The MacDowell Colony Newsletter, summer 2008

Vol. 37, No.1 Summer 2008

In this Issue

Artists 2 Open Studio 6 Centennial Gala 8 Art in the Public Arena 10 News 15 Fellowships 20

architects | composers | filmmakers | interdisciplinary artists | theatre | visual artists | writers

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13 MacDowell Artists Awarded Guggenheims The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced its 2008 Fellowships in April. The Fellowships are awarded annually to men and women who have demonstrated superior capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

Recipients this year included filmmakers Natalia Almada, Rodney Evans, and Anne Makepeace; writers Lan Samantha Chang and Roya Hakakian; poets Meena Alexander, Michael Burkard, and Bill Zavatsky; visual artists Shimon Attie, Joe Fyfe, Sue Hettmansperger, and Pam Lins; and composer Laura Elise Schwendinger.

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Artists

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Brendan Tapley

Laura Schwendinger in Watson Studio.

Roya Hakakian in Sorosis Studio.

LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR

A Case for Charity Here we are after our terrific Centennial year and comprehensive renovation of Colony Hall, the heart of MacDowell. We

invite you to help us salute the prior year by enjoying this issue’s coverage of its final, momentous events — our Centennial gala as well as the favorable verdict in the New Hampshire Supreme Court case regarding MacDowell’s charitable status. In calling into question our eligibility for property tax exemption, the case effectively challenged the charitability of our mission. But in March the court strongly affirmed that MacDowell serves the public good by helping individual artists create new work. The ruling also did something else: It confirmed that there is no hierarchy in charity; that the well-being of the mind is as necessary to a healthy society as the body and soul. This is a nonpartisan issue because we all recognize that without charities, government would struggle to maintain the quality of life that such organizations and their donors help ensure. It was a good day not just for the arts but for all of us.

This issue is also about looking ahead, and our feature story provides a compelling glimpse into the political thinking of some extraordinary artists in this, an election year. We hope you find their ideas stimulating. We wish you a great summer and hope to see you in Peterborough on Medal Day weekend!

Cheryl A. Young Executive Director

Pulitzers for Lang and Schultz Columbia University awarded its 2008 Pulitzer Prizes in April, two of which went to MacDowell Fellows. Composer David Lang received a Pulitzer Prize in Music for The Little Match Girl Passion. Commissioned by — and premiered in 2007 at — Carnegie Hall, the 35-minute piece is a unique melding of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion and Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl.

Lang, cofounder and artistic director of the musical organization Bang on a Can, has worked at MacDowell five times over the course of his career.

Philip Schultz was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection Failure, which was released by Harcourt in 2007. He is the author of five books of poetry, including Like Wings, which was nominated for a National Book Award. A three-time MacDowell Fellow, Schultz is the founder of the Writer’s Studio, a New York-based organization that nurtures the work of fiction writers and poets.

Sater and Sheik Grab GRAMMYs On February 10th, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences presented GRAMMY Awards to lyricist Steven Sater and composer Duncan Sheik in the Best Musical Show Album category. The pair won for the recorded album of Spring Awakening, their Tony Award-winning musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s classic German drama that was produced on Broadway in 2007.

QUOTABLE “Twenty

years have gone by since the first time I came here in July of 1987. Looking back, I see how indebted I am to MacDowell for the time and space to risk, to search, and to continue trying again. The environment created at MacDowell provides an atmosphere of appreciation and respect for the process of making something, and the belief that art nourishes and heals society. The world desperately needs more enlightened communities like MacDowell.”

—Composer and interdisciplinary artist Meredith Monk, who celebrated four decades of work in February with a four-part concert series titled Meredith Monk/Multi-Musics at New York’s Peter Norton Symphony Space.

QUOTABLE “The

nurture, the nature, the interdisciplinary exchange, the moral and spiritual support of The MacDowell Colony — it has all been a huge eye-opener that allowed me to strategize my artistic practice as a filmmaker. I can easily say that my stay at MacDowell was a life-changing experience.” todd weinstein

—Filmmaker Heiko Kalmbach, whose film portrait of German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, If One Thing Matters, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. Kalmbach worked on the film at MacDowell during his 2004 residency.

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New and Notable We gratefully accept donations of Fellows’ artwork, books, music, films/videos, photographs, and other work for the Colony’s Savidge Library collection. Below is a selection of some recently donated works that were created in whole or in part at the Colony.

Films/Videos T he Trapeze Diaries, fiction

Ignacio Alcantara

Thomas Devaney

A Series of Small Boxes, poetry

Karen Aqua & Ken Field In the Shadows of Monadnock, DVD

Sabrina Gschwandtner

K nit Knit: Profiles & Projects from Knitting’s New Wave, nonfiction

Steve Bognar & Julia Reichert

Evan Fallenberg

L ight Fell, fiction

Eva Lee

Janie Fink

B ubble Opera, poetry

D iscrete Terrain: Windows of Five Emotions, DVD

Janis Hallowell

S he Was, fiction

David Petersen

Marilyn Krysl

D inner with Osama, fiction

L andlines: A Centennial Project in Two Acts, DVD

Tom Raworth

A t the Drive-In Volcano, poetry

Hands, DVD

Aimee Nezhukumatathil Selah Saterstrom

T he Meat and Spirit Plan, fiction

Visual Art

Peter Thomson

S acred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal, nonfiction

Bobby Neel Adams

F amily Tree, visual art

John Bisbee

B right Common Spikes: The Sculpture of John Bisbee, book

Joanna Priestley

What I Like About MacDowell, CD

David Webb

12 Paintings, painting

Music James Lewis

S uite Caribe, sound recording

Andrew Rudin

T hree Sisters: An Opera in Three Acts, musical score

Michael Korie

G rey Gardens: The Musical (piano/voice selections), musical score

P assage Quilts & Piñata Anchor of Hope, DVD

he Ghost of Irving Fine, DVD T

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Marie Carter

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Books

Six Artists Show at Whitney Biennial Artwork created by six MacDowell Fellows was featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2008 Whitney Biennial, which was held March 6th–June 1st.

Arguably the most important exhibition of contemporary art in the United States, the Biennial attempts to capture “prevalent modes of working and thematic concepts that are particularly germane to the moment” through its display of mixed-media, sculptural, photographic, and cinematic installations. “The Biennial is a laboratory, a way of ‘taking the temperature’ of what is happening now and putting it on view,” says Whitney Chief Curator and Director of Programs Donna De Salvo. Included in the exhibition, which for the very first time expanded beyond the Museum’s Breuer building into the Park Avenue Armory, was an installation by architect Fritz Haeg, and work by filmmakers Natalia Almada, Kevin Jerome Everson, Rashawn Griffin, Jennifer Montgomery, and Amie Siegel.

Rashawn Griffin, Untitled (Boo Radley), 2006. Pockets, blanket, fabric, wool, foam, fake flower, cotton, and wood, 84 ¾ x 82 x 10 ¼ in. (215.3 x 208.3 x 26 cm). Private collection.

courtesy of The whitney museum of american art

courtesy of The whitney museum of american art

DDR/DDR, 2008, Amie Siegel, HD video, 135 min., color/sound.

Above left: Tom Kundig’s Delta Shelter. Above right: architect Joel Sanders and Yale University Art Gallery’s newly renovated Interface Lounge.

Courtesy of yale university art gallery

benjamin benschneider (2)

Two Architects Honored by AIA Projects by MacDowell architects Tom Kundig and Joel Sanders recently received recognition from the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Kundig was part of a team responsible for the design of Delta Shelter, a 1,000-square-foot steel-clad weekend cabin that is raised above the ground on stilts to minimize the potential for flood damage. Designed as a low-tech, durable structure that can be completely shuttered when the owner is away, the house received a 2008 National AIA Honor Award for Architecture — the profession’s highest distinction for works that exemplify excellence in architecture, interior architecture, and urban design. Selected from more than 800 submissions, the 28 recipients of this prestigious award were honored at the AIA National Convention and Design Exposition in Boston in May. Out of a crop of 400 submissions from architects across the country and around the world, Sanders received two awards from AIA’s New York chapter in February. An Interior Architecture Honor Award went to his design for the Yale University Art Gallery’s Interface Lounge, while his collaborative design with Haeahn Architecture for the Seongbukdong Residences in Seoul, Korea, was acknowledged with a Project Merit Award.

All in the Family Brother and sister filmmakers Ira Sachs and Lynne Sachs recently unveiled projects that were nurtured in their early stages at MacDowell.

Ira Sachs’s feature-length film Married Life was released in theaters across the country in March. A period drama about a man who wants to spare his wife the agony of a divorce and so instead plots her murder, the film echoes back to Ira’s childhood fascination with film noir, according to his sister Lynne.

“He’s always been transfixed by 1940s moody intrigue films,” she says. “With this film, he’s translated this understanding ... into a complex reflection on desire and the ties that bind.” Chosen as a Critic’s Pick by New York Magazine, the film stars Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel McAdams, and Pierce Brosnan. Sachs worked on the script for the film during his 2001 residency at MacDowell.

Lynne Sachs’s collaborative online exhibition Abecedarium: NYC was launched on March 13th. Through original video, animation, photography, and sound captured by 16 artists, the interactive virtual installation codirected by Sachs and fellow artist Susan Agliata for the New York Public Library allows viewers to explore specific areas of New York City through 26 unusual words. Sachs’s search for the ideal 26 words to use as the centerpiece of the exhibit began in 2006 at MacDowell. “In the evenings, after a delicious, lively dinner, I would return to Mixter to read a 1968 Webster’s dictionary I found in Colony Hall on top of the piano,” she explains. “I began with A and got almost halfway through the alphabet, collecting approximately 20 mystical, resonating words for each letter.” After experiencing the offerings of the online exhibit, visitors can also contribute their own visions of New York by creating and uploading videos, soundscapes, photos, and written interpretations to be included in the exhibit’s growing digital archive.

Supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Public Library, and MacDowell, Abecedarium: NYC can be accessed at www.abecedariumnyc.com.

