Tales of Artistic Exploration with Bert Yarborough

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 artists through time, space, and support. He describes making site-specific work in the dunes, later shifting from photography and abstraction toward more figurative, emotionally driven painting, and a Fulbright year in Nigeria studying Yoruba carving that influenced his materials and imagery. Yarborough explains his current process using reactive dyes, acrylics, inks, and occasional bleach, previews a mural commission, notes exhibitions and a PAAM studio visit, and shares memories of living three summers in a dune shack.