Residential artists’ studio at Cape Cornwall

A century of views and postcards of Cape Cornwall

Sturdily built in stone with a slate roof in the 1800s, the property was originally part of the boiler house of the Cape Cornwall Tin Mine. In 1978 an architect converted the building into a dwelling and our benefactor, Tracy O’Kates, purchased the freehold. It is believed to be the westernmost dwelling on the English mainland.

Brisons Veor was managed on an informal basis for artist residencies from 1978 until 1992, when the property was formally made over to the Trust and registered with the Charity Commission. Since then it has been managed by the appointed Trustees, and has continued to provide year-round affordable residencies for creatives working in all media.

Until 2011, residencies were only available for women, but times have changed and Brisons Veor is now an equal opportunities studio.

The Legacy of Tracy O’Kates

Tracy O’Kates at the Berkeley Open Mic Touch of a Poet Series 1996 (photo from screening of performance)

Tracy O’Kates was born Susan Tracy Oppenheimer in 1931 in Chicago. Her great-grandfather was one of the founding members of the Ethical Culture Society the oldest accredited humanist religion in the United States. She graduated from the Francis Parker School a progressive private school that shaped her lifelong commitment to social justice. She went on to Wellesley College, Massachusetts.  She married a Harvard graduate Bob Katz and had four children. Her 13 careers included real estate development, jewellery-designing and making, psycho-therapy and filmmaking. Trained by Herbert Kline, she assisted on the film Walls Of Fire that won the Golden Globe award for best documentary in 1972 and examined the Mexican Muralist movement. She went on to make her own film To The Far Bar, a visual love poem to Cape Cod. She came to Unitarian Universalism in the 1980s via Provincetown’s Unitarian church which was home to many gay men and drew her in with it’s fabulous and fun loving spirit and social justice commitment. Becoming a UU in her 50s she left a lifelong association with the Ethical Culture Society. Whilst in Provincetown Tracy ‘came out’ and was very active in assisting gay men afflicted by AIDs.  She joined the Berkeley fellowship when she moved to Berkeley in 1994. She brought the Welcoming Congregations program to the fellowship; this program offers a supportive framework for UU congregations to become more welcoming spaces for LGBTQ people.  Tracy O’Kates died on September 4th 2013.  She had been a quiet social justice activist all her life.

Tracy was a keen patron of the Arts from early in her life.  In 1974, as reported in Becoming Judy Chicago,  “The five Rejection Drawings so moved Tracy O’ Kates who hailed from Chicago that she bought them for $8000 and offered to donate them to the Museum of Judy’s choice. Rejected by the Art Institute where she first studied Rejection found acceptance in her adopted state at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.”  One of these works is often used in texts concerning Chicago and the first wave feminist art movement – Female Rejection Drawing, from the Rejection Quintet 1974 by Judy Chicago, gifted by Tracy O’Kates to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1980 along with others from the series (Rejection Fantasy Drawing, Rejection Breakthrough Drawing, Chicago Rejection Drawing, Childhood Rejection Drawing).

Tracy acquired an interest in Brisons Veor from Larrigan Estates  (through a holding company) on 27th February 1978 – currently we have no information as to why she did so.  However the presence of ‘friends from Cornwall, England’ in the exhibition at Time & Tide Gallery (see below) suggests she spent some time here.  In the late 1970’s she was a member of the Publications & Advisory Board of the highly regarded and influential Partisan Review, the left wing quarterly that published many influential commentators (including at various times, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, George Orwell & Clement Greenberg) from its inception in 1934 to the closure in 2003.  O’Kates was involved with the Review at the time of its move from Rutgers to Phillips Universities.

For a time in the 1980’s Tracy operated the Time & Tide Gallery in Provincetown. The copy of the Provincetown Gallery Guide for 1987 reported that  “ Former art critic and collector Tracy O’Kates,[will] exhibit in an unusual environment the painting, furniture, crafts and costumes of earlier and contemporary periods plus works by friends from Cornwall, England and Cape Cod.

The holding company together with a London based solicitor and two other persons (who became the founding trustees) established Brisons Veor Charitable Trust on 23rd December 1991.  And on 5th May 1992 the ownership of Brisons Veor was formally transferred from the holding company to the three trustees.  In 2014 in the settlement of Tracy’s affairs following her death a sum of $39,000 was made to the Trust “to be invested by the Trustees of the charitable trust and the proceeds to be used for bursaries for especially talented and needy women artists of whatever persuasion”.

Tracy O’Kates born 1931 died Sept 4 2013

Information culled from the web…especially Stories Between Us: Oral Histories from a Countercultural Congregation by Lena Rebecca Richardson