Vol. 42 Winter 2013
IN THIS ISSUE
Ayad Akhtar wins Pulitzer Prize Medal Day 2013: Honoring Stephen Sondheim Robert Schenkkan Play Stars Bryan Cranston Financial Aid Sparks Long-Term Progress
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LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR
PULITZER PRIZE FOR DRAMA AWARDED TO AYAD AKHTAR
Making a Place for Artists
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Artists
WHAT MAKES ART SUCH A REWARD to the spirit? We now
know that new ideas spark a feeling of well-being in our brains and hearts, a response that evolutionists might say is hardwired in us to help us evolve and survive as a species. We can definitively say that art is good for us. At a recent MacDowell board meeting we explored ways to communicate the importance of what artists do, and why we support artists. We believe that art makes the world a better place so MacDowell makes a place for artists. MacDowell has seen such a significant increase in applications – a 40.4 percent increase from 1,830 in 2008 to 2,569 in 2012, the most of any residency program – that we changed our policy to limit application to once every two years. More than 1,500 of the applications received in the last year came from those who’ve not yet been to MacDowell. MacDowell’s seven admissions panels have the all-important task of identifying 275 of the most promising artists, meaning that roughly one in 10 receive residencies. This past year MacDowell received applications from all 50 states and the District of Columbia as well as 54 countries. The average age of a resident artist is 42, while an average stay is 31 days. We are glad to welcome Jonathan Gourlay as communications manager with this issue of our newsletter. Jonathan has been keeping all of us up to speed about MacDowell artists with eNews and social media posts. We hope you will be inspired by those posts to check out some of the wonderful work of MacDowell Fellows. This issue is full of news of Medal Day when a record breaking crowd came to celebrate Stephen Sondheim and rejoice in his wonderful accomplishments. On that note, we add our proud congratulations to Alice Munro, the 2006 Edward MacDowell Medalist, on being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature this year. We thank them for their many gifts to the world. It’s always been our position that each generation should pass on to the next the responsibility of supporting creative work. We are a small but mighty organization of 30 staff, more than 100 active volunteer board members and admissions panelists, and dozens more volunteers who take on special projects to raise funds and awareness. Having your support and that of so many others who want to help make a difference adds up. As a result of this combined effort, MacDowell has granted 13,309 residencies and is world renowned. Thank you!
Actor and writer Ayad Akhtar was in a London hotel room just three days removed from his 2013 residency at The MacDowell Colony when the phone rang. It was the press agent for Lincoln Center, where Akhtar’s play Disgraced had its New York run late in 2012. “He said, ‘You won the Pulitzer Prize,’” Akhtar said. “I thought I was dreaming.” Akhtar, 42, was in London to consult on a new staging of Disgraced, his one-act play about a successful Pakistani-American corporate lawyer who thinks he has distanced himself from his cultural roots. When he and his white wife host a dinner party, chitchat about art eventually turns into a debate about religion, racial profiling, and September 11, and he sees his carefully created life begin to fall apart. Disgraced was first produced in Chicago, where it won the 2012 Jeff Award for Best New Play. After London, Akhtar expects the play to return to New York. “You always dream about winning something like this, but you never really think it’s going to happen,” he said of the Pulitzer. “It was a really kind of surreal experience.” Akhtar joins at least 70 other MacDowell Fellows who have won the award since the Colony was founded in 1907. A graduate of Columbia University film school, Akhtar wrote and starred in the feature film The War Within, about a friendship between two Pakistani men that falls apart when one becomes a terrorist, and authored American Dervish, a coming-of-age novel about a PakistaniAmerican who confronts his Muslim heritage when he falls
Cheryl A. Young Executive Director
MacDowell Fellows Win Prestigious Prizes from American Academy in Rome MacDowell Fellows Nicholas de Monchaux, Dan Hurlin (pictured at left), and Dan Visconti have all been awarded 2013-2014 Rome Prizes to spend nearly a year pursuing work at The American Academy in Rome. The academy typically awards the prize to 30 individuals following a national competition. Hurlin, who has been in residence at The MacDowell Colony twice and is on the Board of Directors, is the director of the graduate program in theatre at Sarah Lawrence College where he teaches dance and puppetry. He’ll be spending about 11 months in Rome, using a sabbatical year from teaching. “I’m working on a theatre project based on a number of tiny, puppet-sized plays by the Futurists,” Hurlin said, referring to the artistic and social movement that first came about in the early 20th century. “I’m going to develop about a dozen toy theatres, each housing a play, and to be performed simultaneously.” Joining Hurlin in Rome will be architect Nicholas de Monchaux, an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California in Berkeley. De Monchaux was in residence at The MacDowell Colony in 2002. In Rome, de Monchaux said he would examine architectural and urban design solutions to create greater social and infrastructural resilience in Rome’s fabric. Another MacDowell Fellow, Daniel Visconti, is one of two composers who received awards for musical composition. His compositions often explore the rough timbres, propulsive rhythms, and improvisational nature of jazz, bluegrass, and rock and roll. He has said these are elements that tend to collide in unexpected ways with his experience as a classically trained violinist. Visconti’s project is titled “Living Language.”
in love for the first time.
