This week, we interviewed Marian Roth about arriving to Provincetown in 1982, helping start the Freehand writers’ school, and leaving a career in political science to become an artist. She recalls being inspired by women in nontraditional jobs and began photographing “The Working Women of Provincetown,” before finding her artistic voice through pinhole photography, including transforming a van into a giant camera—work tied to her Guggenheim Fellowship. Roth describes how the AIDS crisis shaped daily life through caregiving and activism with the PWA Coalition, though it did not directly drive her art. She discusses recurring themes of village, diaspora, and home, later work using silhouetted figures influenced by her mother’s dementia, and her current focus on making paper and building collage “villages,” guided by a love of learning and beginner’s mind.
