She led the Colony for nearly 25 years, against a background of two world wars, the Great Depression and other challenges.
Over the years, an estimated 5,100 artists have been supported in residence. Among the awards which their work has received, have been at least 61 Pulitzer Prizes. The colony has accepted writers, poets, playwrights, artists and composers.
Stays average four to five weeks and are limited to two months. Room and board are free, and some residents receive help with travel expenses as well. Each artist is assigned one of 32 studios for personal use available on a 24-hour-a-day basis. Each studio is a separate building with power, heat, simple amenities, lunch delivered, and no telephone. Artists allow interruptions by invitation only. In nearly every case, the studios are out of view of each other.
The Colony is a community of between 20 and 30 artists, who generally share breakfast and dinner in a common dining room. They frequently engage in group activities in the evenings.
The Colony was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962
The composer Edward MacDowell was one of the first seven members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He believed that interdisciplinary associations among artists were valuable.
In 1896, Marian MacDowell bought Hillcrest Farm in Peterborough, New Hampshire, as a summer residence for her and her husband. She had always been careful to give him a quiet room for his work. Edward MacDowell found that the New Hamsphire landscape enhanced his work of composing music.
The couple formulated a plan to provide an interdisciplinary experience in a nurturing landscape by creating an institutionalized residential art colony in the area. In 1904 Edward MacDowell began to show signs of a mental illness or dementia that ended his composing and teaching career. He died in 1908.
In 1907 Marian MacDowell deeded their farm to the Edward MacDowell Association, and founded the MacDowell Colony. The first guests were Helen Mears, a sculptor, and her sister Mary Mears, a writer. Marian and friends raised funds among a wide variety of people for the colony, which was supported by former U.S. President Grover Cleveland, industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, the financier J. P. Morgan, and other prominent people, as well as many others across the country. MacDowell said the most consistent support came from women's clubs and professional music sororities, who raised more money for the Colony than a men's fraternity did.
Starting first with lectures before women's groups to raise funds, MacDowell at age fifty resumed her performing career and became a noted interpreter of her husband's work.
The first residents came in 1907. Through the years more separate studios were built. At first soliciting members, MacDowell turned over the admissions process to a committee by the early 1920s. The program continues in dozens of buildings scattered over 450 acres
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In 1896, Edward MacDowell, a composer, and Marian MacDowell, a pianist, bought a farm in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where they spent summers working in peaceful surroundings. It was in Peterborough that Edward, arguably America’s first great composer, said he produced more and better music. Not long after — falling prematurely and gravely ill — Edward conveyed to his wife that he wished to give other artists the same creative experience under which he had thrived.
Before his death in 1908, Marian set about fulfilling his wish of making a community on their New Hampshire property where artists could work in an ideal place in the stimulating company of peers. Their vision became nationally known as the “Peterborough Idea,” and in 1906, prominent citizens of the time — among them Grover Cleveland, Andrew Carnegie, and J. Pierpont Morgan — created a fund in Edward’s honor to make the idea a reality. Although Edward lived to see the first Fellows arrive, it was under Marian’s leadership that support for the Colony increased, most of the 32 studios were built, and the artistic program grew and flourished. Until her death in 1956, she traveled across the country to further public awareness about the Colony’s mission, giving lecture-recitals to raise funds for its preservation.
At its founding, the Colony was an experiment with no precedent. It stands now having provided crucial time and space to more than 6,000 artists, including such notable names as Leonard Bernstein, Thornton Wilder, Aaron Copland, Milton Avery, James Baldwin, Spalding Gray, and more recently Alice Walker, Alice Sebold, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Suzan-Lori Parks, Meredith Monk, and many more.
In 1997, The MacDowell Colony was honored with the National Medal of Arts — the highest award given by the United States to artists or arts patrons — for “nurturing and inspiring many of this century’s finest artists” and offering them “the opportunity to work within a dynamic community of their peers, where creative excellence is the standard.” In 2007, the Colony celebrated its Centennial with a yearlong celebration of the freedom to create. You can browse through MacDowell's history by viewing the Centennial timeline here.
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