Artist Awards, Grants, and Fellowships Joan Acocella

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in Criticism,

Kati Agocs

Charles Ives Fellowship ~ American Academy

Mary Jo Bang

National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, Elegy

Marilyn Chin

USA Fellowship ~ United States Artists

Henri Cole

USA Fellowship ~ United States Artists

John D’Agata

Literature Fellowship in Prose ~ National Endowment for

Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints

the Arts Douglas Dorst

Literature Fellowship in Prose ~ National Endowment for

the Arts Rodney Evans

Creative Capital Grant in Film/Video, Day Dream

Lilian Garcia-Roig Individual Artist Grant ~ State of Florida

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Osvaldo Golijov

Vilcek Foundation Prize for the Arts

Mark Greenwold

Jimmy Ernst Award in Art ~ American Academy

Rashawn Griffin

Painters & Sculptors Grant ~ Joan Mitchell Foundation

Richard Hayes

Research Support Grant ~ Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in

Fanny Howe

American Academy Award in Literature

Frances Hwang

Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, Transparency

Aaron Jafferis

Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater, Kingdom

Brad Kessler

Rome Fellowship in Literature

David Leavitt

PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Finalist, The Indian Clerk

Anne Makepeace

Sundance Institute Documentary Grant,

British Art

As Natayunean — We Still Live Here Ben Marcus

Morton Dauwen Zabel Award

Meg McLagan

Sundance Institute Documentary Grant, Team Lioness

Thomas McNeely

Literature Fellowship in Prose ~ National Endowment for

Cherrie Moraga

USA Fellowship ~ United States Artists

the Arts

Tom Sleigh Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Space Walk Susan Smith

American Academy Award in Art

Mona Simpson

American Academy Award in Literature

Daria Sommers

Sundance Institute Documentary Grant, Team Lioness

Eve Sussman

Creative Capital Grant in Visual Arts, White on White

Anna Weesner

American Academy Award in Music

Emna Zghal Creative Capital Grant in Visual Arts, Dark Turquoise Marilyn Ziffrin

Lotte Jacobi Living Treasure Governors Arts Award ~ New

Hampshire State Council on the Arts

Work by Fellows Included in Academy Exhibition The 2008 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York featured work by MacDowell artists Mark Greenwold, Susan Smith, and Heide Fasnacht. Exhibiting artists were chosen from a pool of more than 150 artists nominated by the 250 members of the Academy, America’s most prestigious society of architects, artists, writers, and composers. The exhibition, which ran from March 6th–April 6th at the Academy’s galleries, featured many new works on view for the first time.

courtesy of THE american academy of arts and letters (5)

Left, top: Mark Greenwold, A Moment of True Feeling, 2004–05, oil on wood, 20½ x 32 in. The Cartin Collection, Hartford, CT. Left, bottom: Mark Greenwold, The Excited Self, 2005–06, oil on wood, 21 x 24 in. Private collection.

The Celluloid Colony

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Voice of America After decades of bringing everyday voices to life on the page and over the airwaves, Studs Terkel examines yet another classic American story in his upcoming book — his own. Terkel’s memoir Touch and Go, scheduled to be released by The New Press in the fall of 2008, covers a period from his early childhood in 1920s working-class Chicago to the censorship during the McCarthy trials.

In between, he tells of his days as a law student during the Great Depression, a young theatre enthusiast, and his rise as an actor on the radio and stage. Terkel, who was a Fellow in 1964, also recounts his days as an interviewer and oral historian and his friendships with such luminaries as Mahalia Jackson and Nelson Algren.

Reading Between the Lines Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings and Everything in Between, a new book edited by Carole Burns, was released by W.W. Norton & Company in December. Based on interviews Burns conducted for her “Off the Page” online chat show for washingtonpost.com, the book — which features quotes from 43 contemporary authors — is divided into chapters that focus on different aspects of the writing process. Burns, who began interviewing authors online in October of 2003, says the writers warmed quickly to the Internet format, which allowed them time to provide thoughtful answers to questions that were submitted. “What always struck me about the interviews,” says Burns, “was how much the authors seemed to enjoy them ... They kept encountering questions that reflected a serious interest in writing and literature.”

Included in the book are excerpts from interviews with MacDowell alumnae John Dalton, E.L. Doctorow, Elizabeth Graver, Gish Jen, Margot Livesey, Walter Mosley, Thisbe Nissen, Joan Silber, and Alison Smith.

Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages, a feature-length drama starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, received two 2008 Academy Award nominations. The heartbreaking tale of a brother and sister who are forced to care for their estranged and dying father earned Jenkins a Best Original Screenplay nomination from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Linney also scored a nomination in the Best Actress category. Written and directed by Jenkins, the film has garnered numerous industry nominations and awards, including Independent Spirit Awards for Best Screenplay and Best Male Lead and an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Director, a National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Screenplay, and a Best Original Screenplay nomination from the Writer’s Guild of America.

An Honorable Mention in Short Filmmaking was presented to Nicolas Provost at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival for his film Suspension. Also on hand at the festival were Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who premiered their feature-length film Sugar, a drama about the cultural and internal struggles faced by a Dominican baseball player who immigrates to the United States. Boden and Fleck worked on the script for Sugar, which was financed by HBO Films, during their 2006 MacDowell residency.

Benita Raphan’s experimental documentary Great Genius and Profound Stupidity was showcased in Minneapolis in March as part of the Walker Art Center’s Women with Vision: Past/Present International Film Festival.

Exploring where genius comes from through commentaries and interviews, the film — which includes a performance by MacDowell Medalist Merce Cunningham — was also selected to become part of the Walker’s permanent collection.

Two memoirs by MacDowell Fellows have begun the long and often arduous journey from book to screen. Michael MacDonald is writing a screen adaptation of his award-winning memoir All Souls, which focuses on his experiences growing up in the projects of South Boston during the 1970s. The film is set to be directed by Ron Shelton (Bull Durham), and is being produced by Crossroads Films. In addition, Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which he worked on at MacDowell in 2001, is also in the process of being translated to film.

Writer Michael MacDonald, who is currently adapting his memoir for the screen.

5 The MacDowell Colony

Left: Susan Smith, View Finder, 2006, found wood with acrylic on wood, 12 x 117⁄8 in.

Center: Susan Smith, Orange Metal Vertical, 2006, found painted metal with acrylic on canvas, 34 x 6 in.

Below: Susan Smith, Grid with Gray #2, 2007, found metal grid with oil on canvas, 21½ x 21½ in.

mary johnson samantha ellis

sidney marquez boquiren The MacDowell Colony

Open Studio

6 Composer

Theatre

Writer

For Manila-born composer Sidney Marquez Boquiren, the process of creating and listening to music is at its best when it is completely unhindered and organic. “I don’t like to lead listeners or constrict their experience,” explains Boquiren, whose deliberate dedication to fluidity is indicative not only of his work, but also of the arc and evolution of his professional career.

With a collection of work that to date consists mostly of chamber, choral, vocal, and piano works, Boquiren has musical roots that lead all the way back to his Filipino heritage. “Music is an important tradition in the Philippines,” claims Boquiren, who says that some of his fondest memories are of singing with his family around the piano.

While being reared in a nurturing environment undoubtedly laid the groundwork for Boquiren’s ultimate choice of vocation, it was science — not music — that brought him to the United States for college in 1988. While studying biology and chemistry on a scholarship at Butler University in Indiana, however, Boquiren couldn’t resist adding music classes to his already crowded schedule. It didn’t take long for him to shift the focus of his studies to music.

Examining ritualism and sacred traditions, Boquiren’s work has often dealt with the practices and precepts of religion. It is, however, becoming progressively more broad. “My work is shifting now from the specific to the universal. It is more about spirituality. Religion can divide; spirituality can unite.”

This idea of unification came into play in more than one way during Boquiren’s recent residency at MacDowell. Being in residence with artists of different disciplines, Boquiren says, helped him to see the connectivity between different ways of viewing the world and different approaches to making art. Working collaboratively with other artists allowed him to push himself — and his work — in very different directions. “Being around all of those artists catalyzed some creative thing in me that allowed me to stretch the boundaries.”

London playwright Samantha Ellis claims that one of the primary joys of working in the theatre is the sense of connectedness and purpose that comes from bringing a group of creative people together to work intensely on a project. “To me, theatre is the most collaborative form of art,” says Ellis, the author of eight full-length plays and numerous short plays.

While a penchant for the abstract ideals of teamwork undoubtedly guides Ellis in her creative endeavors, the act of collaboration has also played a role in her career choice in a very concrete way.

During Ellis’s first weeks of college at London’s Cambridge University, a fellow student approached her and asked if she would be interested in writing a 15-minute play. She agreed. The play went on to win a prize at a small playwriting competition.

“I got excited,” she says, “and decided to focus my studies on playwriting.”

Since graduating from Cambridge with a B.A. in English literature, Ellis has showcased her plays at numerous organizations in England, including Theatre 503, the Hampstead Theatre, the Young Vic Theatre, and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Most recently, in conjunction with The Miniaturists — a London theatre group to which she belongs — her short play Unfinished was performed at, and co-commissioned by, the Liverpool Everyman Theatre.

Ellis’s plays tend to examine the ethnic and cultural backgrounds of her characters, and the implications that personal belief systems have on the formation of interpersonal relationships. “My work is usually focused on a voyage of discovery and friendship,” she elaborates. Ellis is currently working on two such projects. The first, Cling to Me Like Ivy, is about a friendship that forms between an Orthodox-Jewish girl and a Hindu girl in London. The second, the epic Eating My Heart Out for Iraq, is based on stories told to Ellis by her mother, whose Iraqi-Jewish family was one of thousands that populated Iraq for 2,000 years.

Recounting the story of Gertrude Bell, the British archaeologist, traveler, writer, and spy who was responsible for creating Iraq, the play will be about “a woman who fell in love with the idea of Iraq and made it reality, and about whether she was right to think Iraq could be a viable country.”

At the age of 19, current Nashua, New Hampshire, resident Mary Johnson began her training as a nun for Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic religious order founded by Mother Teresa in 1950 that is active in more than 130 countries. Members of the order take vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, and devote their lives to giving “wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor.”

The decision to dedicate her life to God in this way was not a difficult one for Johnson to make. “I was very much in love with God, and I found the whole idea of loving people who are on the margins very appealing,” she explains. “I felt called.”

Answering that call placed Johnson on a path that led to two decades of intense training, study, and prayer, as well as social work with shut-ins, gypsies, refugees, prisoners, and the homeless in such places as the Bronx, New York; Washington, DC; Winnipeg, Canada; and Rome, Italy. Spending a total of 15 years in Rome, Johnson was assigned to the training of other nuns who were then sent as missionaries throughout the world. In time, she became one of the nuns most trusted by Mother Teresa, who assigned to Johnson the task of revising the order’s governing document, the Constitutions.

“Mother Teresa was an extraordinarily focused person, sincere in everything she did and determined to love God with her whole heart and soul,” relates Johnson. “I admired her greatly.”

Johnson’s high regard for Mother Teresa was one of the many things that made her decision to leave the order a difficult one. It was a decision based on a complex series of reasons, but most prominent for Johnson was the unavoidable fact that her world view was shifting to one of a more secular nature.

“The community was becoming more narrowminded, while I was becoming more broadminded,” explains Johnson, who told Mother Teresa about her decision to leave in the spring of 1997. “It is not easy to disappoint one of the world’s most admired women,” she admits.

Since leaving the order, Johnson has focused her efforts on writing — something she says has always been part of her life. She is currently working on a memoir about the 20 years she spent as a missionary, and the internal transformation she experienced that affected her outlook on life and her opinion of organized religion.

“I believe that telling my story can bring hope to many people who struggle with questions of faith, meaning, and religiously-imposed guilt.”