CYNTHIA HOGUE RECEIVES ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS AWARD MacDowell Fellow and Arizona State University Professor Cynthia Hogue won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for her co-translation of Virginie Lalucq and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Fortino Sámano (The Overflowing of the Poem) along with Sylvain Gallais. Hogue says she finished the translation drafts during a MacDowell residency in 2008. She says two other MacDowell Fellows helped during the project: writer Julia Zarankin reviewed the French drafts, and visual artist Morgan O’Hara provided “LIVE TRANSMISSION: movement of the hands of pianist Martha Argerich while performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1” for the cover.
MORE AWARDS, GRANTS, AND FELLOWSHIPS SHARON DOLIN, Poet Witter Bynner Fellowship STEVEN M. BURKE, TOM CIPULLO, TED HEARNE, KAMRAN INCE, AND ARTHUR V. KREIGER,
Composers
American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards in Music ALEXANDRA CHASIN AND JUSTIN SPRING, Writers Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowships MARIE PONSOT, Poet Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize HANNAH SANGHEE PARK, Poet Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship EUGENE GLORIA, Poet Anisfield-Wolf Book Award TANIA ISAAC, Interdisciplinary Artist Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Fellowship KRISTEN VALDEZ QUADE, Writer Rona Jaffe Foundation Award HANK HEHMSOTH, Composer Fulbright Specialists Program Grant DONALD ANTRIM, Writer MacArthur Foundation Fellowship
SALOMÉ LAMAS, Filmmaker DAAD Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program Fellowship 2013 Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships awarded to 20 MacDowell Fellows among 175 artists and scholars: LOUIS K. ASEKOFF, Poet ERIN COURTNEY, Playwright BARBARA HAMMER, Filmmaker SHARON C. HARPER, Photographer MAJOR JACKSON, Poet BEN MARCUS, Writer CLEOPATRA MATHIS, Poet DAVID MEANS, Writer CARMAN MOORE, Composer PAUL MORAVEC, Composer CARRIE MOYER, Painter SYLVIA NASAR, Writer ANN PIBAL, Painter MATTHEW ROSENBLUM, Composer IRA SACHS, Filmmaker BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY, Poet SHEILA SILVER, Composer TERESE SVOBODA, Writer MARY JO VATH, Painter COLSON WHITEHEAD, Writer
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“ Craftsmanship — which I would define, in the context of art, as the compulsive taking of pains — is what makes Stephen Sondheim my hero. 3 And I would argue that it’s for the man’s painstaking craft, as much as his art — if the two can even be separated out that way, and after more than a quarter-century as a working artist I’m not sure they really can — that we honor Stephen Sondheim today. Make no mistake — let me be clear — Sondheim is, in my view, among the four or five most consistently, lastingly great American artists of the postwar era, in any discipline...” —CHAIRMAN MICHAEL CHABON Clockwise from left: Fifty-fourth Edward MacDowell Medalist Stephen Sondheim sat for an interview with PBS Newshour in Savidge Library before the medal presentation; MacDowell Colony Chairman Michael Chabon welcomed 2,200 arts lovers to Medal Day; picnickers enjoy the perfect weather; Sondheim applauds Peterborough Players interns singing “Comedy Tonight.”
M U S I C A L T H E AT R E L E G E N D H O N O R E D AT M E D A L D AY
Celebrating
Sondheim
Author Frank Rich Introduces 2013 MacDowell Medalist Stephen Sondheim LIKE COUNTLESS OTHERS, I was moved by Stephen Sondheim’s words and music before I knew his name. In the late 1950’s, his early lyrics for two of the most enduring works in the history of the American theater, West Side Story and Gypsy, gave indelible voice to characters who had never had a chance to sing before on an American stage: confused young lovers desperately trying to find a place for themselves in a New York City succumbing to tribal gang warfare, and a homeless, fatherless family, a fierce mother and her two lonely daughters, trying to survive emotionally and economically in the midst of the Great Depression. Soon after, Steve had his first Broadway hit as both a composer and lyricist – A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a riotous farce refashioned from the classic Roman comedies of Plautus…And so the die was cast. Still barely 30, here was an artist with a range matched by few others in any creative calling in America. Who else has written major works of any genre inhabited by characters as various as those in the Sondheim canon? His musicals have centered on, among others, Georges Seurat and a mass murderer in
Victorian England, addled married couples in late 1960’s Manhattan and an isolated Japanese populace confronting the arrival of Westerners in the 1850s, Grimm fairy tale icons and American presidential assassins, elegant Swedish aristocrats convening for a weekend in the country and broken-down Broadway Follies performers staggering through a boozy final reunion. Steve is the first recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal to be honored for achievements in musical theater. This is overdue, not only because of his extraordinary and still ongoing career but also because musical theater is America’s one major indigenous art form. Indeed, the American musical is representative of American culture at large: it crossbreeds the high and the low, the tragic and the ridiculous. It reflects every racial, ethnic and immigrant component of the great melting pot. Its roots are as much in vaudeville as in opera, and, in our true national fashion, it often tries to stuff everything into a single thick sandwich: music, dance, drama, jokes, spectacle and magic. At its best, there is
Presentation speaker and New York magazine Writer-atLarge Frank Rich and his wife, writer Alex Witchel, walk to the Medal Day tent.
