Transcript: David Newgarden accepts the Edward MacDowell Medal on behalf of 64th Medalist Yoko Ono on July 21, 2024.
I apologize, I am not as exciting as Yoko! But she’s very modest, I don’t have to be modest. Yoko turned 91 years old in February. She can’t attend today due to her advanced age, but she sends her love, and as Nora mentioned, she’s watching on the live web stream.
(David waves to camera)
The history of MacDowell medalists is absolutely astounding. To name few, Thornton Wilder, Georgia O’Keefe, Sonny Rollins, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Frost, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, Merce Cunningham, and so many other inspiring artists….
MacDowell has a long history of championing avant garde art; Edgard Varese and Alexander Calder received Medals in the early 1960s. In recent years, the Medal was presented to innovators, and square pegs and oddball geniuses—doing things their own way—like flicker filmmaker Stan Brakhage, cartoonist Art Spiegelman, animator Chuck Jones, and documentary filmmaker Les Blank.
(applause)
It will be a joy for me to deliver the MacDowell Medal to Yoko Ono. On behalf of Yoko, I thank Nora and Nell. Thank you, Christine, Andy Senchak, Eleanor Briggs, Chi Kaitano, David Macy, Brett Evan Solomon, Jericho Parms, Anja Mei-Ping Kuipers, chef Scott Tyle, and all the MacDowell community. I’d like to thank Laurie Anderson, and the others on this year’s Medal committee who selected Yoko. Thank you, Edward MacDowell, and especially Marian MacDowell.
(applause)
Yoko wants to thank all the citizens of the world, the residents of New Hampshire, and especially, particularly Peterborough—what a “good town to live in!”
(applause)
Yoko’s father and aunt were accomplished classical musicians. She was classically trained and was a serious student of opera as well as Japanese traditional music and folk songs.
In 1960 and 1961 (it was over a year before the Beatles recorded their first record), Yoko co-presented and hosted concerts and Fluxus arts events in her loft apartment at 112 Chambers Street in Manhattan. At the first concert there were three people in the audience: John Cage, David Tudor, and poet MC Richards. Yoko recalls that at the second or third concert, Peggy Guggenheim brought Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp to attend. In 1964, Yoko performed her powerful performance art work, Cut Piece, at Carnegie Recital Hall. The piece explores vulnerability, aggression and gender-based violence. In London, she exhibited at Indica Gallery in 1966 and performed with jazz great Ornette Coleman at Royal Albert Hall in 1968.
In the 1970s, Yoko famously collaborated with musician John Lennon and she brought him into her world of performance art, the avant garde and activism, while he inspired her to make rock music.
I started working with Yoko in 2008, when she was 74 years old. She hadn’t recorded new music for nearly 12 years, but we then recorded four new albums between 2009 and 2018, she was featured in retrospectives in over a dozen major museums around the world, including MoMA, Bilbao Guggenheim, and (currently) at the Tate Modern in London. In these years, I worked on Yoko concerts around the world with her son Sean Ono Lennon joined by many renowned colleagues and musicians that Yoko inspired. Among them Paul Simon, Iggy Pop, Bette Midler, Anohni, RZA from Wu-Tang Clan, John Zorn, Lady Gaga, and many more.
At age 75, for the first time ever in her career, Yoko received a great reception from music critics—four- and five-star reviews of her album Between My Head and The Sky. The critics were starting to catch up with Yoko. As I worked with Yoko in her 70s and 80s, it was extraordinarily hard for ME to keep up with Yoko. She constantly wore me out!
Yoko once said… (and later tweeted): “Art for me is like breathing. I have a need to do it.”
Yoko's being honored today by MacDowell as an interdisciplinary artist. Yoko never met a medium she didn't like.
(laughter)
She was a pioneer of performance art and conceptual art, and, as Nora discussed, wrote fantastic and poetic instruction pieces. She worked in sculpture and three-dimensional art and photography. She drew with pen and ink and with paint and Japanese calligraphy. She has worked with unusual artistic media like billboards, trees, rotting fruit, and her husband’s shattered eyeglasses.
Yoko designed a 12,000-foot tower of light, powered by geothermal energy—the Imagine Peace Tower on Viðey Island in Iceland. She created experimental art films: I encourage you to watch a few of her 1960s Fluxus films in the beautiful James Baldwin Library this afternoon. In music, she worked in rock, dance music, and avant-garde improvisation. Her songs run from poignant ballads to wild, uninhibited vocalizations.
She is a composer, a distinctive and unique singer, and a provocative lyricist.
Yoko's lyrics of the 70s and 80s are eerily pertinent today. She was ahead of her time in addressing many issues through her music: gender equality, women's rights and gay rights, world peace and ending war, open borders, ecology and caring for the planet. Today, there is still so much more work ahead of us.
To the artists in the audience—Yoko encourages you to use your art to change the world. Today, I’d like to pass the torch from Yoko to a future generation of creators.
Be bold, be confident, be brave, be adventurous, be revolutionary. Be true to yourself.
Break down boundaries. Make art with humanity and empathy and compassion.
I’ve had the terrific pleasure to spend this weekend with my family on the grounds of MacDowell and observe the magic of the MacDowell community, supporting and encouraging hundreds of artists each year. I applaud MacDowell for discovering and supporting and championing artists who don’t fit neatly into boxes.
It’s an honor to work with Yoko and to accept this award on her behalf. In the past 16 years, I have had the privilege to watch her up close and observe her creating, in performances, in rehearsals, in the recording studio, at her kitchen table. I am always learning from her, but she likes to say that she herself is still learning and doing new things. Continuous learning and trying new things keeps us young.
Whether you are an artist, or an appreciator of arts, or you just “know what you like,” a lesson I learned from Yoko is to bring creativity and passion to everything you do every day. Your home, your garden, your dinner table, your parenting, your grand-parenting…
Make art in your mind, make art in your dreams, look for art in the sky.
Use your day-to-day creativity to foster positive change in the world. As Yoko says, IMAGINE PEACE.
After David Macy delivers concluding remarks, Yoko would like everyone to walk over to the Wish Tree just over yonder.
Her instructions: “Make a wish, Write it down on a piece of paper, Fold it and tie it down to a branch of the wish tree.”
“A dream you dream alone is only a dream, a dream we dream together is reality.”
(applause)
Visit our Medal Day page for video and photographs of the day.
Read Nell Painter’s welcome to the crowd, describing MacDowell as a creative sanctuary
Read Resident Director David Macy's tribute to former board chairman Robert McNeil
Read curator Nora Halpern’s introduction to Yoko Ono as a loving and enduring force
