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A Very Special Medal Day Weekend
THE MacDOWELL COLONY UNVEILS SPECIAL LINEUP
FOR CENTENNIAL MEDAL DAY WEEKENDDocumentary Filmmaker Les Blank to Receive Edward MacDowell Medal
Major Artistic Commission Landlines to Highlight Colony’s Cultural Legacy
The MacDowell Colony, the nation’s leading artist residency program, will celebrate its Centennial year with an enhanced and dynamic Medal Day program on August 11th and 12th. The weekend will underscore the Colony’s yearlong theme of “giving artists freedom to create” by celebrating maverick filmmaker Les Blank as the 48th MacDowell Medalist; revealing Landlines, a striking visual arts commission spanning both the grounds and history of the Colony; peering into the creative process with three hours of open studios by current artists-in-residence; and much more. Medal Day, which has become a cultural destination every August, this year offers a unique invitation to understand and experience the vitality of a place that has played an integral role in charting the course of our nation’s culture.
This year, its 48th year of honoring artists who have made outstanding contributions to their fields, The MacDowell Colony will award its Edward MacDowell Medal to documentary filmmaker Les Blank. Mr. Blank joins an impressive list of past recipients, including Thornton Wilder, Georgia O’Keeffe, I.M. Pei, and Merce Cunningham.
The award will be presented to Mr. Blank in a public ceremony during the special Centennial Medal Day celebration on Sunday, August 12, 2007, beginning at 12:15 p.m. on The MacDowell Colony grounds in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Noted broadcast journalist and author Robert MacNeil, chairman of The MacDowell Colony, will present the Medal, along with Carter Wiseman, president of the board, and Cheryl Young, executive director.
Regarded as one of the seminal figures in documentary filmmaking, Les Blank’s career has spanned a range of subjects that profile passionate people at the periphery of American society and the heart of its folklore. He has uncovered Polish-American polka dancers (In Heaven There Is No Beer?), Appalachian fiddlers (Sprout Wings and Fly), and American tourists in Europe (Innocents Abroad). He is also known for his intimate portrayals of such prominent figures as Werner Herzog (Burden of Dreams) and Lightnin’ Hopkins (The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins). About Blank’s work, Time critic Jay Cocks wrote, “I can’t believe that anyone interested in movies or America ... could watch [his] work without feeling they’d been granted a casual, soft-spoken revelation.” New York Times’ critic Vincent Canby has said that Blank “is a master of movies about the American idiom ... one of our most original filmmakers.”
Born in 1935, Blank studied at Tulane and the Ph.D. film program at the University of Southern California. Since completing his education, he has created more than 30 films that have received numerous awards, including a British Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and a Grand Prize at the Melbourne Film Festival. Major retrospectives of Blank’s films have been mounted in Los Angeles at FILMEX; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; New York’s Museum of Modern Art; and Paris’s La Cinematheque Francaise. In 1990, Les Blank received the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award for outstanding lifetime achievement as an independent filmmaker.
“Not only has Les created a distinguished body of work documenting some of America’s most obscure cultures and musical artists, but he’s pursued his cinematic passion in semi-obscurity with the most meager of resources,” says director Taylor Hackford (Ray, An Officer and a Gentleman), the chairman of this year’s Medal Selection Committee. “Les’s films will definitely live for generations to come, enlightening the world about America’s rich and diverse musical roots.”
Mr. Hackford was joined on the committee by filmmakers Ken Burns, Spike Jonze, Mira Nair, and Steven Soderbergh, as well as artist Anna Deavere Smith and Telluride Film Festival co-director Tom Luddy.
Since 1907, The MacDowell Colony has provided more than 6,000 artists of all disciplines with the time and private space for creative work. In assigning film as its own discipline in 1970, MacDowell was one of the first arts organizations to actively sponsor filmmakers. Since then, it has awarded Fellowships to more than 250 filmmakers, including such award-winners as Stewart Stern (co-writer, Rebel Without a Cause), Joshua Marston (Maria Full of Grace), Jennie Livingston (Paris Is Burning), and Academy Award-winner Jessica Yu (Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien). In May of this year, the Museum of Modern Art paid tribute to the history of Colony filmmaking with a two-week, 10-part traveling series entitled “Filmmakers at MacDowell: The Studio System Reconsidered.”Open Studios
After the Medal Day ceremony and picnic lunch, the public is invited to enjoy the work of current artists-in-residence as they open their studios and afford guests a rare glimpse into the creative process. From 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., the public may stroll the 450 acres of secluded woodland and engage such artists as poet and Pulitzer finalist Henri Cole, Academy Award-nominee David Petersen, best-selling memoirist and editor of Gourmet magazine Ruth Reichl, National Book Award-winner Jean Valentine, noted composer Alvin Singleton, and architect Joel Sanders. MacDowell’s Savidge Library, which features the work of all Fellows — including the scores of MacDowell Fellows Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, the books of Alice Walker, and, of course, memorabilia on Colony founders Edward and Marian MacDowell — will also be open to attendees. Newly renovated and restored is the Log Cabin, the first studio ever built on the Colony for Edward MacDowell by his wife, and the seed of what was once called the “Peterborough Idea.” Also open to the public is Hillcrest, the home of the MacDowells, where Edward’s Music Room has been kept as it was at the time of his death.