Scan this QR Code to read Michael Chabon’s complete message: www.macdowellcolony.org /Michaels_2013_Medal_Day_Speech.pdf
“ Residencies have proven their worth many times over, and in the past 25 years there has been an explosion of programs like MacDowell here and abroad. If you would like to see the studio that provided the template for thousands of others around the world, take time to visit MacDowell’s log cabin.” —EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR CHERYL A. YOUNG
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nothing like an American musical, and in truth, no other culture, and that includes Britain’s, has really come close to replicating it. But you have to wonder where the American musical would be today without Stephen Sondheim. The chronicle of the modern musical runs less than a century, and Steve’s contributions have defined and dominated more than half of that span. The first half of that history was arguably defined by Steve’s mentor Oscar Hammerstein II, the playwright and lyricist whom he met as a child through the happenstance that Hammerstein was in his mother’s social circle. It was Hammerstein’s Show Boat, written with Jerome Kern three years before Steve was born, that first staked out the possibility that the musical theater could be more than songs, gags and shopworn romantic plots, and it was Oklahoma!, written with Richard Rodgers as Steve was coming under Hammerstein’s tutelage, that solidified that theatrical revolution. Hammerstein died in 1960, just as Steve’s career was coming into full bloom. By then the torch had been passed about as explicitly as it ever could be in cultural history: Steve, while never emulating Hammerstein’s writing style, was determined to build on his mentor’s theatrical innovations, and the rest proved literally history. In show after show, Steve kept pushing the boundaries of the musical even as he forged an incomparable catalogue of songs whose emotional power, wit and musical dazzle never age no matter what fashions in songwriting come and go all around them. This required not just talent and craft but courage. As everyone here knows, the relationship between an artist of any kind and the American cultural marketplace is always fraught, often treacherous and all too often destructive. To complicate matters further, the musical theater is by definition a financially costly collaborative enterprise. A musical’s author may be lucky enough to secure, say, a commission, a grant, a teaching gig, or a residency at an institution as glorious as MacDowell. But to actually put on a show demands large amounts of capital that usually mandate the sponsorship of commercial producers, with all the burdens that entails. Rodgers and Hammerstein were lucky enough to write their groundbreaking shows at a time when American pop music and Broadway music were synonymous with each other, putting musicals in the commercial mainstream. By contrast, Sondheim and his contemporaries arrived in the theater just as rock came in. Broadway music forever lost its hold on the hit parade not to mention on pop culture in general, making musicals harder to get on.
Steve could have taken the easy way out by trying to pander to the marketplace, but instead his shows became ever more adventurous. He hung in even after some of his most esteemed early collaborators, Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins, abandoned the Broadway theater altogether. He hung in despite being either dismissed or left out entirely in reviews of his early shows, including West Side and Forum. He hung in despite being scorned by some of his supposed colleagues in the so-called New York theater community. In my years as a theater critic, before Steve and I became friends, I did not unequivocally praise everything he wrote, but I was a fierce champion of Sunday in the Park with George. Incredible as it may seem nearly 30 years later, that show aroused such hostility in the Broadway establishment, a hostility comparable to that which greeted its hero, Seurat, in his time – that even I got a tiny taste of the blowback, finding myself under attack by colleagues in theater journalism who were baffled that anyone could like such an idiosyncratic piece in the heyday of brassy musicals like La Cage aux Folles, which won the Tony Award that year. Sunday in the Park, by the way, didn’t just lose the Tony Award. Its Broadway production failed to repay its cost to investors, and did not have a road tour: It was, by the commercial theater’s standards, a flop. So was Follies, so was Pacific Overtures, so were the original productions of Assassins and Merrily We Roll Along. Yet these and most Sondheim musicals remain in nearly constant repertory today while many of the hits and prize winners of their seasons have faded. That Steve was able to persevere, never for a second compromising his art, despite the many obstacles in his path along the way is a remarkable drama in itself. Some of this strength, too, was handed down by Oscar Hammerstein. In 1947, Rodgers and Hammerstein came forth with a wildly experimental show called Allegro, now little remembered except as one of their rare failures, sandwiched in between Carousel and South Pacific. The 17-year-old Steve was hired as a gofer by the production, giving him the opportunity to witness close up the integrity, stamina and work ethic of his surrogate father as he labored in vain to create something striking and iconoclastic and new in the face of huge commercial pressures and a hostile audience and critical reception.
Above: A Medal Day visitor considers color studies in Firth Studio created by painter Patricia Treib. Below: (standing, left to right) MacDowell Colony Executive Director Cheryl A. Young, Frank Rich, Chairman Michael Chabon, and Resident Director David Macy. (seated, left to right) New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan, Stephen Sondheim, and MacDowell President Susan Davenport Austin.