Sidney Marquez Boquiren

—Sidney Marquez Boquiren has completed commissions for the vocal ensemble amarcord (Leipzig, Germany), the instrumental group NOISE (San Diego, California), and the Scandinavian choral ensemble Voces Nordicae (Stockholm, Sweden), among others. He is currently working on several interdisciplinary projects, including one for members of Slagwerkgroep Den Haag (Amsterdam, the Netherlands). He is an assistant professor in the department of music at Adelphi University.

Samantha Ellis

—Samantha Ellis’s plays include Patching Havoc (Theatre 503), Sugar and Snow (Hampstead Theatre and BBC Radio 4), Startle Response (Young Vic Theatre), Martin’s Wedding (BAC), and Scattering (Arcola Theatre). She is under commission to London’s Birmingham Rep Theatre for her play Cling to Me Like Ivy.

Mary Johnson

—Mary Johnson holds an MFA from Goddard College and a diploma in religious studies from Regina Mundi Institute in Rome. She is also the creative director of retreats for A Room of Her Own Foundation, a not-for-profit institution that helps women writers. Her memoir, An Unquenchable Thirst: One Woman’s Journey of Faith, Hope, and Clarity, is scheduled to be released by Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, in 2009.

so yong kim

Harry Barba_Writer and teacher Harry Barba died on November 29, 2007, at the age of 86. Responsible for implementing the creative writing program at Skidmore College, he held teaching positions at various academic institutions throughout his career, including the University of Connecticut, Wilkes College, Marshall University, SUNY Albany, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He was the author of numerous books, short stories, and articles, including Round Trip to Byzantium, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1985, the same year in which he received the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award for his book When the Deep Purple Falls. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright professorship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Poets and Writers, Inc. He had a residency at MacDowell in 1970.

Writer/director So Yong Kim believes in the power of a shared experience. Rather than imbuing her films with heavy messages, she focuses her efforts on communicating the subjective reality of her characters, who often have a thing or two (or more) in common with the filmmaker herself. “My films come from memories, experiences, and feelings I’ve had ... things I cherish,” explains Kim, who says the semi-autobiographical context of her work frequently prompts people to ask why she makes narrative films instead of documentaries. The answer to this question, according to Kim, is all about perspective.

After attempting to make a short documentary, Kim realized that her strong inclination to view stories from a very personal, singular perspective was much better suited to narrative filmmaking — a format that doesn’t demand staunch objectivity from its storytellers.

The ability to give herself permission to experiment — an inherent part of every creative journey — has been vital to Kim’s discovering who she is as an artist. While studying for her MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, it was her willingness to try something new that led directly to the incorporation of film/video in her performancebased, mixed-media installations. In so doing, she unwittingly took the first step toward guiding her career in the right direction.

When it comes to her latest feature, Treeless Mountain, Kim credits a family member — her one-year-old daughter Sky — for making her a better director. Kim says the experience of becoming a mother helped prepare her to make the film, which was shot in Korea in November and December of 2007. “I don’t think I would have been grounded enough to do it if I didn’t have Sky,” she relates. Based on her childhood in Pusan, the film tells the story of two young sisters who are left behind on a rice farm with their grandparents when their mother immigrates to America. Kim says she wrote the story as a way to search for her roots, and also as a letter to her mother.

During her recent residency at MacDowell, Kim edited a three-hour cut of Treeless Mountain in preparation for submitting the film to festivals. “I needed the space, time, and support to make this film happen, and that’s just what I got,” she says.

Kim’s finely honed appreciation for the world she inhabits and her courage to trust in her unique voice has served her well as a filmmaker. In the end, her choice to remain true to her characters — and herself — enables her films to speak for themselves.

—So Yong Kim has exhibited her installations and films/videos throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. She is a recipient of NYFA’s Video Artist Grant, a Puffin Artist Grant, and the Sleipinir Artist Travel Grant, among other awards. Her first feature film, In Between Days (which she worked on at MacDowell), premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, where it won a Special Jury Prize. Her second feature, Treeless Mountain, was selected for the 2006 Sundance Screenwriting Lab.

The MacDowell Colony

So Yong Kim

Elizabeth Hardwick_MacDowell board member Elizabeth Hardwick died in Manhattan on December 2, 2007. A critic, writer, and prior teacher of creative writing at Barnard College, she was one of the cofounders of The New York Review of Books, for which she also wrote frequently. She gained wide attention for her essays, articles, and critiques, and served on committees, boards, and juries for many prestigious organizations such as the National Book Awards, the National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Whiting Elizabeth Hardwick in Savidge Library enjoying Medal Day Writers’ Awards, and festivities honoring Joan Didion in 1996. the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. A recipient herself of awards from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, she was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A member of MacDowell’s board of directors since 1980, she served as the presentation speaker at Medal Day festivities honoring Joan Didion (1996), Mary McCarthy (1984), and John Cheever (1979). She was 91.

Rosemarie Koczÿ_Artist, teacher, and Holocaust survivor Rosemarie Koczÿ

died on December 12, 2007, at the age of 68. A two-time MacDowell Fellow, she met her husband, composer Louis Pelosi, at the Colony in 1980. She produced nearly 12,000 pieces of art in her lifetime, many of which depicted images of the Holocaust based on her own experiences as a child in German concentration camps during World War II. A graduate from the École des Arts Décoratifs in Geneva and once widely recognized in Europe for her tapestries, she spent the last few decades of her life exploring her personal history and heritage through pen-and-ink drawings and wood sculptures. Esteemed in both the mainstream and outsider art worlds, her work resides in many public and private collections, including the Guggenheim, the Musée de la Création Franche in France, and the Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, which accepted her 16-foot wood sculpture, Deportation of the Children, into its permanent collection in 2007. Responsible for creating a community art school outside Geneva in the 1970s, she also taught hundreds of students privately — including the elderly and disabled — over the past 20 years.

Norman Mailer_Renowned and prolific

writer Norman Mailer died on November 10, 2007, in Manhattan. The recipient of the 1973 Edward MacDowell Medal, Mailer was the author of more than 30 books, including The Armies of the Night (1968), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award; and The Executioner’s Song (1979), which also won a Pulitzer. One of the founders of The Village Voice, Mailer was known for his outspokenness and tenacity, and is credited for transforming American journalism by including himself as a central character in his reportage. During a Norman Mailer at the Colony in 1973 to receive lively career that spanned 60 years, he ran for the Edward MacDowell Medal. mayor of New York, reported on six political conventions for Esquire magazine, and acted as president of PEN American Center. In 2005, he was awarded a lifetime achievement award at the National Book Award ceremonies. At the time of his death, he was working on a sequel to his 2007 novel, The Castle in the Forest, a fictional portrait of the young Adolf Hitler. He was 84.

bernice perry

Filmmaker

Remembering

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Every marathon must have its finish line, and MacDowell’s yearlong celebration

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of creativity crossed its in style on December 3, 2007. Drawing a record crowd and raising more than $875,000 for the Colony, the fête that sung in both a new year and a new century had been many years in the making. In the cavernous blackness of New York’s famed Roseland Ballroom, MacDowell’s vibrancy was fully displayed. In the spirit of the Colony, the works and voices were diverse and yet united, capturing the legacy of a place that has supported, inspired, and energized more than 6,500 artists worldwide. The stage featured the contemporary and the timeless, and even the timeless in the contemporary: a reading of Alice Sebold’s best-seller The Lovely Bones by Oscar-winner Rachel Weisz, who will star in the film adaptation; an introduction by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison before a riveting performance by soprano Angela Brown from the opera Margaret Garner, Morrison’s musical collaboration with Colony Fellow and composer Richard Danielpour; a monologue from Spalding Gray’s Monster in a Box by actress Elaine Strich; a dance choreographed especially for the gala by New York City Ballet master-in-chief, Peter Martins, set to the music of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story; a musical performance of Aaron Copland’s Hoedown by Robert McDuffie;

Popping the Cork

and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus singing an excerpt from Leonard Bernstein’s Mass; among other projects worked on at MacDowell. These were punctuated by witty reminiscences by MacDowell Chairman Robert MacNeil, Calvin Trillin, and Robert Klein. A toast was made to chairs of the gala, Ruth Feder, Tom Putnam, and Helen Tucker. The formal program finished with an onstage salute to those MacDowell Fellows in attendance, before the hard work of a historic year could be danced away with Vincent Giordano and the Nighthawks.

Outside, as guests disappeared into the frigid bluster of the night, snow began to swirl, creating a cinematic touch that seemed to honor time past and herald the unformed promise of what MacDowell will manifest in the culture to come.

Save the Date!

The MacDowell Colony’s 2008 benefit TUESDAY, December 2, 2008 On the 52nd Floor of 7 World Trade Center, New York Join us in New York City for a festive evening of fellowship and fun at our annual benefit marking the beginning of The MacDowell Colony’s second century. Additional details about the 2008 New York benefit will be announced shortly. If you would like to receive an invitation, please contact Elena Quevedo at 212-535-9690 or equevedo@macdowellcolony.org.

This page, left, top to bottom: Gala chairs Ruth Feder (left), Helen Tucker, and Tom Putnam; board members Bob and Stephanie Olmsted; Isaiah Wilson, Angela Brown, and Helen Bing; and actress Rachel Weisz.

Right: The MacDowell gala headlines the Roseland Ballroom marquee.

The MacDowell Colony would like to thank honorary chairmen Jane Alexander, Roger Berlind, Barbara Cook, Blythe Danner, David Heleniak, Kevin Kline, Robert McDuffie, and Sherie Rene Scott; Centennial visionaries Helen and Peter Bing, and Robert M. and Stephanie Olmsted; and Centennial stars Ruth and Arthur Feder, Brandon Fradd, Drue Heinz, David W. and Kathryn Moore Heleniak, Louise Eastman Loening, Thomas P. and Barbara Putnam, Helen S. Tucker/The Gramercy Park Foundation, and Rick and Terry Stone; and all the generous supporters of the 2007 Centennial gala. We greatly appreciate the participation of our corporate supporters Harcourt Trade Publishers and Random House, Inc. A very special thanks goes to chairs Ruth M. Feder, Thomas P. Putnam, and Helen S. Tucker for making the Centennial gala a most successful event. MacDowell is also very grateful to Colony Fellows Chris Doyle, Robert Flynt, Eric Novak, Laurie Olinder, Sarah Provost, and Karina Skvirsky for working on the set and projection design and installations placed throughout Roseland; and to Tom Nussbaum, Joanna Priestley, Stacey Steers, and Steve Subotnick, who designed and created commemorative flip books for MacDowell guests.

on the

Second Century

Photos by Steve Tucker

9 The MacDowell Colony

Opposite page, top to bottom: Board member and filmmaker Ken Burns with Executive Director Cheryl Young; dancers Jock Soto and Darcy Kistler; highlights of MacDowell’s 100-year history depicted with a special Centennial timeline; MacDowell Chairman Robert MacNeil with writer Toni Morrison.

