The McDowell Colony

by Gary White

I am creating these pieces so my children and grandchildren get to know who I was and what my life was like. I'm not putting all of them up on the blog, but when there is a Midwestern reference I'm posting them here.

In 1975 I was accepted as a visiting composer at The MacDowell Colony, the oldest artists’ colony in the US. Founded in 1907 by the widow of American composer Edward MacDowell, the colony provides “an inspiring environment in which to produce enduring works of the imagination.” One applies for a residency with a creative project and one is accepted on the basis of the quality of one’s previous creative work. The colony provides room and board and the exclusive use of a studio. Composers’ studios include a grand piano, writing desk, and other furniture. If the artist is a visual artist, the studio includes complete equipment to pursue creative work. Film makers are provided for with a complete production facility onsite. If you want to read more about the Colony click on the title to this piece.

The daily routine at the Colony is breakfast on one’s own in the dining room, lunch delivered in a picnic hamper to your studio, and dinner in the main house with the other “colonists.” Residents at MacDowell Colony call themselves colonists.

I applied for a one-month residency and arrived at the Colony in October, 1975. My cabin/studio was placed well back in the woods and had a stunning view of the forest. The cabin was nicely finished all in knotty pine and a hardwood floor. There was a small porch at the front. The walls of the cabin were decorated with a dozen or more large slabs of pine, called “tombstones” by the colonists, with autographs of all the previous inhabitants of the studio. An impressive list of signatures it was. To make a list of the signatures in my studio would be name-dropping, but the names would be known to anyone familiar with mid-twentieth-century US composers. I spent the first day being overwhelmed by my surroundings. As a small-town boy from southern Kansas I felt intimidated by the big names all around me on the walls. Soon, however, I got to work on my project and settled into the routine of the Colony.

To get some picture of what life at the Colony was like, imagine twenty or thirty high-strung artists with big egos bouncing around the rural New Hampshire countryside and meeting every evening for dinner. Dinner-table conversation routinely included stories of artists who had “gone off the deep end” while in residence, discussions of who was more famous than whom, and guarded statements about how one’s own work was going.

One “deep end” story will give you the general picture. It seemed that an artist who was in residence when one of my contemporary colonists was there refused to leave the Colony at the end of her stay. The staff found her in the morning in the kitchen tied to the kitchen stove. Professionals had to be called in to talk her down and get her on her way.

The “more famous than whom” stories included discussions of prizes won, articles in New Yorker, New York Times reviews, etc. The majority of the artists at the MacDowell Colony reside in New York City and what the Times says is considered to be the gospel truth. As a small-town boy from the Midwest I felt that I was undoubtedly the least famous person at the Colony. No one took any effort to disabuse me of that perception.

In any group of twenty or thirty artists in the midst of the creative process there will always be some whose work is going well, some who are struggling, and a few suffering from absolute creative block. This makes for an atmosphere filled with underlying tension. There were occasional emotional outbursts and other forms of acting out. I witnessed an evening when one of the Colonists leapt up on a dining table, did a furious dance, and ran from the room in tears. Other colonists took such events totally in stride, having witnessed nearly everything before.

Day-to-day life was fairly intense. There was my own struggles with my project, the egos of the other colonists to deal with, and predictably unpredictable behavior at dinner. Artists would be found to be missing, sometimes for several days and the staff would become concerned about their well being. There was an absolute rule at the Colony that no one but the colonist him or herself could enter the studio without being invited. “Missing” colonists could sometimes be tracked by whether the lunch basket was taken in and food consumed, but the staff had to more or less “read the tea leaves” to determine if a colonist was OK. If an artist was really hot on a project, he or she might work day and night for several days and then sleep in for a day or so.

When I got into the routine, my project progressed very well and I actually finished several days before the month was up. This allowed me to take walks in the woods, drive out from the Colony into the New Hampshire countryside and be a bit of a tourist. All in all, the MacDowell Colony experience was very productive and I could have applied again for another residency, I’m sure. Perhaps it was only my feeling of not belonging to the inner circle of New York artists, or perhaps my own struggles with the creative process were enough to have to deal with. I decided to create my own individual settings for my future creative retreats and never returned to the MacDowell Colony or any other artists’ colony.