Another influence that Hammerstein had on Steve also pertains to his character as much as to his work. Hammerstein inculcated in his young student a reverence for the act of teaching itself. Throughout his career, Steve has been a tireless mentor and cheerleader for countless young artists who have aspired to enter the theater. My own first encounter with Steve, more than 40 years ago, was, as Michael described, the result of a letter he wrote me about a piece I’d written for my college newspaper. His out-of-the-blue intervention was the first encouragement I ever received from any professional writer, let alone an artistic hero, and it proved life-changing. Some 20 years later, after I left criticism and Steve and I could become friends, he proved to be a support, sounding board and inspiration, whether the sphere was writing or life. There are hundreds of stories like this, I suspect, just as there are millions of others whose lives have been affected by hearing, seeing or performing Stephen Sondheim’s work. I am so honored to speak for all of them today as we thank Steve for all he has given us and join The MacDowell Colony in celebrating him as a great American artist unlike any other.
“ I remember many years ago as a young girl my excitement whenever my family would visit New York because that meant we would see a show on Broadway. One year I excitedly asked my father what we were going to see. He said, ‘We’re going to see a show called, Sunday in the Park with George.’ When I asked him what it was about, he told me that it was about an artist who paints on Sundays on an island in the park. I was underwhelmed. However, by the end of the first act, I was enthralled. By the end of the show my life was changed. I have quoted the line, ‘White, a blank page of canvas, his favorite — so many possibilities’ too many times to count. To this day, I have a copy of the painting ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’ hanging in my office. I am convinced that the lyrics in the song “Chromolume #7/Putting it Together” that referenced ‘the art of making art’ is part of what eventually led me to my involvement with MacDowell today.” —MACDOWELL COLONY PRESIDENT SUSAN DAVENPORT AUSTIN
Stephen Sondheim Accepts Edward MacDowell Medal and Ebb – who turned it into what is now considered an art form – enough of an art form to be included in college curriculums, at any rate. And there are many people who haven’t forgiven us.
I’m not only humbled and privileged, I’m astonished to be in the company of the other Medalists. I’m even more astonished to be the third oldest recipient – only Georgia O’Keeffe and Chuck Jones were humbled and privileged later than I. The difference, of course, is that my birth certificate is merely a convenience – I’m actually just over 25 and the most promising songwriter on the block.
The fact is that today musicals, as I prefer to call them in order to avoid any discussions of pretentiousness or coyness categorizing them, especially the musicals that originate off-Broadway and in regional theaters, have as much variety and vitality as straight plays do. This is both a happy fact and a sad one – happy because they do have such variety and vitality and sad because they’ve taken over the commercial theater like kudzu. Nowadays, few plays make enough money to sustain the playwrights who write them. Robert Anderson, one of the playwrights who was able to sustain himself during a long career (although he had to resort to screenwriting every now and then) purportedly said that in the theater you can make a killing, but you can’t make a living. Today, that is true only of people who write musicals. The era of the blockbuster Neil Simon hit is over, with rare exceptions like War Horse – which is more like a musical than a play, anyway.
That’s the trouble with awards for a body of work. They always come at both a good time and a wrong time: good because they tell you that what you’ve been doing was worth the doing, and wrong because they ought to come when you’re young and excited and hungry for assurance that what you’re doing is worth the doing. One of the problems of getting awards when you’re established is that you start to believe your notices. Too much recognition can curb the appetite and venerability can kill it. Not if you’re Picasso or Stravinsky, of course – nothing could slow them down. But to live that long and still be that hungry to explore and keep exploring is what separates the geniuses from the gifted. Still, although I may be among the oldest of the medalists, I take genuine pride in being the first to represent the former runt of the arts: musical comedy. Yes, I mean musical comedy, not musical theater. Musical comedy became musical theater only recently – “recently” in the larger scheme of things, meaning over the last few decades. The transformation became certified when institutions of higher learning began offering courses in the subject. And I don’t mean those hyper-contemporary institutions, which offer such specialized subjects as contract bridge and water-skiing (I kid you not, my half-brother went to one). No, I mean respectable, not to say venerable, centers of education like Yale and Princeton and Dartmouth and Northwestern, which not only offer courses but have entire departments devoted to musical theater. The geniuses of musical comedy like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and the Gershwins (to them, Porgy and Bess was an opera, not a musical) would probably have chuckled or even guffawed at the notion of their product being taken so seriously. It was Oscar Hammerstein, of course, who kick-started the whole thing, first with Jerome Kern and Show Boat and subsequently with Richard Rodgers and Oklahoma!, Carousel and the like. By the time he got finished with it, musical comedy had become musical theater. It got further refined by the next generation: Lerner and Loewe and Frank Loesser in particular. But it was my generation – writers like Bock and Harnick and Kander
I’ve never visited The MacDowell Colony before, and seeing it now, that is something I regret. But I do have a tenuous connection to it, or at least to its founder. When I was eleven years old, I was enrolled at New York Military Academy, not because I wanted an Army career but because that’s where baffled children of recently divorced upper middle class parents were sent while the parents tried to straighten out their lives. To my surprise, and perhaps to yours, I enjoyed the school very much, not least because in the assembly hall was the second largest pipe organ in New York State, surpassed only by the one at Radio City Music Hall, but still bigger than the one at the Roxy. It wasn’t the instrument that got me (I don’t much like the sound of the organ), it was the four different manuals and the dazzling colored tabs for the stops – dozens of them to press in myriad combinations. And then there were the pedals, on which you could dance and make different sounds, even though my legs could barely touch them. Anyway, the first piece I learned was MacDowell’s most famous melody, “To a Wild Rose,” which I loved not because it was so beautiful but because it was easy to play, being very slow and consisting mostly of sustained chords, which allowed me to experiment with every stop I could get to, often from bar to bar, creating a crazy quilt of varying timbres and dynamics. This began my interest in MacDowell’s music and later, when I took piano lessons, I worked my way up to, but not through, the Piano Sonatas – they were really difficult, and I couldn’t find any recordings to guide me. I did find a recording of the 2nd Piano Concerto, however. In my teens, I collected classical 78s, the rarer the better, and the Piano Concerto was rare indeed. I
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Above: Chairman Michael Chabon and Stephen Sondheim with the Edward MacDowell Medal. Below: Members of the Grand Monadnock Youth Choir Cecilia Ensemble singing “Another Hundred People.”
