Transcript: MacDowell Madam Chairman of the Board Nell Painter welcomes the 2024 Medal Day crowd to an historic day, July 21, 2024.
Hello! …. Welcome everybody! ….. Welcome to this creative sanctuary, the brainchild of the collaborative team of Marian and Edward MacDowell! This is going to be a wonderful afternoon.
But before we go any further, I want to read to you our land acknowledgement – as I started doing two years ago. It is also printed in your programs.
MacDowell’s staff and board acknowledge that our residency program takes place in Wabanaki, the Dawnland, on the traditional homelands of the Western Abenaki people, on the Pegontagok River, in what we now call Peterborough, and we recognize the hardships they still endure as a result of the loss of their un-ceded land. We also acknowledge that our New York office is located on Lenape land. We lament the devastation of centuries of warfare and colonialism and join voices within our field of artist communities calling for a necessary illumination of the history of and investment in the future of the Indigenous peoples of North America.
We acknowledge the continued presence and sovereignty of Indigenous communities and nations today and thank our Indigenous colleagues and Fellows for their goodwill in our ongoing efforts to collaborate in the challenges of decolonizing the arts.
MacDowell will begin with efforts to understand the history of the Indigenous people of our region, through outreach to local and national Indigenous communities, and by evaluating and adjusting our residency programming to be safe and welcoming to all Indigenous artists. Art is a powerful tool for imagination, reckoning, and change, and MacDowell is committed to offering a safe place for such art to be made.
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We mention communities intentionally in that statement three times because it is through communities, including those that we belong to as well as those foreign to us and that we wish to get to know, that we derive our strength, become educated, get support and make progress in this world.
We need communities. You could look at this micro-community of women on this stage…
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And note that MacDowell makes this case.
Marian MacDowell understood the value of a strong community when she enlisted the townspeople of Peterborough to create the first of five annual pageants in our amphitheater. And if you walk around, you’ll see the amphitheater is still there. After the first of them, two brief years after the death of her husband, she took to the road in winters – and this was when there really were winters – to perform Edward’s music in front of clubs and women’s groups across the country, appearing before numerous communities, raising money to build studios and ensure that this amazing place would get off to a great start. She persisted for 25 years.
She thankfully ignored the powerful men who thought she should give up the foolish idea, the “Peterborough Idea,” and instead committed the rest of her life to actualizing a creative oasis that is like no other. She was part of a strong community and she engendered another.
When I arrived for my first residency in 2016, it was shortly after my father’s death and that pivotal presidential election that I found a gloriously diverse community of artists from all corners of the country and the globe working in several fields. I can tell you as a Black woman of a certain age just how tricky it can be to enter some communities, but the community of MacDowell Fellows is extraordinarily broadminded and welcoming, and I should say MacDowell has a marvelous staff.
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Let’s continue to build our strong community right here, a wonderful community already. Let me introduce all of you to MacDowell Fellows, past or present: Fellows, please stand up and remain standing while we recognize you and give you a round of applause.
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OK, if you have your own art practice, and you’re not a Fellow, whether your practice is amateur or professional, please stand up.
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Stay there.
And, if you came here because you love the arts, please stand up.
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If you are accompanying someone already standing, please stand up. OK, stand up and give yourselves a round of applause!
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Now this is our community, and as Madam Chairman of the MacDowell Board, I want to ask you to actualize, materially, your support. You can do that by writing a check right now, you can go to the website, you can hand a check to any of the staff here. But make your support material.
As we at MacDowell know well, the strength of any community comes from its diversity. That’s true among MacDowell Fellows as well. Our Fellows tell this to us all the time, and I can attest to that. That the gender diversity, the racial diversity, the diversity in cultural background, in ages, life experiences, and diversity in artistic practice - All these differences make for a valuable and ever-evolving coterie of Fellows. And the Fellows rotate out, not everybody comes at the same time and leaves at the same time. Call it a refreshment of Fellows all the time.
We are constantly learning from each other, and hearing different viewpoints, picking up information from artist presentations, which the artists are not forced to give. The artist presentations are purely voluntary, and of course, at the dinners. This cross-disciplinary pollination is overwhelmingly mentioned as one of the surprising rewards artists take away from their MacDowell experience. As a result of the interaction, exchange of ideas, as when a composer talks shop with a painter, or a choreographer chats with a poet, or a novelist gets into a discussion of story with an architect, something astonishing often happens. It’s a multidisciplinary mashup that can make all the difference in the world.
Those of us who cross disciplines, or work between them, are often referred to as interdisciplinary artists, it’s a wide-ranging field and the Medal rotation has come around again this year to the interdisciplinary field. One of my favorite tasks as Madam Chairman of the Board is to begin the process of determining the Edward MacDowell Medal winner by finding someone to help build a selection panel. This year, we got help in the form of avant-garde multimedia artist, Grammy-winning composer, and musician Laurie Anderson to be its chair.
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As you see, that was fantastic! Then we assembled other members, including Bushwick Starr Arts Center cofounder and MacDowell Board member Noel Allain, MacDowell Fellow and acclaimed choreographer Bebe Miller, National Black Theatre CEO Sade Lythcott, MacDowell Fellow and interdisciplinary artist Christopher Doyle, and Arts Student League Artistic and Executive Director Michael Hall.
I think you’ll all agree with me that they did a wonderful job in picking our 64th Edward MacDowell Medal winner, interdisciplinary arts icon and activist, Yoko Ono!
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And now I’d like to introduce my board colleague and president of the Board of Directors Christine Fisher who I’ve gotten to know, respect, and love over the past couple of years as a hard-working, and dedicated supporter of the arts, and especially MacDowell. Christine Fisher. Thank you.
(applause)
Visit our Medal Day page for video and photographs of the day.
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
Read David Newgarden’s acceptance of the 64th Edward MacDowell Medal on behalf of Yoko Ono
