A Director's Choice Exhibition - Waves: Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb

A Director's Choice Exhibition

Curated by Christine McCarthy

This spring, Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) presents Waves: Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, a Director’s Choice exhibition. Curated by Christine McCarthy, Waves is on view April 12 - May 27, 2024 with a public reception on Friday, April 19 from 6-8pm. The artists will share a slide presentation, TWO LOOKS: Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb Photographs, at PAAM on Saturday, May 18 at 2pm (free with $15 Museum admission).

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Inspired by Virginia Woolf ’s novel The Waves, this collaborative project brings together the work of creative partners Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb. This intimate collection serves as a pandemic logbook in words and images, created while the couple was largely sequestered on Cape Cod from March 2020 through May 2021. Rebecca provides original, hand-written poetry that punctuates her lyrical photographs and Alex’s panoramic seascapes. Their images serve as poignant meditations on what it means to be both deeply connected to the world around us and profoundly isolated from much that we hold dear.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Alex Webb has published 17 photography books, including The Suffering of Light, a survey book of 30 years of his color photographs. He’s exhibited at museums worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y., the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. A Magnum Photos member since 1979, his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and other publications. He has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. His most recent books are Dislocations (2023) and the collaborations Waves (2022) and Brooklyn: The City Within (2019) with Rebecca Norris Webb, the latter exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York.

Originally a poet, Rebecca Norris Webb often interweaves her text and photographs in her nine photography books, most notably with her monograph, My Dakota—an elegy for her brother who died unexpectedly—with a solo exhibition of the work at The Cleveland Museum of Art (2015), among other venues. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, and is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, N.Y. Norris Webb is a 2019 NEA grant recipient. Her first collaboration with Alex Webb, Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs from Cuba, was exhibited at the MFA, Boston. Her upcoming tenth book, A Difficulty Is a Light, a hybrid poetry collection punctuated by 15 of her photographs, will be published by Chose Commune in Fall 2024.

HOURS AND ADMISSION:

From November 1-April 30, PAAM is open Thursday-Sunday from 12-5pm. From May 1-October 31, PAAM is open Wednesday-Monday from 11am-5pm, and until 8pm on Fridays (closed Tuesdays).

The Museum is closed on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day, and open on New Years Day and Monday holidays (Martin Luther King Jr. Day, President’s Day, Patriot’s Day, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Veteran’s Day). The Museum occasionally closes for private events, those dates and times are listed on our Events Calendar.

General Admission is $15, and free on Fridays from 5-8pm. Admission for PAAM Members is always free, members also receive one guest pass with their annual membership.