MacDowell celebrates 100 years in full color

The title of the new, colorful, large format book celebrating 100 years of the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough is embedded with double meaning. “A Place for the Arts” honors the role of the nation’s oldest arts colony in our cultural and intellectual heritage. It also references the book’s purposefully open-ended conversation about the lives of individual artists and the place of arts in our culture.

There are many passages in its series of essays that underscore the role of the arts democracy and fulfilling lives everywhere, but people under the age of 40 might be most surprised to learn that during the cold war, arts were considered so vital to national security that Washington “overtly and covertly became a major patron of American artists abroad,” writes Robert MacNeil, chairman of MacDowell’s board of directors since 1993, in the essay “Art and Freedom,” a compelling snapshot of the role of art last half of the 20th century. He reminds us of the lending libraries the U.S. Information Agency opened around the world during the cold war, like the one in Lahore, Pakistan—which, at its peak in the early 1980s and 1990s, had more than 10,000 registered members. During that era, USIA also dispensed exhibitions, American films, and artists on tour, such as William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and others. This cultural diplomacy dropped precipitously in the 1990s, with funding and programs cut by nearly half.

Residents of the Seacoast, immersed in a well of creativity and alarmed by the cultural diaspora from downtown Portsmouth, might easily forget that not every region has a rich array of original plays, artists studios, gallery receptions and venues featuring live original music and concert musicians visiting from around the country and the world. Most of this wealth has emerged from the inspiration and perspiration of our friends and neighbors, and is at our disposal daily.

That not everyone shares this experience was brought home in poet Kevin Young’s essay, “Youngblood,” about the creative energy circuiting among the artists in residence at MacDowell. “Where else could I meet a composer!” he exclaims. “Collaboration is in the water there, however short-lived, and lets us learn about our own work and its possibilities.” Artists arrive to work, and find a sense of community that, as much as the moments alone in the studio, turns each “into the person he will be when the work at hand is finished,” writes Verlyn Klinkenborg in “Landscape of the Imagination.” This process is essential to making art. As Carolyn Diel explains in “On Fire, and Not,” while it’s more romantic to think of artists having a special conduit to God, “ideas come from the act of making, not the other way around.” Their time at MacDowell allows them shed all obligations but their art. Then, as Joan Acocella elaborates in “Time Out,” “for most people the self-confrontation that takes place in the silent cabin, if hair-raising, is a uniquely instructive experience. You discover what’s in your project, and in your head: how much substance, how much hot air.”

Library of Congress curator Robin Rausch writes detailed history of the colony from its founding in1907 by pianist Marian MacDowell to honor the wishes of her husband, highly regarded composer Edward MacDowell (whose work will be performed by the New Hampshire Philharmonic at the Palace Theatre in Manchester on May 5). The colony has grown from hosting a handful artists a year to 250 poets, sculptors and composers, novelists, photographers, filmmakers and installation artists. Many names are long forgotten, but among them they have earned more than 65 Pulitzer Prizes and 10 MacArthur Awards, to name a few honors. MacDowell itself has received its share of accolades, too, surviving hurricanes and wars and making history, both in the work it fostered and in its role as a cultural leader. Its 450 wooded acres were designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962.

Rausch explains that, though MacDowell’s example has since led to others like it around the country, “the colony was unique in its premise that artists working in different fields could influence one another.” The book includes striking images—80 full-page photographs in full vibrant color—and words, with which the artists share the transformations that occur there. “One night, walking back to your studio in the dark, you’re overwhelmed by the reef of stars above you, by the transparency of the depths you find yourself staring into. (On another), you find yourself back in your studio—dazed by the lights, no memory of how you got there—and realize you’ve been unraveling a problem all the way home,” writes Klinkenborg.

It’s not perfect. Somehow the editors allowed a local eatery to be carelessly misnamed, and there are enough repeated references to the beloved lunch baskets left daily on studio doorsteps and the “cowboy pool” played in Colony Hall that it starts to feel a little precious. All in all, though, there’s more here than just a fundraising portfolio for the colony. In addition to a being a well-documented history of the first and most preeminent of such places in this country, it provides inspiration for isolated artists elsewhere and a sense of validation that only the long view of history can give.

The essays—divided into sections about the ways in which artists use their time here, about the making of art, about the role of art in the common good— bear out Wiseman’s observation that there’s nothing like art to bind us to generations past and future, or to remind those of us living together here and now that “we are not mere socioeconomic units, not sociobiological entities, and not just consumers of entertainment, but moral beings with aspirations, cravings, anxieties, desires and dreams.”

In short, art provides an antidote to our culture’s increasingly short-term horizons and our common misperception of information as wisdom. In light of current events, “A Place for the Arts” also reminds us that among art’s most significant charms is that it replaces fear with hope.

In addition to the book, the MacDowell Colony will celebrate its centennial with a film presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in April. In September, a marathon of celebrities will read from fellows’ work at Symphony Space in New York for NPR’s “Selected Shorts” program, and a reunion picnic will take place in Central Park. Locally, MacDowell has awarded several residencies to artists whose work will engage the local community in an event, happening or conceptual work. The capstone to the local celebration will take place over the annual Medal Day weekend on Aug.11 and 12, when MacDowell is traditionally open to the public. Colony Fellow and 2006 MacArthur winner Anna Schuleit of New York City will create an installation that will engage numerous townspeople and children in a unique performance piece, invoking the memory of MacDowell’s first, and most spectactular, pageant in 1910.