today. From melting glaciers and rising sea levels to plastic pollution and overfishing, our common origin is in danger. This group of marine biologists, ocean advocates, and researchers of the local coastal ecosystem venture into a discussion about how the ocean connects us—and what we can do to protect it.