think I paid at least five times the retail price for it, but I liked the music because it reminded me of Rachmaninoff, whose music I adored. I think MacDowell did, too. One final observation: As most of you probably know, there is a cycle of rotation among three primary disciplines involved in the awarding of the MacDowell Medal: one year a writer, the next a composer, the next a visual artist, and so forth, the rhythm occasionally interrupted by a filmmaker or a choreographer. A new category was introduced in 2003, when Merce Cunningham received the Medal for Interdisciplinary Art, because his work comprised both musical and visual ideas in collaboration with other artists. Well, perhaps this Medal should be for Interdisciplinary Art too, then, because I do not write alone, I’m a collaborator. Collaboration is the lifeblood of musicals – the collaboration between the songwriters, if there are more than one, and the librettists, if there are more than one. Traditionally, this has been less important to opera, where music is the driving force and the libretto is subordinate to it. In the kind of musicals which Oscar pioneered and which have been the standard ever since, no matter how experimental some of them have become, the reverse is the case: the libretto is the engine and the songs arise from it and are enhanced, or sometimes made to look foolish, by it. Interdisciplinary or no, this Medal is for Musical Theater. I’d like to accept it on behalf of Oscar and all his descendants who made the category possible – including, I have to say, myself. Thank you.
Since 1996, MacDowell in the Schools has been introducing artists to local students in grades 3 through 12. Some Fellows present their work, others lead workshops or help with portfolio reviews. Since 2001, another program called MacDowell Downtown has built a following as part of First Friday. March through November, MacDowell Downtown presents a delightful variety of composers, performers, playwrights, filmmakers and writers. In the last 12 months these two programs combined to connect 42 MacDowell Fellows with nearly 2,000 local arts lovers. —RESIDENT DIRECTOR DAVID MACY
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I’VE READ SOME OF THE ACCEPTANCE SPEECHES by other Medalists, and almost every one of them said that they were humbled and privileged to be in the august company of the other Medalists.
Pulitzer-Prize winner Robert Schenkkan’s (above) new play All the Way starring Bryan Cranston, of AMC’s Breaking Bad fame, was produced at The American Repertory Theatre this past fall. The dramatization of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s first year in office examines how means versus ends played out when an assassin’s bullet propelled L.B.J. into the highest office in the land at a time when it was becoming clear it was also the most powerful office in the world.
FELLOWS EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE ADDS TO MEMBERSHIP MacDowell’s Fellows Executive Committee (FEC) held elections in April to replace outgoing members: Anthony Schneider, Seth Riskin, Eleanor Cory, and Scott Frankel. The newly elected members — composer Michael Harrison, interdisciplinary artist Brandon Neubauer, composer Andrew Rudin, and writer Seamus Scanlon — will serve three-year terms. Comprising artists who have been in residence, the FEC serves as an advisory group to the Colony. With first-hand knowledge of the MacDowell experience, the FEC works to build and engage the community of Colony Fellows and provides feedback and recommendations to the Colony’s staff and board of directors. To learn more about the FEC, log on to www. macdowellcolony.org/artists-
New Voices of Change Initiative Serves Middle Eastern Artists For many artists MacDowell’s slogan “Freedom to Create” is a given. Now with a new focus on the Middle East, the Colony is reaching out to artists who cannot always count on that freedom. Voices of Change, a collaboration with the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), is promoting residency opportunities to artists across the region. Since the initiative was launched in fall 2012, six artists from five different countries have been offered MacDowell residencies. For Syrian filmmaker Nabil Maleh, the freedom he experienced at MacDowell was a welcome contrast to the demands that have come with other support. “This is very rare,” said Maleh, whose acclaimed work is featured in film schools and festivals around the world. Since Maleh’s residency, five other Voices of Change Fellows, Palestinian architect Lana Judeh, Lebanese composer Joelle Khoury, Turkish filmmaker Burcu Koray, Egyptian filmmaker Mohammad Shawky Hassan, and Turkish writer Zeynep Kayhan have completed residencies.
fec.html or e-mail the committee at fec@macdowellcolony.org.
