Nature and history are frames for a feast of creativity, as Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill celebrates its 50th anniversary, and heads into the next 50 years.

There are two sites for the center. The original on Meetinghouse Road hosts the art gallery, art studios and a three-story office in a former windmill tower which looked to the center’s founder, Joyce Johnson, like a castle. Johnson, a Cape icon, an evocative woodblock printer and sculptor in many media of sensuous modernist figures, who self-built her house in the outer Cape dunes, saved the acreage and buildings 50 years back as a place to teach art.

While Johnson was not sure that it would take off, it did, enlarging over the years to host some 175 workshops a year. Cherie Mittenthal, the Center’s director for 20 years, said, “Joyce is smiling down and happy about what has transpired here.”

The Center is a big part of the magic of the Truro community but reaches from the local to the global with workshops taught by notables in their fields (including Pulitzer winners and internationally exhibited artists — Saul Bellow, Helen Frankenthaler, Will Barnet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Faith Ringgold and Reginald Betts are just a few who taught at Castle Hill), to participants of all ages and abilities, at a reasonable price.

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