2017 Fellows Exemplify Cape Cod’s Creative Diversity

From Falmouth to Provincetown, and every community in between, there are local artists doing extraordinary work with their creative talents. If you want proof, simply look at this year’s submissions that the AFCC received for its artist fellowships.

“The applicants that came in this year were diverse, incredibly talented, and crossed all mediums,” said AFCC Executive Director Julie Wake. “It motivates me to raise more funds so we can add to the fellowships we offer because clearly there is a need based on the talent we have here.”

Fellows are chosen by an anonymous jury of their peers who live as close as Cape Cod and as far away as Los Angeles. Now in its third year, the AFCC’s Fellowship Program provides meaningful support to Cape Cod’s working artists, each of whom are given a $1,500 award to further their artistic vision.

JULIA CUMES (VISUAL ARTS)

It is through her camera that Brewster’s Julia Cumes has gained a better understanding of our world. It all began when she was a teenager living in apartheid-era South Africa. “I grew up in this society that had a very strong bias and prejudice against non-whites and women,” Cumes said. “Very early on I was shaped by that experience. I started photographing women and girls as a 13-yearold in South Africa. It was my way of seeing the world through the camera and understanding my own identity, and exploring the concept of identity in this world.”

Since then, photography has served as Cumes’s passport around the globe, taking her to such faraway places as Cuba, Rwanda, India, Kenya, Morocco, Tanzania, and Uganda. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including the Cape Cod Times, Cape Cod Magazine, Boston Globe, New York Times and National Geographic.

Art, she said, “is so fundamental to who we are as human beings,” serving as a mechanism to “communicate ideas, explore feelings and work out some of the struggles we all have in life.”

Cumes, who arrived on Cape Cod in 2001, plans on using her fellowship award to help fund a portrait series that will shine a light on women in the region who have been impacted by cancer. “We [Cape Cod] have a 20 percent higher rate of breast cancer than the rest of the country,” she said. “This fellowship empowers me to work on this project and it gives me affirmation that this [series] is something interesting to people, and important to our lives.”

You can learn more about Julia Cumes and her work at www.juliacumesphoto.com.

JORDAN RENZI (PERFORMING ARTS)

When Jordan Renzi graduated from college in 2011, she came back to her hometown of Orleans with a backpack full of clothes, a bicycle and a guitar that “I didn’t really know how to play,” she said.

Today, that instrument has become a prized possession, helping Renzi find her voice as one of the Cape’s preeminent singers and songwriters. She started off through a process of trial and error, performing at local open mics where she initially sang cover songs before eventually singing one of her own, “September,” which would make its way onto her first EP of the same name.

Local coffee shops and bars, such as Flying Fish Café, Harvest Wine Gallery, and the Sand Dollar Bar & Grill, served as unofficial institutions of higher learning where Renzi cut her teeth as a musician, developing her creative talents on the fly in front of Cape audiences.

She recorded her first EP in 2014, the same year she played at Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s inaugural ball at the Hynes Auditorium in Boston. Here’s a fun fact - the Dropkick Murphys technically opened for her, playing prior to her three-song set that night.

Two years later, Renzi released her second EP, “Featherbed Lane,”

which received national and international airplay on over 40 stations.

Last year, Limelight Magazine named her female vocalist of the year. She followed that up by winning the grand prize at this spring’s Eventide songwriting competition.

What’s next for the rising star? Renzi will use her award to produce her third EP later this year. “To me this fellowship is very validating which of course, as artists and musicians, we are constantly seeking,” said Renzi. “The Cape is a great place to be an artist. There are things you can do here as an emerging artist you can’t do in other places. And I think, more and more, we are being given the tools to make a living for ourselves because, at the end of the day, we all have to do that.”

You can learn more about Jordan Renzi and her work at www.jordanrenzi.com.

MYRA SLOTNICK (WRITTEN WORD)

She has lived in New York City and Los Angeles, but it is in Provincetown where Myra Slotnick is happiest. “I first laid eyes here in 1986 and I knew then I would end up here one day,” she said.

That day occurred in 2002, when the former comedian and actress moved to the Cape, pursuing a career as a playwright. Since then, the Emerson College graduate has made her mark on the local theater scene.

She began by writing short plays, many of which found their way to the Provincetown Theater. That served as the launching pad for the Universal Theater, a three-day short-play festival that Slotnick created to draw writers, actors, and directors from across the country to Provincetown during the dead of winter.

Eventually, she delved into longer fare, writing her first full-length play, “The Weight of Water,” which premiered at the Provincetown Theater in 2011. The piece focused on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and had an off-Broadway run two years later.

She followed that up with three additional plays – “The Beachcomber Boys” about Provincetown’s artist colony; “The Children of Desire” about the offspring of “A Streetcar Named Desire”; and “The Shadow Child” about a family in 1960s Brooklyn that survived the Holocaust – which have had readings or been workshopped, both on- and off-Cape.

She will use her fellowship to turn her latest piece – what she termed, “the dreaded Thanksgiving 2016 dinner table play” which deals with the aftermath of last year’s presidential election – into a reality.

“I love being in the world of ‘what if,’” Slotnick said about writing. “It is my favorite place to be on the planet… It is my intellectual and spiritual yoga.”

Being recognized by the AFCC, she said, “means a lot… It really is such an honor to be supported by a prestigious arts organization and acknowledged, not only creatively, but financially for your work.”