From Studio To Square Art In The Public Arena

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When the very first amendment to our nation’s constitution enshrines

expression, is it any surprise that art can be a serious, meaningful act of political engagement? What can seem like strange bedfellows to some, art and politics in fact make for very natural partners in a democracy, one inspiring the other, challenging the other, even confronting the other — creating the vital tension of checks and balances that both grounds and elevates our society. In this election year, when the dominant story has been the body politic, we thought it fitting to explore some of the ways MacDowell artists inhabit it. What we discovered includes a Serbian composer enlisting music to heal deep scars in a war-torn nation (Aleksandra Vrebalov); an architect using his palette for the sake of ecology (Fritz Haeg); and a philosopher whose classic book traces the gift of art and the crucial ratio between it and flourishing civilizations (Lewis Hyde). We also heard from a Pulitzer-winner (Michael Chabon) who put his novelist’s pen away (temporarily) to write arts policy for

by Michael Chabon, member of BaraCk Obama’s ARTS Policy Committee the Democratic candidate for president, and from a Spanish artist the more difficult it then becomes to do that person Every grand American accomplishment, every harm. If you want to make a torturer, first kill his innovation that has benefited and enriched our lives, (Nicolás Dumit Estévez) whose imagination. If you want to create a nation that will stand every lasting social transformation, every moment of attempt to meet every single citizen by and allow torture to be practiced in its name, then go profound insight any American visionary ever had into a ahead and kill its imagination, too. You could start by way out of despair, loneliness, fear, and violence — in Peterborough was not just an act cutting school funding for art, music, creative writing, everything that has from the start made America the of stamina but an artistic twist on and the performing arts. shoe-leather politics.

Our children need training and encouragement and

Campaigning for creativity

world capital of hope has been the fruit of the creative imagination, of the ability to reach beyond received ideas and ready-made answers to some new place, some new way of seeing or hearing or moving through the world. Breathtaking solutions, revolutionary inventions, the road through to freedom, reform, and change ... Never in the history of this country have these emerged as pat answers given to us by our institutions, by our government, by our leaders. We have been obliged — to employ Dr. King’s powerful verb — to dream them up for ourselves.

America’s artists, therefore, are America. Collectively, they are the guardians of the spirit of questioning, of innovation, of reaching across the barriers that fence us off from our neighbors, from our allies and adversaries, from the six billion other people with whom we share this dark and dazzling world. Art increases the sense of our common humanity. The imagination of the artist is, therefore, a profoundly moral imagination: The easier it is for you to imagine walking in someone else’s shoes,

support. They need rehearsal space and tempura paint and bass violins; teachers and tap shoes. They need constant, passionate exposure to the great artistic heritage of their people, so that even if they don’t grow up to be artists themselves, they will still have been blessed, as Americans have always been blessed, with the artist’s gift for seeing the possible in the impossible; the fellow on the other side of the fence. Our artists need freedom to pursue the solitary investigations into which their art inevitably leads them. America needs that untrammeled flow of creativity, of the willingness and ability to innovate, to skylark, to tinker, to daydream out loud. Over the course of two and a half centuries now, our creative flow has filled the world’s libraries, museums, theaters, and recital halls; its academies, movie houses, and marketplaces; with works of genius to break the heart and boggle the mind. And the people of the world — our world — need an America that remains in full, confident possession of its mighty gift

With more than 6,500 artists now on record as MacDowell Fellows, there are many more stories we couldn’t fit in these pages. But what this sampling proves is something the Colony has quietly known for more than 100 years: Out of the 32 studios that dot these rural acres come the passion, ideas, and hard work that continue to make art relevant but also indispensable.

everything that has from the start made america the world capital of hope has been

the fruit of the creative imagination.

the imagination of the artist, Therefore, is a profoundly moral imagination ...

of imagination, not merely to meet the global demand for our entertainment and art and literature, but so that they — and we — need never fear the brutality, the arrogance, and inhumanity to which a nation in want of imagination must, inevitably, descend.

Michael Chabon is the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Artist Fritz Haeg (top, right) and various stages of his nationwide ecological art project, Edible Estates.

For Californian architect and visual artist Fritz Haeg, election years have now become anniversaries to trace his own national campaign. “I was visiting Australia in 2005, right after the red-state/blue-state election,” he explains, “and I asked myself what did I want to do? I had this desire to do something that took on all of America, not just the cultural areas of New York and Los Angeles. And that’s how I happened to find myself in Salinas, Kansas.”

Salinas, Kansas, is the geographic center of the United States, and it was here where Haeg began his series, Edible Estates, now three years old. Edible Estates is a curious blend of Haeg’s background, incorporating the precision of the architect with the wild abandon of the guerilla artist, while adhering to a social conscience that, front lawn by front lawn, enlists a national audience. “The project proposes the replacement of the domestic lawn with a highly productive, edible, organic garden landscape,” the artist writes.

In reinventing the American lawn — an institution deeply embedded in our national psyche, he claims — and making

“I received about 20 e-mails,” he reports, “and we’ll probably look at seven of those.” His fifth project, a large apartment complex of student housing, opened in March in Austin, Texas.

Edible Estates does beg a cynic’s question: Why dis the good ole-fashioned front lawn? It is, after all, a repository for those nostalgic and possibly nationalistic memories, so invoked by movie and television cliché (summer barbecues, neighborhood baseball games). But as it turns out, these notions are themselves flawed. The two-stroke mowers that groom our lawns, for instance, greatly contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. The pesticides and herbicides that treat unwanted plants and create that enviable green are not only dangerous themselves, but are also washed into our water supply with sprinklers and hoses — that water itself being a waste. Haeg goes on to point out the larger problems inherent in turning away from our own backyard for food and instead edible estates incorporates the precision of the architect with the to the supermarket, where fruits and vegetait proposes bles are routinely engineered and chemically the replacement of the domestic lawn with an edible landscape ... treated for appearance, uniformity, and ease of transport. He cites a startling fact: “The it a source of food, Edible Estates also confronts concepts of produce in the average American dinner is trucked 1,500 miles to reach our plates.” All this, he says, creates a “detachment energy conservation, the local food movement, landscape water use, public green space, suburban sprawl, even public from the source of our food [which] breeds a careless attitude toward our role as custodians of the land that feeds us.” In art and its community. “Coming out of a depression and becoming gardeners, he argues, we will reconsider our connectwo World Wars, our elders had every right to celebrate tion to the land. And that is a reconsideration that is personal, the comforts and conveniences of industrial progress. [But] political, and to Haeg’s mind, overdue. this is an optimism we have lost for the moment, as we are Edible Estates is a grand vision but a workable one, too. coming to terms with the limit of our resources and land.

Haeg has called his national campaign “a relatively small and Before we spread out further, how do we want to occupy modest intervention on our streets,” but it is this intervention the space we have already claimed?” that not only demonstrates how the world of ideas provokes Salinas was the prototype for Edible Estates, but Haeg has art but, more importantly, the way art informs the world since taken the show on the road. Three more lawns were of ideas. transformed into gardens in California, New Jersey, and England, and each has ranged in style, scope, and, of course, In addition to his work at Fritz Haeg Studio, Fritz Haeg has taught at edibles. Haeg says it is important to him to keenly understand CalArts, Parsons, and the University of Southern California. He has the local environment before planning the ingredients and exhibited work at London’s Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Mass MOCA, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, among others. His design of the garden. He wants the work to be sustainable, new, ongoing series, Animal Estates, debuted at the Whitney Biennial in both for the residents and the garden itself. Currently, he is March. For more information on the artist, Edible Estates, and how to get in Baltimore vetting candidates for his sixth transformation. involved, visit his Web site: www.fritzhaeg.com.

wild abandon of the guerilla artist ...

11 The MacDowell Colony

Green State

From Studio To Square

Art in a Market Economy

by Scott Timberg, reprinted courtesy of the Los Angeles Times

The MacDowell Colony

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Below: Lewis Hyde delivering his lecture on cultural civility at the 2007 Monadnock Summer Lyceum; his seminal book.

Lewis Hyde describes modern culture much the way Oscar Wilde described a cynic: “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Hyde’s 1983 book, The Gift, argues that inspiration comes to its creator the same way a gift does. Because of this, both the artist and the resulting work itself become uneasy in a market economy. This gift is most comfortable, instead, when it is kept moving — offered or traded — instead of being hoarded or commodified.

Over the years, The Gift has developed a cult following among writers and artists who rarely lend their names to anything as potentially sentimental as a book on creativity — David

into a market economy, and this book explains why and builds out on the alternative, which is to imagine the commerce of art to be well described by gift exchange.

What made you choose folktales and fables as the bases for your argument, as opposed to, say, the lives of artists?

The book has two halves, and the first builds a theory of gift exchange and the second applies it to some cases in art. To do the theory, I chose folktales and mythology because they are closer in their language and their imaginative universe to the world of art. Most of the work on gift exchange comes out of social science, either out of anthropology or some branches of

When the National Endowment for the Arts was set up, one of the lines in the legislation was that a great nation cannot call into being an artist or a humanist. But a nation can provide

the support without which no artist can survive. economics. It’s interesting, but it’s not as figurative in its language. So I turn to them as a way of widening what’s already known in the social sciences.

Is there a sense that in using stories from all over the world you’re getting at something universal, or essential, or timeless, or something like that?

This is, of course, a cultural debate we’ve had for some time now, whether there are essential and timeless categories like this.

In a sense, yes, using folktales and myths was an attempt to get the argument out of the particular and into a more general language.

You talk about a tension, a disconnect, between the artist’s inspiration and his ability to take his work into the marketplace. But haven’t many artists, especially since Warhol and going back at least to Shakespeare, been

courtesy image

quite adept at the marketplace?

Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Geoff Dyer among them. To Jonathan Lethem, it’s “a life-changer”; video artist Bill Viola calls it “the best book I have read on what it means to be an artist in today’s economic world.”

But when The Gift was released in Britain for the first time a year ago, it also drew some scorching reviews. “I have to say,” argued Tibor Fischer in London’s Sunday Telegraph, “I’m a little suspicious of someone who draws his proofs from fairy tales and the behaviour of tribes in the South Pacific, as Hyde does, since they can be used to argue just about anything.”

Now there’s a 25th-anniversary reprint out, with a new afterword. The Los Angeles Times spoke to Hyde about his thesis, his critics, and how his critique of the market economy speaks to us in an age of capitalism triumphant.

I can’t think of a succinct way to describe The Gift. Can you?

The main assumption of the book is that certain spheres of life, which we care about, are not well organized by the marketplace. That includes artistic practice, which is what the book is mostly about, but also pure science, spiritual life, healing, and teaching.

This book is about the alternative economy of artistic practice.

For most artists, the actual working life of art does not fit well

Yes, of course. And my argument is not that artists can’t do that — they can, and I think it’s wonderful when they succeed.

But I think there’s this double economy nonetheless.

Just to take Warhol as a quick example: He was quite cunning about commercializing fine art. But the fact is the largest last piece of his was a series of over 100 silk screens, which was funded by the Dia Art Foundation. To do a large-scale work of that kind, Warhol still needed a patron. So you always find this mix, even in someone as commercially canny as Warhol.

