Avital Sagalyn: Mid-Century Provincetown
Provincetown Art Association and Museum
By: PAAM - May 01, 2026
Avital Sagalyn (1925-2020) was at the time a fine arts student at Cooper Union in New York. And it was in Provincetown that she embarked on a work that helped her win one of the first-ever Fulbright awards to study painting in Paris, in 1949. While painting in Provincetown, Avital found herself enamored with light and fog, immersed in natural and architectural wonders, and confident in her quest to find the very essence of her chosen subjects through painting and drawing them. This creative reverie, so evident in her works, would later be reprised in Paris, where she was befriended by artists including Picasso and Brâncusi. By the mid-1950s, though, she had declined exhibition offers from top New York and Paris galleries in favor of marrying and starting a family. She continued to be a lifelong artist, but had quietly stored away her early works. All but a small handful of these pieces were never discussed nor saw the light of day –until her son discovered them beginning in 2017. Avital died six months after the University Museum of Contemporary Art in Amherst, Mass., held a major retrospective of her works in 2019.
PAAM’s Avital Sagalyn: Mid-Century Provincetown, guest-curated by art historian Betsy Siersma, surveys Avital’s drawings and paintings mainly in ink, and sometimes gouache or oil, all variations on what remain iconic Cape visions today – the tempestuous water, the historic wharf, fishing boats and shacks, the rocky shoreline and mammoth sand dunes. These are joined by selected works on related themes that the artist completed later in life. Nearly all the curated works are making their public debut at PAAM. Taken together, this exhibition invites us to rediscover what was then mainly a Portuguese-American fishing community, seen through the eyes of a woman whose interpretations look entirely original and fresh some 80 years later.
Christine McCarthy, PAAM CEO and executive director, recently described her first reaction upon reading Siersma’s exhibition proposal and viewing images of Avital’s Provincetown works: “Who is this artist? And why don’t we know enough about her? Because the work was that powerful.”
To learn more about the late artist and her work, visit https://www.avitalsagalyn.com
The Curator
Betsy Siersma is an art historian who, in retirement, teaches seminars on contemporary art and art history for the Five College Learning in Retirement Program. She previously had a 27-year career as a modern art museum registrar, curator and director at the UMass Amherst University Gallery, before retiring in 2004. As director, she was responsible for planning and coordinating exhibitions and programs, staff supervision and development, fundraising, and writing annual budgets. She organized more than a dozen museum exhibitions of contemporary art, including several that traveled. Among Betsy’s significant legacies at the University Gallery, she was responsible for developing the museum’s permanent collection.
Betsy has sat on art juries, given many gallery lectures, and taught museum studies. She has served as a member of the public art committees for Amherst and Northampton, Mass., and was a member of the Northampton Housing Partnership, an advocacy group for affordable housing. Betsy taught in the Summer Institute in Art Museum Studies at Smith College in 2006. She was interim director of the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, from November 2006 through July 2007, and oversaw a collaborative public art project by Wendy Ewald and Brett Cook for Amherst College from August 2007 through May 2008. Betsy earned an M.A. in Art History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (1984), with a concentration in Modern Art, and a B.S. in Art from Skidmore College (1965).
In 2021, Betsy worked with Avital Sagalyn’s son and daughter-in-law to review the late artist’s Provincetown works, with the aim of guest-curating a museum exhibition. She successfully proposed the solo exhibition to the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Two years earlier, Betsy also succeeded in suggesting to the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass Amherst the idea of an Art History Department-curated solo retrospective of Avital’s works, which opened in October 2019 for a two-month run. This event significantly introduced the art community and the public to Avital’s colorful personal history, and to her rich portfolio of paintings, drawings, sculptures and textile designs.
Curated by Betsy Siersma
On View: June 5 - August 2, 2026
Public Reception: Friday, June 26, 6PM
Watch Avital Sagalyn discussing her work here.