Category: In The Media

Cape Cod Times: White House as art plus virtual song

9/29/2020

By Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
Posted Sep 28, 2020 at 6:35 AM
Updated Sep 28, 2020 at 6:35 AM

Provincetown artist creates a White House model as a race-oriented art installation; CLOC adds fall shows; CabaretFest live-streams; new guests for Seth Rudetsky series.
Provincetown artist Jay Critchley will create a walk-in-size scale model of the White House as a pre-election Commercial Street art installation commenting on race and the politicization of the presidential residence.

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Old Glory Condom brand relaunched!

12/9/2019

Old Glory Condoms - still worn with pride country-wide;

radical safer sex corporation celebrates thirty years of redefining patriotism; a legal textbook Trademark case

Thirty years ago CEO Jay Critchley founded the Old Glory Condom Corporation - worn with pride country-wide, which redefined the definition of patriotism: to protect and save lives. It was launched at an exhibition at MIT in 1989. At the time the US Congress was debating a Constitutional Amendment to outlaw desecration of the flag following a Supreme Court ruling declaring it free speech while the government was doing little to confront the HIV/AIDS crisis.

When the company applied for a US Trademark, the government deemed the name and logo - the American flag imprinted on a condom, “as immoral and scandalous to associate the flag with sex”. This led to a three-year legal battle that forced the government to issue the Trademark.

Old Glory Condoms is reviving its potent message and relaunching its brand with trademarked
t-shirts, mugs and even flip flops. At this time condoms are not available, although they may be in the future.

Attorney David Cole, presently National Legal Director at the American Civil Liberties Union, took on the case while at the Center for Constitutional Rights and recently commented on the results:

“Your legal battle was important both culturally and legally. It arose in the heart of the culture wars over both the proper uses of the flag, and over safe sex and HIV-AIDS. As a legal matter, the Old Glory Condom case became a textbook case (literally) in the application of the disparagement and scandalous provisions of the Trademark Act. In the past few years, the Supreme Court has held unconstitutional the legal provisions applied to deny you a trademark, in cases involving an Asian rock group that sought to trademark their name, The Slants, and a clothing manufacturer who wanted to trademark its brandname, FUCT. So you were ahead of your time!”

“The challenge to freedom, democracy and sex and gender could not be more relevant today”, especially as we commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims on indigenous peoples land in 2020”, states Critchley. “For years people have asked us for these irreverent creations so we dug into our archives – a patriotic Christmas!” he added.

The controversy generated worldwide media coverage including the front page of the Washington Post and a feature in People Magazine. But its most successful prize was from conservative Senator Jessie Helms, an architect of the culture wars, who inadvertently created the first global safer sex commercial by holding up the Old Glory logo in the US Senate and denounced its Trademark, which was broadcast on CNN.

CEO Critchley is a respected corporate leader and influencer whose projects and actions have tackled global environmental issues like plastics, fossil fuels and the automobile, including legislative filings and governmental interventions. His offices and home are on Cape Cod in Provincetown, Massachusetts USA. For more information: [email protected]

Contact: Jay Critchley, CEO
Old Glory Condom Corporation - condoms with a conscience
[email protected]
www.jaycritchley.com

September 11th, 2019

9/11/2019

To spite the weather, swimmers, paddlers, volunteers and supporters come out to eat for the Swim

It’s hard to know which force has had the greater impact on the other. Has Provincetown changed Jay Critchley, a gay man raised among nine siblings in a Catholic family, or has Critchley changed Provincetown even more?

Critchley may be feeling slightly depressed this year. After 32 years running the Provincetown Swim for Life, this was the first year no one dipped a toe into Provincetown Harbor to raise money for the AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod, Helping Our Women, Outer Cape Health Services and other nonprofits. And still, the charitable event Critchley founded in 1988 raised about $150,000 for nonprofits this year. It’s collected $6.5 million overall.
The Cape Cod National Seashore denied him a permit to use Long Point as the jump-off for the 1.4-mile swim across the harbor due to the fear of sharks. Then, Hurricane Dorian hit. So Critchley called off the harbor swim. Even still, swimmers had already raised the pledge money, and so the nonprofits that depend on the Swim’s funds will still get donations.

As a tribute to Critchley, we hope people donate more to make up for the $50,000 shortfall of this year’s semi-swim.

JAY CRITCHLEY’S APOCALYPTIC VISION OF MAYFLOWER 400

7/29/2019

By Howard Karren | Provincetown Banner

When Jay Critchley, Provincetown’s resident performance-installationartist- writer-satirist-activist- impresario, sat down to discuss his upcoming talk, “Democracy of the Land,” which he’ll be giving on Tuesday at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, a messianic mission quickly emerged. Ever since he was “born again” as an artist some 38 years ago, at the age of 33, Critchley has been creating projects and series and films, on his own and collaborating with others, on subjects that he feels need addressing. “It’s just being engaged in the politics of the world and the country,” he says.

Before re-imagining his life as an artist, Critchley’s “former self ” was devoted to “human services” — and he still is, by running the Provincetown Compact, which he founded 26 years ago and has raised millions to support charitable causes, mostly by holding the annual Swim for Life & Paddle Flotilla in September. “I worked for youth in Connecticut,” Critchley says. “I was a VISTA volunteer in Oregon. I worked at a drop-in center in Provincetown — that’s what got me here. I was married at the time. I have a son and three grandchildren. I came out as a gay man first. The ‘born again as an artist’ came four years later. My sister sent me a subscription to Art in America. I said, ‘Why are you sending this to me?’ She said, ‘Because you’re an artist.’ How could I get away with being an artist? It just wasn’t part of my thinking. We’re talking about Irish Catholic in the ’50s.”