It does seem that artists and novelists have lost some of their distance from the marketplace, some of their disdain for it. We know that Tom Wolfe, for instance, left his longtime publisher for one that gave him a bigger advance. It seems much more common these days to talk about art and literature with a dollar sign attached. Does this seem different from when you were writing the book in the 70s?

Probably not. I think there’s always been a star system that has that kind of element. But the thing to realize when you’re talking about a writer like Tom Wolfe is that this is like talking about the very best baseball or basketball players in the world, and there are 100,000 people who are not at that level that I’m thinking about.

Most of the fiction writers I know struggle to make a living from their writing and have to take second jobs. And for those people, it’s important to remember that it’s not a failure on their part: It’s a structural problem that comes with the practice of art.

You talk about a resurgent “market triumphalism.”

Have our attitudes toward the marketplace changed since the book came out?

of having “a hippy disdain for ‘the market economy.’” Is that fair?

I think it was fair when I began, but I don’t think it’s fair now. I began with a real attachment to the gift-exchange side of this equation, and in a sense the book overemphasizes that, intentionally so because I felt that it was not well described or thought about. But as I said in my afterword, I ended up realizing the real problem was to have a consciousness about the two realms and to think about ways they could communicate usefully with each other.

So I have nothing against the marketplace, when it’s applied to the things it works well doing. And my books are for sale.

Maybe you’re simply reminding people that artistic work has its own dignity and value: It doesn’t need to be commodified by the marketplace to be worthwhile.

Absolutely. It has a value of its own, and sticking to that value is going to bring a satisfaction that you can’t get elsewhere.

I have a line in there where I say that artists need to be able to retreat to those bohemias halfway between the library and the slums, or something. It’s nice if a culture can provide the spaces where somebody can do these kinds of work that matter, instead of putting pressure on them to live at an unattainable standard of living.

When the National Endowment for the Arts was set up, one of the lines in the legislation was that a great nation cannot call into being an artist or a humanist. But a nation can provide the support without which no artist can survive.

That’s an ongoing question.

Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. He is currently at work on a book about our “cultural commons,” that vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to produce. A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches at Kenyon College and is a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The Expatriate

The MacDowell Colony

On that note, one of the critics of your book accused you

13

NICOLÁS DUMIT ESTÉVEZ HAS A KEEN INTEREST in taking art out of the traditional gallery. By devising conceptual projects that are centered around human interaction, his is an art that is almost social science, focused on the personal as a means of revealing the political. “For close to a decade I have been invested in the presentation of performances and actions that involve audience participation, and for which collaboration is vital,” he explains. “My work is born out of a strong commitment to art in everyday life.”

Estévez’s Peterborough Project, Pleased to Meet You — one of eight artistic commissions developed to engage the local community in celebration of MacDowell’s Centennial last year — is no exception. Touted by Estévez as “a public intervention,” the project consisted of the artist immersing himself in the local culture by attempting to meet every person living in the town of Peterborough.

“Pleased to Meet You was an experience that opened up a space for a series of exchanges between me and the town’s inhabitants,” says Estévez, who claims the core of the project rested on his ability to find commonalities with local residents. “The people I met were searching for a common denominator between themselves and me, the newcomer from a Spanish-speaking island.

Dominican friends and relatives emerged out of the Nordic Peterborough landscape.” Estévez’s engagement with locals ranged from very brief encounters, to searching for the perfect Christmas tree, to lengthy conversations, such as the one he had with a local family over dinner about climbing Mount Monadnock.

His visit to Peterborough was especially well timed in regard to the presidential race, as it enabled him to bear witness to the charged atmosphere of New Hampshire primary season. “National political figures came in and out of town with the informality of a close relative,” says Estévez, who regretted missing John Edwards, but was able to hear Rudy Giuliani speak on gun ownership and support of the Iraq war.

Ultimately, Estévez’s success in connecting with people in Peterborough was bolstered by the lessons he learned previously when undertaking a similar project in Calaf, Spain. “In Calaf, I learned the importance of reaching out to people through organizations,” says Estévez, who credits the efficacy these neutral spaces provide for opening doors that may otherwise have remained closed to him. But during his time in Peterborough, Estévez found no shortage of doors to knock on.

“To my surprise, I couldn’t keep up with the town’s full agenda: the firefighters’ open house, comedy night at the public library, the monthly havurah of a group of Jewish citizens to celebrate their faith, choir rehearsals at the Unitarian Church ... all of these were only a few of the things going on.”

With its role as the cultural epicenter of the region, Peterborough ultimately proved itself to be a permeable community, and one that will be the subject of a soon-to-be-launched Web site thoroughly detailing the project. In making the community his canvas, Estévez created a work of remarkable connection that proved that all politics are, indeed, local.

Nicolás Dumit Estévez has exhibited and performed extensively in the United States and internationally at venues such as Madrid Abierto/ARCO, IDENSITAT, The IX Havana Biennial, the Prague Quadrennial, Longwood Arts Project/Bronx Council on the Arts, and others. Awards include the PS1/MoMA National Studio Program, the Lambent Fellowship Program of Tides Foundation, the Michael Richards Fund, and the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art. In early June, Estévez launched a Pleased to Meet You Web site featuring more than 700 images of Peterborough residents and places. The address is: www.pleasedtomeetyou.org.

Two new Peterborough acquaintances pose for Estévez’s camera.

nicolás dumit estévez (2)

That I do think has changed. Beginning in the early 1990s, we got an era of market triumphalism in this country. Those who sincerely believed that the market is the best way to deliver all things are still enjoying their moment.

It means that these other realms that are not as well delivered in that way are suffering. This includes questions of how we fund higher education, secondary education, healthcare; how we fund the humanities, the arts, and pure science. And since the early 90s, the move has been to try to do all of this through private enterprise.

From Studio To Square

Peaceful Measures

The MacDowell Colony

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Serbian-born composer Aleksandra Vrebalov in Sprague Smith Studio.

Five years ago Aleksandra Vrebalov, a Serbian composer who now lives in New York, formed a collective with five other composers called the South Oxford Six. Their name — slightly infamous-sounding — is fitting. Under the guidance of Vrebalov, the group decided to put its artistic energies into political action by connecting American composers and students with Serbian audiences and creating music that fused the two. Hoping to “decentralize the Serbian culture” and reconcile the resentments for the NATO countries that bombed the former Yugoslavia in 1999, Vrebalov says her activist plan, now government funded, aimed for “a higher form of exchange that is spiritual in nature.”

Art and art organizations, she believes, tend to “fix things governments do.”

The sincerity and altruism of Vrebalov’s newfound mission is affecting. Above and beyond that mission, what she seems most passionate about is the unique way art invites critical introspection into human life, that same introspection that guides conscience, empathy, and the ability to understand — three traits that might diminish a great deal of conflict, personal or international.

Though music is the means and result of the

collective, it seems that introspection is the goal of the exchange program. In this confrontation with the self, art becomes a handmaiden of humanitarianism. It is a formula Vrebalov bases on her own life: “Being away from my country and

becoming more rooted in this one gives me enough insecurity to question things,” she says. “And when you have to redefine your identity, you also have a strong urge to understand your origins, your place.” And the origins and place of others.

We spoke to the composer recently about her work.

What do you believe the link is between art and political reconciliation?

I believe that there is a homo politcus in each of us, so creating, for me, is in part a way to respond

in this storm ... [Vrebalov’s latest work, which premiered at Carnegie Hall in March], I wanted to merge musical languages of two antagonistic ethnic groups (Serbs and Albanians) and create a world in which they can coexist and complement each other. The challenge was to use the elements of their individual identities, such as religious symbols and ethnic instruments, and to fuse them, wed them, in a union impossible otherwise.

Therefore, the powerful attributes of both Serbian and Albanian nationalism, which over the years had fueled a dark passion to exclude, become in

in the arts ... we can relive hatred, loss, shame, humiliation, with enough distance to recognize them as universal and

This is how we humanize

shared across the war lines.

those who are, according to our government, our enemies.

We are [then] more open for acceptance and reconciliation...

to the social environment and to deal with events and emotions specific to the moment. In the arts, we have a luxury of creating worlds in which real-life tensions and dramas become abstractions, available to us to mold and manipulate. In that imagined, staged world, we can relive hatred, loss, shame, humiliation, with enough distance to recognize them as universal and shared across the war lines. And this is how we humanize those who are, according to our governments, our enemies.

From the moment we realize we share that humanness, we are more open for acceptance and compassion, and eventually for reconciliation.

the piece just the opposite: the binding, structural elements of a rather striking union in music.

What about the Serbian conflict inspired you

Do you think governments, political systems

to take up this artistic challenge?

of any kind, would benefit from enlisting art

Coming from a place like Serbia, where it has been impossible to separate individual identity and destiny from the collective one — because of events such as the totalitarianism of Milosevic’s regime, nationalism at its extreme, and several wars — writing music turned out to be a way to process and cope with what has been going on for all of us over there.

in conflict?

So this has shown up in your own work?

Yes. In the specific case of ... hold me, neighbor,

Public Arts Funding Receives Major Boost The National Endowment FOR THE ARTS, a longtime supporter of artist residency programs, has received a significant increase in funding that will strengthen the overall support it can provide for arts initiatives nationwide.

On December 26, 2007, President Bush signed an omnibus appropriations bill that included $144.7 million for the NEA, raising the funding level by $20.1 million. The largest dollar increase in the NEA budget since 1979, this appropriation will allow the agency to devote more funds to arts organizations and to extend support for arts education in theatre, music, dance, literature, and the visual arts.

This news came just after the NEA awarded a $30,000 Access to Artistic Excellence grant to The MacDowell Colony to support Fellowships for eight first-time residents at the Colony in 2008. MacDowell was one of the first organizations to

In terms of your exchange program, what specifically have you detected about how art can heal those you’ve worked with?

We do not cry because music is sad, we cry because there is sadness in us, helped by music. So, art has its ways — subtle, yet direct; irrational, yet steeped in our most concrete experiences — and when we are exposed to it in a ritual of performance, we know we are protected by boundaries of that ritual. We feel safe and open to emotions.

In an ideal world of responsible governments, reaching out to artists and intellectuals would be a part of the prevention of conflict rather than post-conflict reconciliation. The benefits would be about inclusion and treating “the other” as an equal partner in keeping the peace, rather than a threat. So, government-supported cultural programs could contribute to a better mutual understanding of groups.

In real life, however, it is a super-sensitive issue, and a very problematic one. Art’s power, I believe, lies in an artist’s readiness to deal with intimate concerns and views on the world that, in the process of creation, exclude the public and certainly exclude governments. So, as an artist, I want to distance myself from my government and to counteract its doings by creating ways of dealing with political crisis. Art in the hands of government can be in danger of becoming a defender of ideology. Depending on the political agenda, it can be equally effective in both propelling the conflict and helping the process of reconciliation.

ever receive NEA funding, acquiring its initial grant to support residencies in 1972. In addition to grants supporting annual Fellowships for artists at MacDowell, the Colony has received three major NEA Challenge Grants, which ignited grassroots enthusiasm for MacDowell and helped transform it into one of the nation’s leading residency programs. These campaigns enabled MacDowell to improve its work spaces, increase its endowment and contributor base, and upgrade services that continue to benefit creative artists in the 21st century.

