September, 2002

Over MacDowell’s many Medal Days — 43 now to be exact — the Colony has heard that the day’s chief joy is interacting with acclaimed and emerging artists during their open studios. This past Medal Day was no exception. Numerous people approached staff and Colonists alike to describe the unique enrichment they experience in chatting up the artists-in-residence. Inevitably, they ask: Why don’t you do this more often? MacDowell Downtown, our new program, is our answer to that. Though the Colony has emphasized community outreach in the area’s public schools since 1996, MacDowell Downtown is a formal way of extending the interaction with artists at the August celebration into the year.

Our kickoff event is a timely one. It has to do with politics, New Hampshire, and the season known for debates, mudslinging, and general mayhem in the quest for that most elusive prize: one good candidate. In other words, election season.

David Coggins, a 26-year-old photographer from Minneapolis, MN, is all about this season in New Hampshire. While in residence, Coggins is capturing the personal vs. public lives of politicians in a show called Political Dinners. “I’m really interested in politicians. I’m interested in their private behavior when they’re home with their families and how they negotiate that in public,” he says. Coggins is using his residency at MacDowell to both approach and capture New Hampshire political candidates in their home environments. Dinner, he notes, is the key ingredient to the project. “I try to do projects that show something everyone does…like eating a meal. Sometimes artists get so detached; they scoff at things. I’m not an advocate of that. I want people to enter the civic debate. I want to get people together, create work that involves people in a common environment.”

Coggins has taken this approach in prior endeavors. Last year, in his project A Month Without Rent, he spent the night at a different person’s home and photographed the bedrooms he slept in. Then, when he found his new apartment, he made postcards of his photographs, mailed them to the respective hosts, and had a housewarming party they attended. “People are curious about others, and they want to come together. All of my ideas are about bringing people from different communities together.”

Another of Coggins’ ideas was to take photographs of people’s books and present them one atop the other as though they were shelves on a wall. The “shelves” not only displayeded the literary tastes of his subjects but their overarching quirks and characteristics. “I like reconfiguring things — books, bedrooms, meals — and letting them reveal our personalities.” In doing so, Coggins’ larger aim is to reveal “our shared tendencies,” which lend a humanism and universality to groups some might call disparate. For his MacDowell Downtown show, Coggins plans on inviting all the politicians who have hosted him as well as fellow MacDowell artists and the public, and thus unite in some fashion these diverse groups.

September’s installment of MacDowell Downtown will allow visitors to view the photographs Coggins has taken, but in keeping with the spirit of his project, the bulk of the time will give people in attendance a chance to meet and enjoy each other’s company. Coggins will be on hand to describe with more precision the goals of Political Dinners, its future, and take questions.

Artist David Coggins (left)
with State Senator Ted Leach.