P-town museum's $5m renovation builds image, prestige

PROVINCETOWN - For an institution so firmly entrenched in the history of this town, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum's location was surprisingly a bit of a mystery for some residents.

"I would walk downtown and ask people where the museum was," said Christine McCarthy, 40, executive director for six years of the art association and museum. "They'd scratch their heads and point toward the Pilgrim Monument. But they could all tell me where Angel Foods was, the deli right across the street from us."

The museum's footprint in Provincetown hasn't changed, but its property in the East End - nearly a mile away from that monument in the center of town - received a $5 million renovation that has raised its visibility, both in the community and in the art world. The work, completed last year, transformed the 1820s sea captain's house cobbled together with a nondescript cinder-block space into a superb modern facility.

"The renovation has helped us on many, many levels," McCarthy said. "We have gone from a grass-roots museum into a major small museum of American art."

Rightly so, since Provincetown has been an artist colony of note since Charles W. Hawthorne founded his Cape Cod School of Art here in 1899. It was the nation's first outdoor school of figure painting, and both Hawthorne as well as the town's spectacular setting on the tip of the Cape lured some of the leading artists of the 20th century.

"People know Provincetown as the home of American theater, but they're not as aware of its stature in American art," McCarthy said. "When the MFA had a Blanche Lazzell exhibition [in 2002], we loaned them lots of her works, but we couldn't bring any of their collection here."

Big-time museums were "skeptical," McCarthy said of loaning works to PAAM because of its aging facility. That all changed with the overhaul: A recent exhibition of works by modernist Edwin Dickinson is an example of the footing the museum is now on.

"We had paintings on loan from the Met, the Whitney, and MoMA," said McCarthy of the show titled "Edwin Dickinson: The Provincetown Years, 1912-1937." "There were 98 works in the exhibit, and 70 percent of them had not been back here in 40 years. His daughter and his grandchildren attended, and they had never seen some of them."

The Dickinson show, from mid-July to mid-September, was a debut of sorts for the renovated museum, and McCarthy continues to, as she says, "beat the pavement" to make people aware that PAAM has turned a serious corner.

"It's great to have this fabulous space, but the important thing is, now we can do our jobs," she said. "Now we can operate on a level we should be on, we can be more national in scope."

A design by the Boston-based architecture firm of Machado and Silvetti, whose principals Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti are Provincetown residents, restored the original house and two rear galleries, then tore down and rebuilt a new wing, effectively doubling the space.

The new front windows draw people in from busy Commercial Street and add natural light. The design earned a "leadership in energy and design" rating from the US Green Building Council, making it the first art museum in the country to be certified by the council.

McCarthy recalled her reaction when she left the Institute of Contemporary Art to take over at PAAM and got her first look at the nearly 2,000 works in its holdings.

"The ICA was not a collecting museum when I was there," she said. "I went into the vault here, and I was like a kid in a candy store. It was unbelievable. It is a stellar collection."

McCarthy found another local resource from which she could draw: People who had studied with Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) at his renowned summer school or who had worked with other top painters of that generation.

"The lore is unbelievable," she said. "They love to talk about the good old days. I would go to someone's house, and I felt like I was casing the joint. I would see an oil by Karl Knaths on the wall and ask if I could put it in a show."

McCarthy is moving to preserve the history by videotaping anecdotes. The historical value of Provincetown's century of art - whether Hawthorne's first school, Hofmann's summer studio, or the Sun Gallery of the 1960s - is brought home to McCarthy on a regular basis.

"Part of our renovation included a research library, and now people can view our exhibits as podcasts," she said.

"We feel like we have a good balance of historic and contemporary art. We have juried shows, artists who take classes here. . . . This has always been a membership organization and still is. We can do it on a much higher level."

Ron Driscoll can be reached at rdriscoll@globe.com.