This March, MacDowell Executive Director Cheryl Young represented MacDowell on visits to Capitol Hill for Arts Advocacy Day. In meetings with Congressman Paul Hodes, Senator John Sununu, and the legislative aides for Senator Judd Gregg and Representative Carolyn Shea-Porter, Young attested to the value of NEA funding and asked for support on issues important to artists and the arts.

Aleksandra Vrebalov has written chamber, vocal, orchestral, and ballet music. She has received honors and commissions from Carnegie Hall, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Barlow Endowment, Merkin Hall, Kronos Quartet, and Festival Ballet Providence, among others. Her residencies include The MacDowell Colony, Rockefeller Bellagio Center, Tanglewood Music Center, Other Minds, and American Opera Projects.

Architecture 101 Critic, author, historian, and MacDowell president Carter Wiseman recently led a four-part illustrated lecture/ discussion series titled “American Architecture 101: What Makes It Great” at the Westport Arts Center in Westport, Connecticut. The series, which took place on March 11th and 25th and April 1st and 8th, focused on the historical, social, and aesthetic foundations on which the best American architecture is based, and examined the architectural design of some of the world’s most important buildings from Colonial time to the present. In conjunction with the series, Wiseman — the former architecture critic for New York magazine — also offered a guided walking tour of the campus of Yale University, where he currently teaches at the School of Architecture.

His most recent book, Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style, was released by W. W. Norton in 2007.

Thom Mayne Named MacDowell Medalist

MARK HANAUER

Committee and will be the presentation speaker, said, “I am pleased the Colony has chosen Thom Mayne. Thom has long been regarded as a kind of outsider of American architecture, with his inventive, daring, and sometimes controversial buildings. But in recent years he has moved to the center of the architectural culture with a series of major works for public and civic purposes.”

Often called the “maverick,” or the “antihomogenizer,” or the “authentic architect,” Mayne was born in 1944. Before founding his current architectural firm, Morphosis, in 1972, he received an architectural degree from the University of Southern California and a Master’s degree from Harvard.

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12:15 p.m. Edward MacDowell Medal Award Ceremony 1:15 p.m. Picnic lunch on the grounds near Colony Hall 2:00 – 5:00 p.m. Open Studios by artists-in-residence. Visit some of the 32 artist studios at the Colony.

Bring your own lunch or reserve a basket lunch by contacting The MacDowell Colony offices (212-535-9690 or 603-924-3886) or by returning the online reservation form at www. macdowellcolony.org/MedalDay. Contributions to support Medal Day are welcome and help make this wonderful community event possible. Medal Day sponsors are listed in the program and receive two complimentary basket lunches. For additional information about supporting Medal Day, please contact Pauli Ochi at 212-535-9690 or pochi@macdowellcolony.org.

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New Faces

Tim Anderson

campaign coordinator

Katya Luchanskaya

development assistant

John Martin

development associate

Pauli Ochi

events assistant

MacDowell’s Web site offers a rich source of information about the Colony.

Interested in going behind the scenes of a Fellowship experience? Watch MacDowell Moments, a 10-minute video on the Colony produced by Art:21. Want to see upcoming openings, readings, or concerts? Check out our online Calendar, which features the work of Fellows across the globe. The MacDowell Blackboard also accepts information on sublets, rides to the Colony, and more.

You’ll find e-postcards to send to friends; an entire section devoted to our 2007 Centennial celebration (including an interactive timeline and the commissioned film, Seasons of MacDowell); profiles of recent artists; a sign-up for our e-News service (providing monthly bulletins on the Colony); and much more.

Don’t forget to bookmark us — www.macdowellcolony.org — so you can keep visiting as the site is refreshed for each season of the year!

The MacDowell Colony

Education has been a significant part of Mayne’s professional legacy, specifically his creation of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), a school begun by him and several young architects to foster the unconventional and visionary in the field. The school has since become one of the most innovative architectural programs in the world.

Morphosis, which came into being during the first year of SCI-Arc’s evolution, means “to be in formation” and can be viewed as an extension of Mayne’s pioneering aesthetic. That aesthetic has been widely praised as “exuberant,” “a seamless fusion of art and technology,” “moving architecture from the 20th to the 21st century,” and “a risk-taking and visceral experience.” Morphosis’s projects have ranged from the School of Engineering building at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and the Alaska State Capitol building, to the Federal Building in San Francisco and the Sun Tower in Seoul, Korea. Commissions have also come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for a satellite control facility in Washington, D.C., and Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles for its Comprehensive Cancer Center. Morphosis has also been involved in The MIR Project, which seeks architectural solutions to the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

Among his 54 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Awards and 25 Progressive Architecture Awards, in 2005 Mayne was given the Pritzker Architecture Prize, arguably the most prestigious honor in architecture. He was the first American in 14 years to be chosen. In naming him laureate, the committee said, “Every now and then an architect appears on the international scene who teaches us to look at the art of architecture with fresh eyes, and whose work marks him as a man apart in the originality of its vocabulary.”

Since the MacDowell Medal began in 1960, the Colony has awarded it among the seven artistic disciplines, but Mayne is only the second Medalist in architecture. In 1990, architecture was created as a discipline and the Colony remains one of the few programs in the world to support architects with Fellowships. MacDowell Fellows in architecture include such well-known individuals as Les Robertson, Fred Clarke, and Tom Kundig.

News

The Colony will present its 2008 Edward MacDowell Medal to architect Thom Mayne. He will be the 49th recipient. The Medal is awarded annually to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the arts. Mayne joins an impressive list of past recipients, including Leonard Bernstein, Thornton Wilder, Georgia O’Keeffe, and fellow architect I.M. Pei. In naming Mayne as the 49th Medalist, Pulitzer-winner and Boston Globe architectural critic Robert Campbell, who chaired this year’s Selection

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Art:21 Wins Peabody

courtesy of pbs/art:21.

The MacDowell Colony

News

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Board member Susan Sollins Brown, executive director of the PBS series Art:21 — Art in the Twenty-First Century, is celebrating the George Foster Peabody Award the show received in April. Art:21 won the Peabody — a renowned international prize in electronic media — for providing “a unique forum for the display, analysis, and appreciation of myriad forms of contemporary visual art.” In particular, the episode “Protest” was singled out for examining the ways in which artists question war and express sympathy for the suffering of others. As part of MacDowell’s Centennial last year, Art:21 produced MacDowell Moments, a short film exploring the residency experience.

The film can be viewed on the Colony’s Web site at www.macdowellcolony.org/ video.html.

Video still from 2006 Art:21 episode “Muxima.”

New Hampshire Supreme Court Says Colony Benefits Society On March 14th, the New Hampshire Supreme Court unanimously affirmed a 2006 Superior Court ruling and declared that the Colony, by promoting the arts, is a charitable institution. The Supreme Court decision came more than two years after the Peterborough Selectmen rejected the Colony’s status as a charity entitled to property tax exemption. In its decision, the Court said: “The trial court [concluded] that by ‘supporting the artistic process,’ MacDowell benefits ‘at the very least, artists across the world, and, in a broader sense, the general public.’ The [trial] court further concluded that MacDowell’s artist-inresidence ‘program primarily benefits society as a whole.’ We agree.”

The decision explained that “the relevant inquiry is not whether the public … benefits from the organization’s property, but whether the public … benefits from the organization’s performance of its stated purpose. While

Oral arguments on the case were heard in Superior Court in December, 2006, resulting in Judge Gillian Abramson’s strong ruling in favor of the Colony. She wrote: “Charitable institutions, such as MacDowell, that are aimed towards enabling artists to significantly contribute to the well-being of our society should be supported, not discouraged. By fostering the creation of the arts, MacDowell serves a charitable purpose for the benefit of the general public through its artistin-residence program.”

After the trial court’s verdict, the Peterborough Selectmen chose to appeal the case to the New Hampshire Supreme Court.

The March decision by the state Supreme Court reinforced Judge Abramson’s ruling, saying, “MacDowell’s charitable purpose is not to actually create art but to promote it; that is, in the words of its charter, ‘to encourage study, research,

Likening a Fellowship to the discovery of a medical cure, the court said, “... even though the ‘reward’ goes to only one person ... the benefits will be bestowed upon the public.”

MacDowell does provide services to the Colony Fellows, its charitable purpose is, as the trial court determined, ‘promotion of the arts.’ The provision of that service benefits a far greater segment of society than the artists who actually use MacDowell’s property.”

In addition to the three other Supreme Court judges, Justices Linda Dalianis and James Duggan offered further affirmation in a concurring opinion. “Receiving a Fellowship to MacDowell is like receiving a prize or an award for excellence in art, the benefits of which ‘are of a two-fold nature.’

Obviously the individual Fellows benefit, but the general public necessarily receives the benefits of the art produced ... ” Likening it to the discovery of a medical cure, the two Justices said, “… even though the ‘reward’ goes to only one person, the fact that a particular individual someday may qualify to receive the reward is but the instrumentality through which the benefits that will be bestowed upon the public are brought about.”

The case against MacDowell began in 2005, amid the annual application process every New Hampshire charitable organization makes to its town government for property tax exemption. At that time, Peterborough’s Selectmen denied MacDowell’s charitable status, overlooking long-standing precedent set by previous Select boards, and issued a tax bill.

Prior to taking this action and bringing the case to court, the Selectmen had proposed that MacDowell make a “payment in lieu of taxes” (PILOT).

MacDowell’s board of directors unanimously rejected this proposal, adhering instead to state law and the principle that the Colony — through its 100-year mission of promoting art and awarding Fellowships — is, and has always been, a charity devoted to the public good. To date, MacDowell has awarded residencies to more than 6,500 artists, including Aaron Copland, Benny Andrews, Alice Walker, and more recently, Meredith Monk, Jonathan Franzen, Wendy Wasserstein, and Michael Chabon. The works that have directly benefited from a MacDowell Fellowship include, among many others, Our Town by Thornton Wilder, Mass by Leonard Bernstein, Death Comes for the Archbishop

by Willa Cather, and The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

and production of all branches of art; to develop a sympathetic understanding of their correlation and appreciation of their value; and to broaden their influence.’

It is MacDowell, not the individual artists, that performs that stated purpose.”

While defending MacDowell’s charitable status required significant time and resources, the Colony’s board of directors felt the issue was sufficiently important to pursue at the highest level. MacDowell hoped the case would set a precedent, one that would safeguard other charitable organizations from increasing pressure by municipalities to pay taxes they do not owe.

Said MacDowell’s Executive Director, Cheryl Young, after the ruling: “Charitable organizations exist to serve real needs in our communities, sustaining a healthy society and enhancing the quality of life for all. The law encouraging charitable uses of property is essential to that end.”