Shari Frisch de Miskey_New York artist Shari Frisch
de Miskey died on March 28, 2011, at the age of 97. De Miskey was known for her abstract paintings and book designs, but mostly for her illustrations. She was married to photographer, Walfred Moisio. De Miskey, who was in residence in 1951, studied in New York and spent her summers in Provincetown at the Hans Hoffman School. Some of her best-known illustrations are in the books Epitaph of a Small Winner and The Prophesis of Nostradamus.
Susan McDonald White_Visual artist and non-fiction
writer Susan McDonald White died on June 20, 2012, at home in Weston, MA, at the age of 51. White, who was in residence in the fall of 2002, was an art conservator and restorer, specializing in ancient art. White also produced her own work and exhibited numerous times in the Boston area. She earned degrees from Duke University, Harvard University, and the University of Delaware.
Robert Ward_Composer Robert Ward, who was in residence in 1938 and whose best-known work, an operatic adaptation of Arthur Miller’s drama The Crucible, won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for music, died at home in Durham, NC, on April 3, 2013, at the age of 95. Ward studied composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, was chancellor of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and taught at Duke University. Oscar Hijuelos_Cuban-American novelist
Oscar Hijuelos, who became the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1990 for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, died suddenly on October 12, 2013. He was 62. The writer was in residence four times, most recently in 1997.
New & Notable Neuroscience meets meditation in Nene Humphrey’s installation/ performance Circling the Center. The multimedia liturgy of sound, film, and live performance weaves images of animated MRIs, electronic circuitry, and Victorian mourning braiding with sounds of serenading rats in a lab, metronomes, and chanted braiding pattern instructions. The performance at Dixon Place Theater in New York was presented in conjunction with Humphrey’s solo exhibition at Lesley Heller Workspace last spring.
Medeas, a new film by Orlando Tirado, is making the rounds of international film festivals. It premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in late summer and stars Academy Award nominee and Golden Bear winner Catalina Sandino Moreno and Tony Award winner Brian O’Byrne. Tirado co-wrote the script with the film’s director, Andrea Pallaoro.
Actor, playwright, and MacDowell board member Lisa Kron wrote the book and lyrics for Fun Home, a musical composed by Jeanine Tesori based on the Alison Bechdel book. It had a successful run at The Public Theater in New York. Coming up at the Public, Kron will join Thornton Wilder’s nephew and literary executor, Tappan Wilder, and others to read and discuss Wilder’s classic 1931 one-act The Long Christmas Dinner at Joe’s Pub for one night only on December 10.
During her residency, Tamiko Thiel developed an installation called Shades of Absence: Governing Bodies, an augmented reality memorial to the “Culture Wars” in Washington, D.C., focusing on censorship involving high government officials. It premiered during the exhibition “Manifest:AR” in the Corcoran Gallery before being placed permanently in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Capitol Building, and the National Endowment for the Arts offices in the Old Post Office Pavilion.
Kirk W. Johnson is a writer and director of the List Project, which began as an endeavor seeking to resettle more than 1,500 American-affiliated Iraqis after they were abandoned by the U.S. government. His first book, To Be a Friend is Fatal, is about the fate of these Iraqi interpreters and was published by Scribner in October. While in residence, Johnson had the unusual experience of listening—with other fellows—to an interview with him about the book and The List Project as it aired on the National Public Radio program “This American Life.”
COURTESY PHOTOS
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Artists
Robert Schenkkan Play Stars Bryan Cranston
biographies Nancy Decker Dougherty died on February 6, 2013, at home on Shelter Island, NY, at the age of 73. She was raised in Columbia, MO, and earned a bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe College in 1961. Dougherty, who was in residence in the spring of 1991, earned a master’s and doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1987, she received the PEN Girard award for best non-fiction by a previously unpublished female author.
Remembering
Nancy Decker Dougherty_Film critic and writer of
When Yotam Haber’s A More Convenient Season premiered at the Alys Stephens Center in Birmingham, AL, late last month, one reviewer called it “a monument to Birmingham’s civil rights legacy.” The premiere of the piece, which Haber says “walks a tightrope” between an oratorio and an opera, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963, when four young girls were killed. It was performed by the Alabama Symphony, a 90-voice chorus gathered from Mississippi State University, Tuskegee University, and several Birmingham groups, including the UAB Gospel Choir and Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Children’s Choir. It was conducted by Michael Morgan. Vint Virga’s book, The Soul of All Living Creatures: What Animals Can Teach Us About Being Human, was published by Crown/Random House in June.
exploring the art of the Mississippi Delta region was the home of Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly in Oxford. The two writers and spouses had just recently co-written a novel, The Tilted World (HarperCollins 2013), and discussed it with visitors. Friends of MacDowell also explored the birthplace of the blues, Faulkner country, and stops commemorating the roots of the Civil Rights Movement.
A few days later, Solomon introduced Ghikas to Patience Haley at a reception in the Eugene Coleman Savidge Library, a meeting that would launch a 50-year partnership. Haley, who worked primarily in water-based media, said the two were so taken with each other that they left the Colony together when her residency was complete. “We became engaged in January, and Panos set sail for Greece in February,” said Haley, calling the six months they were apart “a very painful separation.”
