PHOTO: Grace Gouveia with Jay Critchley, 1985, before opening of Jay’s TACKItown show and performance at Steve Fitzgerald’s Hell’s Kitchen Gallery
Join us on Saturday, May 10, 2025 at 1PM as we honor the legacy of Grace Gouveia and fellow poet Harry Kemp at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center through film and readings. Additional information will be available shortly so check back often.
Grace Gouveia was an activist, poet and avid smoker.
World War I was in high gear when Grace arrived in Provincetown from Olhao, Portugal at the age of seven. Artists and writers were fleeing Europe for the US. It was 1916, the year playwright Eugene O’Neill’s first play was performed in town. The European Diaspora settled in.
Grace Gouveia smoked two + packs a day, her muumuu dresses fluttered in the smoke as she walked. She was a political and cultural force, but in her heart, she was a poet who loved the community and her Portuguese heritage and fought for the town’s survival.
Grace Gouveia: Smoking Bomb is an experimental short film documented on a site-specific installation screened at the 2012 Provincetown International Film Festival, the festival’s first. Initially created to be projected onto Long Point Lighthouse, the US Coast Guard rejected it as a “hazard to navigation.” Undaunted, Critchley constructed a screen in the shape of the lighthouse on the harbor beach, viewable from the deck of the Aqua Bar at the Aquarium Mall.