A year in the planning and spanning the Colony’s 450 acres, visual artist Anna Schuleit’s artistic commission, Landlines, will be revealed on Saturday, August 11th — the night before the Medal Day ceremony — as part of MacDowell’s 48th Medal Day weekend.
The decision to commission a major work of art arose out of the Colony’s desire to celebrate its history and the place it has called home for 100 years. “This entire year the Colony is saluting the freedom to create,” says Peterborough resident and board member David Baum. “As the place that has inspired so much great work, it seems fitting we celebrate that freedom right where it was founded.”
Beginning at 7 p.m., the first half of the work will be a stage performance, taking the decades of MacDowell as a theme. Works of art created in each decade will be reinvented by a contemporary MacDowell Fellow and a local student with whom he or she has been paired in the months prior. These five-minute performances — which will involve music, literature, visual art, and other mediums — will evoke the breadth of creativity at MacDowell, and will connect the local community to our nation’s culture. More than 75 residents have volunteered to participate in the Landlines project, making it a true community event.
Following the 10 performances (for which student and adult volunteers will also act as stage managers, lighting designers, and tech assistants), Landlines moves to the much-loved woodland of the Colony. Dotting the landscape at dusk beneath cones of colored light will be telephones from every era. They will ring and be available to anyone to pick up. Voices from around the world will provide a moving evocation of the Colony’s story. As voice is paramount to the artist, so voice becomes paramount in this installation. In the spirit of public art and with the use of telephones — the only “forbidden” item in the artist studios at the Colony — the public is invited to interact with the life of the Colony, its network of artists, and its wealth of past creations.
“Each time I have been to MacDowell, I have been struck by its curious contradiction: Out of such privacy comes the art that finds a public audience,” says Schuleit, a three-time MacDowell Fellow, whose large-scale installations often revolve around the archaeology and remembrance of public sites and modern ruins. “In art galleries, concert halls, movie theaters, and on bookshelves everywhere, the work done in the cloistered, protected setting of Peterborough has had a major impact on the outside world.” Currently a Radcliffe Fellow, Schuleit was also awarded a 2006 MacArthur Fellowship.
“Landlines will enable links between audience and artist, space and time, history and the future. By ‘violating’ MacDowell’s trademark privacy in a loving way, we will bridge the inside to the outside, and perhaps be able to lift boundaries between those within the walls of the Colony and those beyond them. It is only then that we can really understand the spirit and significance of MacDowell over the past century — and the century to come.”Additional Events
MacDowell’s Medal Day Centennial weekend has inspired local organizations to take part in the celebration. During the weekend itself, visitors may choose to visit the Sharon Arts Gallery in downtown Peterborough where a month-long exhibit of works by 18 MacDowell visual artists will be on view. Peterborough Players, the beloved summer theatre, will showcase The Long Christmas Dinner by Thornton Wilder. In the weeks prior, a screening of Medalist Les Blank’s work will take place on August 3rd at the Peterborough Historical Society, and on August 5th Colony Fellow and admired author Lewis Hyde will give a lecture on art and civility at the Monadnock Lyceum, one of the oldest lecture series in the country (established in 1829), at the Unitarian Church in downtown Peterborough. Further details on these and other participating events are available upon request.
The MacDowell Colony
In 1997, The MacDowell Colony was awarded the National Medal of Arts for “nurturing and inspiring many of this century’s finest artists.” Situated on 450 acres of woodland in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the Colony welcomes more than 250 composers, writers, visual artists, architects, filmmakers, playwrights, and interdisciplinary artists from the United States and abroad each year. The sole criterion for acceptance to the Colony is talent; a panel in each discipline selects Fellows. To learn more about MacDowell and the yearlong Centennial program, featuring events in New Hampshire, New York, and around the country, please log on to www.macdowellcolony.org.
