Artwork by Alice

Restaurant Massacree.” She also was an author and artist with a sharp wit, as you can see by the image here, titled Moral Dilemma II. She might have owned three restaurants in Stockbridge and Lenox, but she never intended it to be a career. She closed up Alice’s at Avaloch, a restaurant/motel that’s now the Appletree Inn, and left for Provincetown in 1979, opening an art studio and creating paintings, prints, and hand-painted beach stones. Alice lived the rest of her life out there and died last year, just a week before Thanksgiving. She would have had a good chuckle knowing her artwork displaced the Bard at The Bookstore in Lenox. That’s exactly what Jim Youngerman had to do to make space for 28 pieces of Alice’s art. Shelves of Shakespeare were moved to the side for this special exhibition of giclée prints that spans Alice’s 45 years in Provincetown. Her paintings depict sunrises and sunsets, food, and beach scenes. “The naïve, primitive, self-taught aspect of the work is so beautifully simple and yet complex and compelling,” says Youngerman, the exhibition’s curator who was a friend of Alice’s and is an artist himself living in Stockbridge. “Anatomy didn’t matter, but gesture did.” Money raised from the exhibition’s sales will go to charities that Alice has supported, says Youngerman. Talks are going on now with Provincetown Art Association and Museum to put some of Alice’s original work in the museum’s permanent collection.

—Anastasia Stanmeyer