The Art Colony

In episode 50 of The Art Colony podcast, former journalist Joe Woolley interviews our host, Gaston Lacombe. Gaston, a Canadian-born artist and American citizen, recounts earning history degrees in Ottawa, living 16 years in Latvia in roles from teacher and newscaster to embassy cultural work, becoming the first head of Latvia’s national LGBT organization, and leaving amid threats. In Washington, D...

Zoe Lewis, born in Rottingdean on England’s south coast, joins us this week as she describes becoming a largely self-taught multi-instrumentalist, learning through bands, travel, and absorbing world rhythms across 70+ countries. She recounts leaving planned tourism studies after joining punk-era bands, traveling with minimal resources, and eventually settling in Provincetown around 1990 after bein...

Artist Joshua Wilmoth joins us this week as we talk about how he has shaped the town’s look through murals, store facades, interior decor, and massive Carnival installations. He describes his celebration-driven, maximalist, unapologetically queer mission against blank white walls, recounts growing up in South Florida with intensive arts education, studying at Tufts/Museum School, and pivoting full...

This week, we bring on Eric Lesh, a figurative artist now in his fifth season, describes his path from musical theater to LGBTQ rights law (including work at Lambda Legal and directing the LGBT Bar Association of New York) and how figure drawing at the NYC LGBT Center and Zoom sessions during the pandemic grew into commissions and queer art fairs like Barnwood and Art Gaysel. He explains his whims...

This week, we welcomed returning guest Christine McCarthy of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) plus Elaine Grossman and Daniel Sagalyn to discuss the exhibition “Avital Sagalyn: Mid-Century Provincetown,” on view through August 2, 2026. McCarthy describes the exhibitions committee’s excitement at discovering Sagalyn’s “breathtaking” works and their maturity for an artist in her 20...

We have finally brought in the amazingly talented performer and artist Ryan Landry to talk about his life and work. Landry recounts growing up in Wallingford, Connecticut, moving to New York City, and arriving in Provincetown in 1979, describing the town’s earlier “Wild West” atmosphere and his early jobs. He explains how his prop-heavy performances in “Puttin’ On The Hits” led him to create the l...

This week, we interview Cole Cook, a sculptor who was born in New York, raised in Los Angeles by actor parents, and spent summers on Cape Cod. Cook describes being shepherded into baseball, playing professionally across all minor-league levels, then becoming unhappy and eventually leaving the sport after an eye-opening trip around artists in New York. After studying improv at UCB, writing, and wor...

This week, we welcome author, editor, and publisher Russ Lopez to The Art Colony to discuss his new book, Provincetown Stories. Lopez recounts first visiting Provincetown in January 1981, returning for decades with his husband, and eventually buying a home before COVID, while noting changes such as higher costs, heavier tourism, and evolving attitudes around race and performance. He describes his...

This week, we interview Liz Carney, artist and owner-director of Gallery 411 on Commercial Street. She describes her roles as painter, educator, entrepreneur, and property manager, and traces her family’s Provincetown roots through her mother, a MassArt-trained art educator who bought 411 Commercial Street around 1980 and filled it with renters including artists, writers, and local characters. She...

This week, we welcome Provincetown musician and artist Mike Flanagan, a full-time resident, who plays saxophone and piano, as well as multiple other instruments, studied music education at Berklee, earned a master’s in Music Education at NYU, and now is the entertainment director at Provincetown's Tin Pan Alley and Post Office Café.  He also teaches band, keyboard lab, and co-teaches Italian...

This week, we welcome Provincetown artist and teacher Pete Hocking. Pete discusses seven as a formative age before peer pressure. Pete recounts childhood Cape Cod trips, early dreams of living and painting here, and influences from comics, superheroes, and Snoopy. He describes a career balancing art with teaching activism and leadership at Brown and RISD and art at Goddard, adoption’s impact on hi...

This week, we welcome 20 Summers program director Alice Gong to discuss the Provincetown arts organization and its spring festival. She shares her path to the Outer Cape and explains that 20 Summers was founded about 15 years ago to honor and activate the historic Hawthorne Barn, built in 1906 by Charles Hawthorne as an art school and later used by generations of artists. Privately owned today, th...

Art in L'overalls with Myra Kooy.  Our guest today is a visual artist who also co-owns her own art gallery in Provincetown, the Radiance Art Gallery.  In this episode, we talk about how being a woman, and African-American, has played a role in Myra's life and art.  We journey through her growth as an artist, from selling handmade suspenders on the streets of New York City to owning...

This week, we welcome artist, educator, curator, and arts administrator Burt Yarborough to discuss his six-decade relationship with Provincetown and the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC). Yarborough recounts coming to Provincetown in 1976 after studies in architecture and photography, his FAWC fellowship, and how the center’s early, unrenovated lumber-yard facilities and local visual committee shaped a...

This week, we interviewed a Provincetown multidisciplinary artist, educator, and curator Megan Hinton about how studios and process shape art. Hinton, raised in Ohio, describes coming to art through deep looking and connecting drawing to sports via eye–hand coordination, with art helping to live more freely and queerly. We describe current abstracted-realism bird collages built from drawings, phot...

The Drag Philanthropist with Mackenzie

This week Gaston welcomes to the studio the very talented playwright and improvisation artist Cody Sullivan.  For the last seven years Cody has been making Provincetown audiences laugh with his witty and insightful stage performances.  Learn about his origins as an artist, about his connection and love for improvisation, about his popular event "Cody Plays," and about the plays he has st...

Gaston welcomes multifaceted percussionist, singer, and innkeeper Brian Calhoun to discuss music in Provincetown and Brian’s path to the marimba. Brian describes his musical family, early piano and drum set lessons, and discovering marimba.

This week, we interviewed Marian Roth about arriving to Provincetown in 1982, helping start the Freehand writers’ school, and leaving a career in political science to become an artist. She recalls being inspired by women in nontraditional jobs and began photographing “The Working Women of Provincetown,” before finding her artistic voice through pinhole photography, including transforming a van int...

The Art Colony Podcast welcome Cherie Mittenthal, artist and Executive Director of the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. We take a journey through the long history of Castle Hill, and talk about the myriad offerings of classes at the center. We also discuss Cherie’s art, especially her passion for welding, pottery and encaustic. And this leads us to review the annual International Encausti...

Gaston talks with author Jeannette de Beauvoir, a France-born writer and historian who settled in Provincetown and created the Sidney Riley series. She explains how the town’s festivals, shifting seasonal crowds, and real locations inspire her plots, discusses “Dead in the Water,” and notes she weaves Provincetown history into the series. She previews her next novel and shares her Dune Shack–inspi...

Gaston invites PJ Kierans, a PTown chocolatier, on this week to discuss the mastery and artistry of chocolate making. PJ, who hails from London and trained in culinary arts in the UK and the Netherlands, explains his journey from a busy restaurant kitchen to becoming a full-time chocolatier in Provincetown. He delves into the intricacies of chocolate production, from the fermentation of cocoa bean...

Wall Writer and Wave Rider with Andrew Jacob

Artist at Work - Trevor Mikula

Cut and Paste with John Derian