By affirming the Superior Court’s ruling, and thus the Colony’s right to property tax exemption, the Supreme Court decision also refuted each of the town’s arguments. “The town argues that certain programs facilitated

by MacDowell but provided by its artists-in-residence … do not qualify MacDowell for public charitable status. We need not address this argument, as MacDowell relies solely upon its artist-in-residence program as satisfying its public service requirement, and we have found that program sufficient.”

MacDowell’s attorney William L. Chapman observed: “The reasoning behind this decision supports a policy of valuing the arts because the arts serve the public good. This logic is relevant at the local, state, and national levels.”

After the decision, the Colony issued this statement: “Today’s Supreme Court decision affirming MacDowell’s long-standing property tax exemption is welcome news to all citizens who value the work done by charitable organizations in New Hampshire. In response to the challenge brought forth by the Peterborough Selectmen, the Court reviewed the principles set forth by our state constitution and issued a forceful opinion in support of the arts. The Court’s ruling reminds us that municipalities and nonprofits are on the same side, working to strengthen our communities and enhance the quality of life for all citizens.”

Baker and Senchak Join MacDowell Board

Left to right: Leonard Bernstein, former MacDowell Chairman William Schuman, and Aaron Copland celebrate Copland’s 75th birthday at MacDowell’s 1975 New York benefit.

Music to Our Ears When Aaron Copland first came to The MacDowell Colony in 1925, he had yet to make a name for himself as a composer. It was at the Colony that Copland communed with artists of various disciplines, emerging with material that would become some of his most iconic American music, including the 1938 ballet Billy the Kid. Copland, who completed eight residencies at the Colony, went on to serve as MacDowell’s president from 1961 until 1968.

In the spirit of this enduring relationship between the Colony and the composer, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music has made recent annual grants to support the composers’ “If my music has been conresidency program. These and other gifts from many individuals and organizations have helped bring more than 1,000 composers to nected in people’s minds MacDowell during the past century, including Sebastian Currier, with America, if people John Harbison, Osvaldo Golijov, Paul Moravec, Alvin Singleton, Louise Talma, Michael Tilson Thomas, Melinda Wagner, and find some reflection of Ellen Taafe Zwilich.

Andrew Senchak is president of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods (KBW), a full-service investment bank that specializes in the financial services sector. Having been with KBW for more than 20 years, Senchak is responsible for overseeing the company’s corporate finance practice, which includes mergers and acquisitions, recapitalizations, restructurings, and capital market transactions. Prior to joining KBW in 1985, he taught economics at Rutgers University, and also spent two years in Brazil with the Peace Corps. In addition to serving on MacDowell’s board, he sits on the boards of Newark Academy and the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.

the American spirit in my music, then certainly the Colony must have some of the credit.”

MacDowell’s ongoing push for stipend support is clearing the path for composers to accept these Fellowships free of financial worries. The Lesher Fund for Composers, created in 2007 with an endowed gift from Dr. Tom Lesher of Logansport, Indiana, will provide annual stipends to cover expenses for two composers.

This financial assistance is part of the Colony’s broader effort to ensure that residency opportunities are available to the most talented artists.

Deborah Baker and Andrew Senchak, the Colony’s newest board members.

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—Aaron Copland Recognizing the Colony’s long commitment to providing creative opportunities for contemporary composers, some donors direct their gifts to support composers through Endowed or Annual Fellowships. In honor of Aaron Copland’s 75th birthday in 1975, the Norlin Foundation endowed the Norton Stevens Fellowships, which support residencies for four composers every year in perpetuity. Annual Fellowships support a residency in the year they are given, and many donors regularly renew their commitment. The national collegiate sorority Alpha Chi Omega, for instance, has given a Fellowship for a composer each year since 1961.

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The first, of course, was Edward MacDowell, who, in collaboration with his wife, Marian, founded the Colony in 1907. What began as one composer’s dream continues to feed the spirit of American music in the 21st century.

17 The MacDowell Colony

nancy crampton

Two new members joined MacDowell’s board of directors in December.

Deborah Baker is a writer who has spent the last 17 years splitting her time between India and America. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times and The Calcutta Statesman, and her book In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (2004) was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent book, A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, was released by Penguin Press in April. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband, writer Amitav Ghosh, and her two children.

For further information about ways you can help composers at MacDowell, please contact John Martin at 212-535-9690, or jmartin@macdowellcolony.org.

An Artistic Gift “To work in the company of other artists is a gift; to have an open field of time to work is a journey; and to have a place like MacDowell that allows for both is a vivid and continuous dream.”

—David Petersen, Colony Fellow and filmmaker As artists pass through their daily lives, a world that makes time for the creative process can seem more and more like an elusive dream. For more than a century now, The MacDowell Colony has been turning this dream into a reality. The Colony opened in 1907 as a place where artists could work in peace within a supportive multidisciplinary community of their peers, and now more than 6,500 artists have received this increasingly rare gift. The artists who have worked at MacDowell — including Milton Avery, Virgil Thomson, and Alice Walker — share an enduring legacy of works that have been published, performed, and exhibited around the world, touching the lives of countless people.

By making an annual gift to The MacDowell Colony, you can help this dream live on for the more than 250 exceptionally talented artists of all disciplines who will be awarded Fellowships to work at the Colony in 2009. Enclosed in this newsletter is an envelope for a contribution to MacDowell’s annual appeal. You may also visit our Web site at www.macdowellcolony.org to make a secure donation online, or contact Katya Luchanskaya at 212-535-9690 for further information. Please make a gift today that will help bring art to life during the coming year and ensure that MacDowell continues to make dreams come true well into its second century.

Cincinnati MacDowell Society and Alpha Chi Omega Offer MacDowell Events Two long-standing supporters of the Colony recently paid homage to it with special MacDowell-related events hosted by the organizations. On November 11, 2007, at the University of Cincinnati College’s Conservatory of Music, the Cincinnati MacDowell Society presented the Cincinnati MacDowell Medal to Paavo Järvi, music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

More than 100 of the Society’s members attended the event, which included an informal dialogue with maestro Järvi followed by a reception.

The MacDowell Colony

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In addition to the medal, Järvi was also presented with a copy of MacDowell’s Centennial book, A Place for the Arts, inscribed by MacDowell Chairman Robert MacNeil.

Established as a way to honor individuals for their unique contributions to the arts in the Cincinnati area, the Society’s MacDowell Medal has been awarded 23 times in total, and 11 times in the category of music. Founded in 1913, the Society — an educational and charitable group — came about due to the friendship between Edward and Marian MacDowell and three Cincinnati women: Mary Emery, Clara Bauer, and Bertha Bauer. In addition to offering support to the Colony, the Society also presents programs for its 170 members on a regular basis, and offers grants to artists in the Cincinnati area.

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Alpha Chi Omega marked its annual “MacDowell Month” with a special event featuring MacDowell Fellow and composer David Dzubay on March 2, 2008, at its headquarters in Indianapolis. Roughly 30 of the organization’s alumnae and collegiate members turned out to see and hear Dzubay share his work and speak about his 2007 residency at the Colony. A fraternity to which Marian MacDowell belonged, Alpha Chi funded the construction of MacDowell’s Star Studio, which was completed and first occupied in 1911. The studio was permanently endowed in 1920 by Alpha Chi, which has since provided a grant each year for the studio’s continued maintenance and care. In addition, the organization also offers a Fellowship for artists and writers who need financial aid in order to partake in a residency at MacDowell.

Mary Ellyn Hutton talks with Cincinnati MacDowell Medalist Paavo Järvi about his work and career.

Bond Hall, before and after.

A Fresh Welcome

by David Macy, resident director

Late one February afternoon in 2007, I took Jim and Michael Bruss of Bruss Construction to visit Heinz Studio. In his younger days, Michael had apprenticed with Mark Lindquist, a sculptor and Colony Fellow then living in New Hampshire. Having just signed the contract for the renovation of Colony Hall, I wanted the contractors to connect directly with the artists. John Bisbee, a sculptor in residence, offered the Bruss brothers congratulations on getting the job and a little unsolicited advice: “Just don’t mess it up.”

Like an Ellis Island for creative immigrants, Colony Hall is the gateway to the land of no distractions.

Since 1916, the building has served as the social center, kitchen, dining hall, staff headquarters, and stage for countless public events. In February, 2005, we polled artists and staff about the building’s effectiveness.

While everyone expressed their deep affection for Colony Hall, a variety of conflicting uses were identified.

When we poked around in the building itself, we found the original 1814 barn, the 1916 gambrel-roofed addition, and no shortage of funky repairs and deferred maintenance. We took all of this information into our first conversations with O’Neil-Pennoyer Architects of Groton, Massachusetts.

Early in the process, it became apparent that the dining room and Bond Hall would pass through the renovation with minor edits, while the administrative and service areas would need to be reconstituted. Working with Sheldon Pennoyer’s and David O’Neil’s guidance, we established four values that would help us make the right decisions. We agreed that the building should have improved energy efficiency, enhanced natural light, barrier-free access, and improved relationships between functional spaces. Before we could begin reorganizing, 21st-century regulations including fire, health, and building codes emerged. To accommodate them, a separate maintenance facility would be required, cooking equipment would have to sit beneath a powerful, new exhaust hood, and the electrical wiring would have to be replaced. A fire suppression and alarm system would weave from the basement to the attic. MacDowell’s board, steadfast in their belief in the project’s value, considered and approved the necessary expenses.

In March, 2007, the kitchen closed for the first extended period since MacDowell began offering winter residencies in the mid-1950s. For the spring and summer of 2007, Fellows dined at Hillcrest, the former home of Edward and Marian MacDowell. While the kitchen was dismantled, the Admissions office directly above was also modified to better serve the increased volume of applications. Throughout the summer, MacDowell staff and Bruss Construction crews went to great lengths to complete the project in time for Medal Day. It was a remarkable display of cooperation. Happily, Chef Scott Tyle and his staff inaugurated the new kitchen the first week of August, serving more than 200 guests the Saturday before Medal Day. After a two-month hiatus, the Bruss crew returned to Peterborough in October. Senior Program Administrator Kyle Oliver coordinated the movements of individuals and whole departments into temporary work spaces. By February, the appearance of fresh paint helped everyone to cope with the incessant noise and dust. In March, John Sieswerda and company moved into a new workshop with three garage bays. Sited near High Street, the highly functional building was expertly crafted by Timothy Groesbeck Builders. In April, Deb Marsh and her housekeeping team gave up their temporary perch at Hillcrest for expanded and streamlined quarters below the dining room.

As it was before the construction began, the noisiest activities in Bond Hall today are Ping-Pong and billiards. And arriving artists are once again greeted and absorbed into the heart and hearth of MacDowell.

This American Life at the Fifth Annual New Hampshire Benefit On March 8, 2008, Chris Wilcha gave 160 MacDowell friends and artists an insider’s look at the acclaimed television series This American Life as the featured speaker at the annual New Hampshire benefit for The MacDowell Colony. Wilcha, a Colony Fellow who also directs and produces the Showtime program with host Ira Glass, presented segments and discussed the process and challenges of adapting Glass’s long-running NPR show for television. The program, which took place at the Shattuck Golf Club in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, was followed by a lively questionand-answer period and a live auction. The evening, which also included a silent auction, was superbly organized by the New Hampshire benefit committee, led by Sarah Garland-Hoch and Monica Lehner.

