All images are by Midge Batelle, included in the Love Letter to a Dream exhibition. Courtesy of PAAM.
A Retrospective of Midge Battelle at PAAM
by Steve Desroches
Midge Battelle had a dream. Not a dream as a euphemism for a goal or a destination in life, but an actual dream, while sleeping. And in that dream, as can often be the case, things seemed strange though oddly familiar in the way that it does in slumber-induced imagery. Kind of like when you’re in your house in a dream, but it’s not really your house, but it feels like it is. According to Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung, dreams are a message from our unconscious minds, a balance to our lives while awake. Dreams, he said, show the desires of our inner psyches. So, when Battelle dreamt she was snapping photographs rapidly one night, it left an impression.
“I’m not a Jungian student, but my sister is a Jungian therapist,” says Battelle. “And I had this dream to be a photographer. I didn’t even own a camera. But I had a dream where I was a photographer. And so I became one.”
A longtime resident of Provincetown, Battelle has an equally lengthy lifework as an artist, working in black and white photography, painting, and cyanotypes over the past 40 years. And this week the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) opens a career retrospective titled Love Letter to a Dream, curated by her good friend and artist, Pasquale Natale. Drawing from every medium she has worked in, Battelle says it was “fabulous” to work with Natale, spending the past few years pulling out old work, rediscovering viewpoints and processes she pursued as an artist.
She came to art later in life, going by traditional standards that a life’s pursuit must begin in youth, or at any particular age for that matter. At age 38, after taking a cue from that dream, she enrolled at Greenfield Community College, not far from the Massachusetts/Vermont border, taking classes in photography, design, and color theory, and later continued her studies at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, earning her B.F.A. She spent many years as a photographer, but then Natale encouraged her to explore painting, bringing over a 36×36-inch board for her to work on. She plugged away at that, not really giving much credence to the idea that she was even switching mediums and practices. “I wasn’t thinking I was a painter at all,” says Battelle. “I really did it for me. But my friends and friends who were artists liked it. They all liked what I was doing.”
With a few interruptions, Battelle has lived in Provincetown year-round since 1967, first arriving for the summer of 1966. She was so in love with Provincetown after that first visit that she planned all winter to return, and she did so just in time for the Summer of Love, which, while largely associated with San Francisco, happened in many locales that year, including Provincetown. It was a “great” summer, laughs Battelle. She worked in kitchens throughout town and then when Labor Day approached, she bemoaned having to leave as the season ended sharply at the beginning of September then. But a waiter named Eric told her not to leave if she didn’t want to. So she didn’t, staying until 1974, when the wild ways of the 1960s caught up with her and she moved to an old fishing cabin in the backwoods of Athol in Western Massachusetts to recover and get sober. But she returned to Provincetown, as since that summer of 1966, she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. What is it about Provincetown that has such a hold on her?
“Everything, everything,” says Battelle. “I was a young Sapphic from a working-class town hanging out, and then I ended up going to Provincetown with a car full of friends. It was in the middle of summer. It was amazing. I felt such freedom. I felt safe. When you’re living a life in the closet, you’re always looking around to feel safe. When I came here that feeling went away. I just felt safe and free.”
That feeling is palpable in her work on display at PAAM. Unafraid to try new things and experiment, Battelle’s work isn’t bogged down in a precious pursuit of perfection or a need to make deep statements. She just worked. She mentions a photograph of the dunes years ago during a ferocious blizzard as her favorite. She brings it up multiple times actually. A wild landscape during an even wilder weather event…that just seems so Provincetown, and a good representation of her work, apropos of a retrospective. The work speaks for itself, and in a way for her, as she focused on just doing the work and not about why she was doing it.
“I didn’t really have an ambition to do it,” says Battelle. “I just kept doing it. And then I looked around and had all this work. It’s all just really elevated my life.”
Midge Battelle: Love Letter to a Dream is at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM), 460 Commercial St., August 7 through October 25. An opening reception is planned for Friday, August 7 starting at 6 p.m. General admission to the museum is $15. Battelle will be in conversation with exhibition curator Pasquale Natale as part of the Fredi Schiff Levin Lecture series on Thursday, September 3 at 6 p.m. For more information visit paam.org or call 508.487.1750.
