In 1977, a group of painters and collagists—deeply rooted in both the New York School and the longstanding Provincetown art colony—did something unusual. They founded a gallery that would belong entirely to the artists themselves. No dealers. No middlemen. No hierarchy. Just a cooperative run, funded, curated, and sustained by the people who made the work.
They called it Long Point Gallery, after the crescent of land that arcs out from Provincetown into the Atlantic. It would go on to become one of the most vital artist-run institutions in the history of the Outer Cape. For twenty-one years—until its closing in 1998—Long Point shaped Provincetown’s late-20th-century artistic identity, provided a hub for serious abstract work, and fostered a spirit of camaraderie rarely seen in the art world.
Founders, Visionaries, and the Provincetown Lineage
The gallery’s founding members were a powerhouse group:
Varujan Boghosian, Fritz Bultman, Carmen Cicero, Sideo Fromboluti, Edward Giobbi, Budd Hopkins, Rick Klauber, Leo Manso, Robert Motherwell, Paul Resika, Judith Rothschild, Sidney Simon, Nora Speyer, and Tony Vevers.
These artists formed a bridge between multiple creative eras:
- Sun Gallery generation artists like Tony Vevers (who had exhibited in the legendary 1950s Provincetown avant-garde)
- The New York School influence embodied by Motherwell, Bultman, and Rothschild
- Provincetown’s own experimental, sand-blown tradition of autonomy and invention
The result was a cooperative whose impact was far larger than its footprint.
A True Cooperative: Run, Funded, and Governed by Artists
Long Point was not symbolic about its structure. It was the real thing.
The member-artists:
- curated and hung their own exhibitions
- designed the announcement cards
- planned their openings and parties
- held regular business meetings
- collectively subsidized the gallery
- and hired a director to maintain hours and keep the operation running
This last detail—the hired director—is telling. Long Point was democratic, but it was also intentional and organized. In the gallery’s earliest days, Budd Hopkins personally reached out to Berta Walker, then working at the Whitney Museum in New York, and invited her to run the gallery. She had to decline—she couldn’t leave her full-time museum position—but the invitation reveals much about Long Point’s ambition and Hopkins’ influence in shaping its structure.
A Community of Harmony & Camaraderie
Ask anyone connected to Long Point what made it special, and they mention the same thing:
the harmony among its members.
This was not incidental. It grew out of the cooperative model and the commitment of the artists who built it. Long Point created a space where abstraction, collage, and conceptual inquiry could thrive without market pressure—an environment of shared experimentation, intellectual rigor, and mutual respect.
Its legacy is preserved today through a range of archives, including the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, the Motherwell/Ponsold papers, and the surviving materials held by families of founders like Sidney Simon and Tony Vevers.
Who Remains: The Living Links
Many of Long Point’s founders have passed—Motherwell, Bultman, Vevers, Rothschild, Simon, Manso, Fromboluti, Boghosian, and more recently Nora Speyer (who died in 2024 at age 101). But as of the most recent public record, several founding members remain alive:
Carmen Cicero, Edward Giobbi, Paul Resika, and Rick Klauber.
They represent the last direct living thread to the founding circle.
The Legacy Today: From Budd to Grace
Long Point’s lineage continues in Provincetown through Berta Walker Gallery, founded in 1990. Though not a continuation of Long Point, it shares the same devotion to Provincetown’s artists and its history. Today, its director is Grace Hopkins—daughter of founding member Budd Hopkins and art critic April Kingsley.
Berta herself once said:
“Today there is no Berta Walker Gallery without Grace Hopkins.”
With Grace, the Long Point DNA—collage, abstraction, conceptual inquiry, artist-led governance—remains alive and evolving. She serves as the living bridge between the founding generation and Provincetown’s contemporary art scene.
Why Long Point Matters for the 2026 MISSING TIME Festival
The 2026 festival explores portals, disappearance, perception, and the Provincetown-New York continuum—precisely the terrain in which artists like Hopkins, Motherwell, Boghosian, and Rothschild worked.
Long Point’s founding spirit—artist-driven, experimental, communal—resonates directly with the festival’s broader themes:
- the collision of the rational and the uncanny
- the Provincetown sand-dune frontier where art meets mythology
- the desire to make order out of fragments
- the willingness to build something entirely new
Long Point is not just history—it’s the architecture beneath so much of what Provincetown’s creative community is today.
The Missing Time Festival celebrates that lineage, honors the founders who shaped it, and acknowledges the living stewards who carry it forward.