The MacDowell Colony

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Left: Filmmaker Chris Wilcha talks about This American Life. Above: Attendees mingle at the 2008 New Hampshire benefit at the Shattuck Golf Club in Jaffrey.

Thank you to our New Hampshire Benefit Business Sponsors ...

12.13.07 Interdisciplinary artist Amy Jenkins offered a lecture and a screening of her previous work. She also talked about her Peterborough Project, Water Windows, which was on display concurrently at the Peterborough Historical Society.

1.4.08 The Colony offered a screening of three films: Lady in the Wings; the short animated film In the Shadow of Monadnock, which was introduced by its Peterborough Project artists Karen Aqua and Ken Field; and a 10-minute documentary by filmmaker David Petersen about the production of Landlines, the large-scale public-art project staged at the Colony last summer.

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MacDowell Downtown

Outreach

Patrons: RiverMead, Sheehan Phinney Bass + Green PA Supporters: Aesop’s Tables and Events; Belletetes; Crotched Mountain Foundation; The Petersons; Scully Architects; Yankee Publishing, Inc. Friends: LePF Green Body Care; Roy’s Market; Sim’s Press, Inc.; Sophelle

A still from In the Shadow of Monadnock, an animated film created by local students with MacDowell artists Karen Aqua and Ken Field. The film — which was screened at the Mountainfilm Festival in Telluride, Colorado, in May — received an Environmental Prize from the Marin County Festival of Short Film and Video in California, where it will screen July 2nd–6th.

2.1.08 Composer Bobby Previte presented a live electronics show that included a presentation about the evolution, history, and invention of the modern drum set and a performance on the electronic drums.

3.7.08 Writer Mary Johnson read from her memoir-in-progress, An Unquenchable Thirst: One Woman’s Extraordinary Journey Through Faith, Hope, and Clarity, based on the 20 years she spent as a nun for Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity.

4.4.08 Playwright Samantha Ellis recruited a few of her fellow artists-in-residence to read from her work-in-progress, Eating My Heart Out for Iraq.

Amy Jenkins’s dazzling Peterborough Project, Water Windows, installed for the 2007 holiday season in downtown Peterborough.

5.2.08 Graphic novelist James Sturm discussed the process he uses when creating comics, from thumbnail drawing to finished piece.

Fellowships

The MacDowell Colony

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The MacDowell Colony awards Fellowships to artists of exceptional talent, providing time, space, and an inspiring environment in which to do creative work. The Colony was founded in 1907 by composer Edward MacDowell and Marian MacDowell, his wife. Fellows receive room, board, and exclusive use of a studio.

The sole criterion for acceptance is talent, as determined by a panel representing the discipline of the applicant. The MacDowell Colony was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1997 for “nurturing and inspiring many of this century’s finest artists.” Applications are

Clockwise from top left: Theatre artist John Jahnke; visual artist Lesley McTague; visual artist Mark Epstein; filmmaker Luke Lamborn; interdisciplinary artist Beth Krebs; and visual artist Jane Dickson.

available from either the New Hampshire or New York addresses below, or at our Web site: www.macdowellcolony.org.

Chairman: Robert MacNeil

From November of 2007 to April of 2008, The MacDowell Colony welcomed a total of 111 artists from 26 states and 7 countries.

This group included 47 writers, 19 visual artists, 16 composers, 10 interdisciplinary artists, 10 filmmakers, and 9 artists working in theatre.

President: Carter Wiseman Executive Director: Cheryl A. Young Resident Director: David Macy MacDowell is published twice a year, in June

Ignacio Alcantara, filmmaker

Santo Domingo, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Janet Allard, theatre

New York, NY

Robert Anasi, writer

Brooklyn, NY

Benjamin Anastas, writer

New York, NY

Betsy Andrews, writer

Brooklyn, NY

Karen Aqua, filmmaker

Cambridge, MA

Wende Bartley, composer

Toronto, CANADA

Brian Bauman, theatre

Boulder, CO

Brooke Berman, theatre

Ken Field, composer

Cambridge, MA

Peter Filkins, writer

Cheshire, MA

Wendy Flanagan, writer

New York, NY

Corrie Francis, filmmaker

South Lake Tahoe, CA

Travis Frazelle, visual artist

Brooklyn, NY

Jan Freeman, writer

Ashfield, MA

Amity Gaige, writer

Amherst, MA

Ramon Garcia, writer

Los Angeles, CA

Leah Gauthier,

New York, NY

interdisciplinary artist Chestnut Hill, MA

Ruth Boerefijn, visual artist

Jeremy Gavron, writer

Sidney Boquiren, composer

L.B. Green, writer

Oakland, CA

Franklin Square, NY

London, ENGLAND Davidson, NC

Marianne Boruch, writer

Jennifer Griffith, composer

Elizabeth Brown, composer

Gordon Haber, writer

West Lafayette, IN Brooklyn, NY

Feeding Hills, MA

Long Island City, NY

Jane Brox, writer

Alex Halberstadt, writer

Christina Burroughs, writer

Robin Heifetz, composer

James CaÑón, writer

Robin Hessman, filmmaker

Brunswick, ME Pittsburgh, PA

Long Island City, NY

Angela Cappetta, visual artist

New York, NY

Michael Chabon, writer

Berkeley, CA

Catherine Chung, writer

Rockville, MD

Richard Connerney, writer

Needham, MA

Katherine Crouch, writer

San Francisco, CA

Jane Dickson, visual artist

New York, NY

Kerry Dolan, writer

San Francisco, CA

Ellen Driscoll, visual artist

Brooklyn, NY

David Dzubay, composer

Bloomington, IN

Samantha Ellis, theatre

London, ENGLAND

Jeanne Englert, visual artist

Port Ewen, NY

Mark Epstein, visual artist

Rockville, MD

Brooklyn, NY

Van Nuys, CA Boston, MA

Cynthia Hopkins,

interdisciplinary artist Brooklyn, NY Nene Humphrey, visual artist

Brooklyn, NY

John Jahnke, theatre

New York, NY

Mary Johnson, writer

Nashua, NH

Louis Jones, writer

Nevada City, CA

Wade Kavanaugh, visual artist

Brooklyn, NY

Etgar Keret, writer

Tel Aviv, ISRAEL

Lucy Kim, visual artist

Bellevue, WA

So Yong Kim, filmmaker

Brooklyn, NY

Jerome Kitzke, composer

New York, NY

Andrea Kleine,

interdisciplinary artist New York, NY

Nicolás Dumit Estévez, interdisciplinary artist

Bronx, NY

The Colony is grateful for the generous support of the following organizations:

Brian Knep,

interdisciplinary artist Boston, MA Barbara Kolb, composer

Providence, RI Beth Krebs,

interdisciplinary artist Brooklyn, NY Luke Lamborn, filmmaker

Colorado Springs, CO Brad Land, writer

Conway, SC

Eva Lee, filmmaker

Ridgefield, CT

Hyekyung Lee, composer

Columbus, OH

Michael Leslie, writer

Essex, NY

Michael Lowenthal, writer

Roslindale, MA

Sara Marcus, writer

Brooklyn, NY

Cecily Parks, writer

and December. Past residents may send

New York, NY

newsworthy activities to the editor in Peterbor-

Michael Paterniti, writer

ough. Deadlines for inclusion are April 1st

Portland, ME

and October 1st. For more timely updates we

Tom Piazza, writer

encourage Fellows to post their news and

New Orleans, LA

Judith Podell, writer

events on our online Calendar.

Washington, DC

Editor: Brendan Tapley

Bobby Previte, composer

Associate Editor: Karen Sampson

Brian Quirk, theatre

Design and Production:

New York, NY New York, NY

Iraj Isaac Rahmim, writer

Houston, TX

Tom Raworth, writer

Cambridge, ENGLAND Christopher Robbins,

John Hall Design Group, Beverly, MA All photographs not otherwise credited: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey Printer: Puritan Press, Hollis, NH

interdisciplinary artist Vranje, SERBIA

No part of MacDowell may be reused in any way

Andrew Rudin, composer

© 2008, The MacDowell Colony

Jason Samuels Smith,

The MacDowell Colony is located at

Allentown, NJ

without written permission.

Vanessa Marsh, visual artist

San Francisco, CA

interdisciplinary artist New York, NY

100 High Street

Daniel Mason, writer

Bert Seager, composer

Telephone: 603-924-3886

Christian Maychack,

Jessica Shattuck, writer

Berkeley, CA

visual artist San Francisco, CA Cat Mazza,

interdisciplinary artist Troy, NY Rosemary McGuire, writer

Cordova, AK

Paul McKibbins, composer

Glen Cove, NY

Lesley McTague, visual artist

Seattle, WA

Ben Moorad, writer

Portland, OR

Martin Moran, filmmaker

New York, NY

Dorota Mytych, visual artist

Elblag, POLAND

Jenny Nichols, writer

Los Angeles, CA

Kazuo Ohno, filmmaker

Brooklyn, NY

Pat Oleszko,

interdisciplinary artist New York, NY Suzanne Opton, visual artist

New York, NY

Dominic Orlando, theatre

Minneapolis, MN

Jena Osman, writer

Philadelphia, PA

Karen Ostrom, visual artist

New York, NY

Brighton, MA

Peterborough, NH 03458 Fax: 603-924-9142

Cambridge, MA

Administrative office:

Stacey Steers, filmmaker

163 East 81st Street

Boulder, CO

New York, NY 10028

Aleksei Stevens, composer

Telephone: 212-535-9690

Brooklyn, NY

Mary Szybist, writer

Fax: 212-737-3803

Portland, OR

Web site: www.macdowellcolony.org

Pamela Thompson, writer

E-mail: newsletter@macdowellcolony.org

Worthington, MA

John Thorndike, writer

Athens, OH

Joy Tomasko, theatre

Brooklyn, NY

On the Cover…

Deb Unferth, writer

Lawrence, KS

Anne Washburn, theatre

Brooklyn, NY

Natalie Wetzel, visual artist

Greenville, OH

Susan Wicks, writer

Kent, ENGLAND

Mary-Sherman Willis, writer

Woodville, VA

Richard Won, writer

Brooklyn, NY

Karla Wozniak, visual artist

Berkeley, CA

Matt Wycoff, visual artist

Brooklyn, NY

Pete Wyer, composer

Brighton, ENGLAND

Seeps of Winter, cast paper pulp, glassine, fumed silica, 10’ x 50’ x 30’, by visual artist and Colony Fellow John Grade.

Grade worked on this piece at MacDowell in 2007. It was unveiled at Suyama Space in Seattle, WA, in January, 2008. In March of 2009, it will be sited at the base of a glacier in the North Cascade Mountains in Washington for two months.