Provincetown Art Association and Museum Announceces Robert Motherwell and Renate Ponsold Research Fellow

Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) is honored to announce the inaugural Robert Motherwell and Renate Ponsold Research Fellow, Helen Molesworth. She has been awarded $25,000 for the 2026-2027 Fellowship to work on original research on the visual art and artists of Outer Cape Cod. Learn more at paam.org/fellowship

THE RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP

The Robert Motherwell and Renate Ponsold Research Fellowship is a one-year, low-residency program that supports scholars conducting original research on the visual art and artists of Outer Cape Cod.

Fellows will utilize PAAM’s collections, archives, and research resources to develop projects that contribute to the scholarly understanding of the region’s cultural history. Projects that broaden and diversify scholarship on Provincetown art and artists are strongly encouraged.

Established in 2024 by the Ponsold Motherwell Charitable Trust, the Robert Motherwell and Renate Ponsold Scholars Endowment promotes research and scholarship on Provincetown art and artists. Through its Research Fellowship and Biennial Art History Symposium, the endowment fund aims to build a lasting body of art-historical literature and archive that focuses on the visual arts of Outer Cape Cod, with a primary emphasis on the art and artists of Provincetown.

HELEN MOLESWORTH

Helen Molesworth is a writer, podcaster, and curator based in Los Angeles and Provincetown. In 2023 Phaidon published Open Questions, Thirty Years of Writing About Art, an anthology of her essays. Her podcasts include Death of an Artist, a 6-part podcast about the intertwined fates of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta, and the inaugural season of Recording Artists with The Getty. She is also the host of DIALOGUES, a podcast that features interviews with artists hosted by the David Zwirner Gallery. 

Her major museum exhibitions include: One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art; Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957; Dance/Draw; This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s; Part Object Part Sculpture; and Work Ethic. She has organized one-person exhibitions of Ruth Asawa, Moyra Davey, Noah Davis, Raoul De Keyser, Louise Lawler, Steve Locke, Anna Maria Maiolino, Josiah McElheny, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, Amy Sillman, and Luc Tuymans. She is the author of numerous catalogue essays and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2021 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2022 she was awarded The Clark Art Writing Prize.