The MacDowell Colony, Nurturing the Arts

In 1896, one of America’s first great composers, Edward MacDowell, bought a farm in rural Peterborough, New Hampshire, with his wife Marian MacDowell, a pianist. The two spent each summer working in the peaceful surroundings of the New Hampshire countryside. Edward claimed that he was able to produce more and better music while working at the farm. But just a handful of years after they purchased the farm, Edward fell gravely ill. He told Marian on his deathbed that he wanted to give other artists the same type of creative experience he’d enjoyed at the farm that had given him such inspiration.

Before her husband’s death, Marian began working on fulfilling his wish to create an ideal place for artists to work in the company of their peers. The "Peterborough Idea," as the project came to be known around the country, attracted numerous high-profile citizens to become involved. Andrew Carnegie, Grover Cleveland, J. Pierpont Morgan and others created a monetary fund in the honor of Edward MacDowell, to help his widow make his dream a reality.

Edward lived just long enough to see the arrival of the first Fellows to the MacDowell Colony. Marian continued building and leading the support for developing the Colony, eventually building 32 individual studios and launching an artistic program that has continually grown and flourished. Until she died in 1956, Marian traveled around the country encouraging public awareness about her husband’s mission, giving talks and lectures designed to raise funds to continue building and preserving the Colony. Today the MacDowell Colony is the leading artist colony in the United States.

In 1997, the National Medal of Arts was bestowed upon the MacDowell Colony for "nurturing and inspiring many of the century’s finest artists" and offering them "the opportunity to work within a dynamic community of their peers, where creative excellence is the standard." Since its beginnings, more than 6,000 artists have been given Fellowships to reside and work at the Colony. Every year there are more than 250 artists who come to live the experience; about half of these have attended the Colony previously. Visual artists, writers, composers, playwrights, architects, filmmakers, and interdisciplinary artists come to the Colony from all around the United States and all over the world.

When it was begun, the MacDowell Colony was just an experiment, and a vision shared by a man and his wife. Now it is an American institution, having given critical space and atmosphere to thousands of noted artists including Leonard Bernstein, James Baldwin, Thornton Wilder, Spalding Gray, Alice Walker, Aaron Copland, Milton Avery, Alice Sebold, Meredith Monk, Jonathan Franzen, and many more. Thousands of creative individuals with superlative talents have sought an inspiring environment where they can produce enduring testaments to the human imagination, and the Colony has given them just such a place and will continue to do so.