RECOVERED HISTORY; THE MACDOWELL COLONY

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS - The Library of Congress is celebrating the centennial of The MacDowell Colony – the first artists’ residency program in America and the model for hundreds of others – with a new exhibition titled "A Century of Creativity: The MacDowell Colony 1907-2007." Among the many featured artists included in the exhibition are composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, playwright Thornton Wilder and novelist Willa Cather. The MacDowell Colony was founded in 1907 by composer Edward MacDowell and his wife, Marian, on 450 wooded acres in Peterborough, N.H. Their vision was to provide artists of exceptional talent with uninterrupted time, a private workspace and a dynamic community of peers to inspire creativity and excellence. This simple formula has had a profound impact. The MacDowell Colony has, to date, awarded fellowships to more than 6,000 writers, visual artists, composers, playwrights, filmmakers, architects and interdisciplinary.

Aaron Copland was unknown as a composer when he first came to The MacDowell Colony in 1925. The artists he met there that summer changed his perception of art in America. Years later, Copland acknowledged his debt to the Colony, saying that if people found his music distinctly American, the Colony deserved some of the credit.

Playwright Dorothy Kuhns met poet DuBose Heyward at The MacDowell Colony in 1922, and they married the following year. When the Heywards returned to the Colony in 1924, DuBose was working on his novel Porgy. It was Dorothy who convinced DuBose it would work as a play, and the two collaborated on dramatizing the story, which became the basis for George Gershwin’s legendary opera Porgy and Bess.

Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-prize winning play Our Town is inextricably linked to Peterborough, New Hampshire, which was a model for the play’s fictional town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire.