Complimentary Art and History Tours New Year’s Day

All are invited to explore the carefully appointed rooms of the historic Mary Heaton Vorse house and its distinctive art exhibit of over 100 paintings by 30 master and emerging artists.

As a unique start the New Year, scholar Mary Jane Treacy has volunteered to join this open house to answer questions about Mary Heaton Vorse and her bohemian circle from noon until 2:00. Author and professor Treacy, who has spoken to SRO crowds at the Wellfleet Public Library and Addison Art Gallery, is currently researching her next book Dwellings: New Living in Old Housing (working title). Featured are members of the bohemian “first families” who spent their summers in Provincetown, the Village’s “summer suburb,” including Vorse, George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood, John Reed and Louise Bryant.

The Mary Heaton Vorse House, 466 Commercial Street, is home to the Provincetown Arts Society which supports local artists and longstanding arts organizations of all genres; Culinary, Film, Stage, Performance, Painting and Literary. Programming includes guest chefs in collaboration with local artists, an annual outdoor film series, performing arts, curator conversations, fund-raisers and year-round artist residencies.

House Manager Sophia Hill and gallerist Helen Addison will be on hand to guide people through the exhibit. The art is available for purchase; proceeds benefit the Provincetown Arts Society.

About Mary Jane Treacy
Mary Jane Treacy, professor emerita of modern languages and literatures at Simmons University, has taught Spanish and Latin American literature as well as courses in women’s and gender studies, first-year college seminars, and the honors program, which she directed for over a decade. Since 2005 she has been involved with Reacting to the Past, a national group of scholars writing interactive role-playing simulations for university history and political science courses. Her work with Reacting took her to New York, literally as well as intellectually, as she wrote Greenwich Village 1913: Suffrage, Labor, and the New Woman, now in a second edition, Paterson (New Jersey, but just seventeen miles away) 1913: A Strike in the Progressive Era, and Harlem 1919: A Question of Leadership. Her academic training in Hispanic Studies also led to a simulation on the aftermath of political violence in Argentina, Argentina 1985: Questions of Memory, Truth, and Justice.

Now living on Cape Cod, she is thrilled by the current interest in the East Coast’s bohemia and the rebels who came to view Provincetown and neighboring Truro as Greenwich Village’s “summer suburbs.” She is currently researching how these first bohemians shaped and were shaped by their Cape experiences.

Mary Jane is a master gardener, a baker, gourmet cook and art collector working from her home in Orleans.