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The two decided to get married that following December in Savidge Library, inviting family and all the artists who were in residence at the time. After returning twice more for residencies at MacDowell, the couple worked together on restoring two large Barry Faulkner murals at former New York Governor W. Averell Harriman’s family estate. The work led to other commissions, including a mural in gold leaf completed in 1980 for the World Trade Center’s 110th floor restaurant, Windows on the World.
JONATHAN GOURLAY
Outreach
In April, poet Hannah Park, winner of a 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry fellowship, met with Advanced Writing students and their teacher at ConVal High School to answer questions about her writing process and how to overcome writer’s block. Park later returned to ConVal to conduct a workshop with students. In May, Noluthando Lobese welcomed a group of Advanced Theater students from ConVal (pictured left) during her spring residency. She shared examples of her previous work as a costume and set designer and described her process. Later in May, visual artist Martha Clippinger met with art students and two faculty members and presented a slideshow of her work and discussed her artistic influences with the students. In July, composer Florent Ghys and interdisciplinary artist and choreographer Will Rawls met with 25 Walden School students and faculty in Savidge Library. Ghys talked about composing and played a piece on his double bass, and Rawls talked about a new project, The Planet Eaters, which was staged at The Chocolate Factory in November.
MacDowell Downtown In March’s edition of MacDowell Downtown, Stephen Kuusisto (at right) presented poems and nonfiction about his experiences as a user of guide dogs. In April’s presentation, Erik Santos sang original compositions and played guitar. In May, interdisciplinary artist Johannes Heldén presented and discussed his visual art, poetry, music, and Web-based work. In June, composer Peter Van Zandt Lane performed on the bassoon and talked about his new ballet. In August, “Sondheim! The Birthday Concert” was screened to honor Stephen Sondheim’s upcoming appearance to accept the 54th Edward MacDowell Medal. September featured playwright Stacey Gregg, who showed a clip of her film Spoof or Die and was later joined by visual artists Michael Scoggins and Eleanor King in a reading of her 2011 play Perve. Egyptian filmmaker Mohammad Shawky Hassan presented two short films and discussed his upcoming work, and finally, the collaborative trio of visual artists Ben Beres, Zac Culler, and John Sutton discussed their installations that mix sculpture with painting, drawing, and video, among other media. In other events, musician Sam Moss performed at the Mariposa Museum in Peterborough as part of the three-day The Thing in the Spring music and arts festival, and visual artists Michael Scoggins and devised theatre artist Janaki Ranpura contributed pieces to a curated exhibition at the Sharon Arts Center in downtown Peterborough. The show, (con)TEXT, featured art that incorporates text.
MARIA PROVIDENCIA CASANOVAS
MacDowell in the Schools
FEC REUNION PARTY The Annual Fellows Reunion in New York City broke not just one but two records on October 18, 2013, drawing more than 200 artists and raising more than $4,000! Planned and hosted by the Fellows Executive Committee, the party gives MacDowell Fellows the chance to reconnect and to pay forward the MacDowell gift in a meaningful way by supporting future residencies at the Colony with their donations. This year’s party was held at the Little Airplane in the South Street Seaport. Thanks to the following sponsors for donating food and raffle prizes: Lagunitas Brewing Co., Donut Plant, New York Theater Workshop, Aldea Home + Baby, Damascus Bakeries, Roundabout Theater, Garden of Eden, Trader Joe’s, and Peterboro Basket Co.
7 WINTER 2013 • THE MACDOWELL COLONY
One of the stops along the way on the 2013 National Trip to Mississippi
Ghikas was in his fifth MacDowell residency getting ready to leave in late summer 1962, when friend and fellow painter Hyde Solomon convinced him to extend his stay to meet a young painter who was about to arrive. Ghikas, who received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. at the Yale School of Art and later won a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the Akademie der Bildenden Kuenste in Germany, had no immediate obligations, so he remained behind.
Events
FRIENDS OF MACDOWELL TRIP VISITS DELTA REGION
When Panos Ghikas died in 2012 at the age of 95, the art world lost one of its preeminent master gilders and an expert in egg tempera painting. He left behind a legacy of solo works as well as restorations that he completed with his wife, Patience Haley, a collaboration that began at The MacDowell Colony.
COURTESY PHOTO
ELENA QUEVEDO
Panos Ghikas and Patience Haley, a Truly MacDowell Collaboration
NEW BOARD MEMBERS
Nickitas Demos COMPOSER
News
SCULPTOR
Sarah Garland-Hoch
Anne Stark Locher MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS EXECUTIVE
Mark Foster Gage ARCHITECT
Richard Peña
PROFESSOR OF FILM STUDIES
Brian Rogers
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Financial Aid Sparks Long-Term Progress for Colony Fellows WHITING, LEVY FOUNDATIONS AND OTHERS GIVE MORE THAN $120,000 A YEAR TO ARTISTS.
“Thanks to Whiting, Levy, and others, we have been able to expand access to residencies for all artists regardless of financial means,” says MacDowell Executive Director Cheryl Young. “This support is so critical, especially for emerging artists who are working far ahead of the marketplace and cannot support themselves on their artwork alone.” Seeing the impact of financial aid on artists, other funders and individual donors have decided to invest in stipends. The Rona Jaffe Foundation endowed a fellowship for emerging women writers which provides a $2,500 stipend in addition to residency support. The Pollock-Krasner and Graham foundations have also donated fellowship and stipend packages for artists of need.
The Whiting Writers’ Aid Program, which was established in 1998 with annual grants from the Whiting Foundation, helps with some of the everyday expenses artists incur. Before then, artists could get travel support through the MacArthur and Putnam foundations, but ongoing costs such as lost income, rent, and childcare were not covered. At the time, stipends were a new priority for The Whiting Foundation. The Leon Levy Foundation followed suit in 2006 with a three-year $150,000 grant to support artists working in other disciplines.
While Ford and others have found success, the survey results show that the financial hardships of the creative life have not eased in the last 43 years. Of the artists surveyed, at least half work other jobs to supplement their artistic income, and 46 percent have had to cut time spent on their art due to financial obligations related to the economy. Faced with these challenges, the artists cited a residency as a particularly effective solution to easing the pressures of the economy and making them more productive. The vast majority (83 percent) prefer a residency and financial aid package over a larger individual cash grant. Identifying a range of reasons for preferring residencies, more than 93 percent of the artists polled said MacDowell has had a positive impact on their careers.
For artists like filmmaker Yance Ford, this help provides some important validation for their creative work. Ford, whose first documentary Strong Island is currently in post-production, describes a subtle yet powerful impact that cannot be easily measured in a survey. “The Leon Levy stipend was like a down payment on my future,” she says. “As a first time filmmaker with no previous work to reassure MacDowell or the Levy Foundation, my residency was like winning the lottery. The Levy stipend was a tremendous validation of me as ‘an artist’ independent of the social value of the subject matter of my film.”
Scan this QR code to read the full story and see a table illustrating survey responses.
In the survey, recipients of Whiting Writers’ Aid and Leon Levy stipends say their time at MacDowell led to more than 600 new works of art, awards, and other accomplishments.
Immediately following the Edward MacDowell Medal presentation ceremony on August 11, visitors flocked to see the newly renovated Eugene Coleman Savidge Library. Tim Groesbeck and his team of local carpenters and sub-contractors executed the design by internationally renowned architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. The 2,900 square-foot glass and granite structure complements historic Savidge Library in a way connected to the woods and meadows following a landscape design by Reed Hilderbrand of Watertown, MA. Built in 1928, the original building will remain a favorite spot for artists to connect with past Fellows.
The MacDowell Colony is located at 100 High Street Peterborough, NH 03458 Telephone: 603-924-3886 Fax: 603-924-9142 Administrative office: 163 East 81st Street New York, NY 10028
Telephone: 212-535-9690 Fax: 212-737-3803 Web site: www.macdowellcolony.org E-mail: newsletter@macdowellcolony.org
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 pianist Marian Nevins 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 available on our Web site at www.macdowellcolony.org. Chairman: Michael Chabon President: Susan Davenport Austin Executive Director: Cheryl A. Young Resident Director: David Macy
PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE
On the cover…
Stephen Sondheim applauds during Chairman Michael Chabon’s opening remarks kicking off the medal ceremony on August 11, 2013. Cover photo by William Gnade MacDowell is published twice a year, in summer and winter. Past Fellows may send newsworthy activities to the editor in Peterborough. Deadlines for inclusion are April 1st and October 1st. Editor: Jonathan Gourlay Design and Production: John Hall Design Group, Beverly, MA All photographs not otherwise credited: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey Printer: Deschamps Printing, Salem, MA Mailing House: Sterling Business Print & Mail, Peterborough, NH No part of MacDowell may be reused in any way without written permission. © 2013, The MacDowell Colony The names of MacDowell Fellows are noted in bold throughout this newsletter.
macdow.convio.net/site/PageNavigator/ 2013OctoberWhitingLevyGrantFunding.html
MEDAL DAY VISITORS GET FIRST LOOK AT RENOVATED LIBRARY
that respects tradition while pointing the way to the future. The new building is
Jason Van Nest
Even with full fellowship support, nearly 55% of the artists surveyed say they couldn’t accept a residency without direct financial aid today.
Give artists time and a little bit of money, and they may prosper for life. This is the message of a recent survey conducted by The MacDowell Colony involving more than 600 artists of all disciplines who received financial aid with their residencies between 1998 and 2012. It reprises a 1969 survey that the Colony published in the Saturday Review. With major grants from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, and other partners, MacDowell awards more than $120,000 a year in stipends and travel support to artists who otherwise could not afford to take time off for a residency. More than 40 percent of the 275 artists who work at MacDowell each year qualify for amounts of up to $1,000 each.
JONATHAN GOURLAY
WINTER 2013 • THE MACDOWELL COLONY
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Andrew Ginzel
facebook.com/MacDowellColony OMISSION In the Summer 2012 newsletter an item about Kevin Puts being awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music for the opera Silent Night neglected to mention that the libretto was written by Mark Campbell. Congratulations to Kevin and Mark, and apologies for the omission.
The Colony is grateful for the generous support of the following organizations: