MacDowell

Art and artists are made at MacDowell. For more than a century, MacDowell has given artists time, space, community, and freedom to create.
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MacDowell's mission is to nurture the arts by offering talented individuals an inspiring residential environment in which to produce enduring works of the creative imagination.

05/29/2026

For one day each year, MacDowell opens its campus to the public, offering a rare glimpse into the spaces where artists live and work.

The studios, typically private places of reflection, experimentation, and creation, welcome Medal Day guests inside to encounter works in progress and engage directly with artists in residence. It is a longstanding tradition we are honored to continue.

Join us this Medal Day as we celebrate visionary composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton, 66th recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal. Following the ceremony, the afternoon will unfold with open studios, conversations with Fellows, and picnics across campus in honor of artistic fellowship and creative exchange.

To purchase a picnic basket, make a donation, or learn more about the day, follow the link in our bio.

05/27/2026

A multimedia meditation on the borders between experience and memory by Avi Amon ( ‘24)

Part concept album, part memoir, part immersive concert, Avi Amon’s MOTHER/ROAD invites audiences to participate in an act of emotional memory.

For this production, Amon creates a musical meditation on grief, memory, and family using cassette tapes carried by his parents when they immigrated to the United States from Istanbul in 1979.

The piece explores the porous nature of time, how it fades and distorts, and how—like a cassette tape—it can rewind, warp, and overwrite itself. Out of the stuff of memory, music and sound compose new worlds at once fragile and infinite for the generations to inhabit together.

July 17-18

05/21/2026

The Medal Day picnic tradition is a simple and cherished one.

Following the Medal Day ceremony, visitors gather amid the gardens and greenery to enjoy a picnic meal that resembles the lunch baskets our artists in residence receive every single day. The afternoon unfolds with walks along the meandering roads of MacDowell’s campus, leading to the open studios that await exploration.

For more information on Medal Day, including the purchase of a picnic basket catered by , visit the link in our bio.

05/20/2026

Spanning space, time, and systems of exchange, the expansive work of Malaika Temba ( ’26) traces the threads connecting labor, migration, and global commerce.

Temba’s work is currently on view as part of ‘FADE’, a group exhibition by
May 1-September 6
NYC

Transforming textile, a medium historically marginalized within the hierarchy of fine art, into one that bears the weight of labor and colonial histories, Malaika Temba’s large-scale tapestries, embroideries, and installations honor the generations of women whose quiet work has sustained households, economies, and cultures for millennia. At once intimate and global, Temba’s work extends the lineage of textile traditions into new forms as both cultural inheritance and contemporary intervention.

Slide 5
Preparing Dinner
Woven cotton rayon and acrylic paint
61” x 52”
2025

Slide 6
U Don’t Have to Call
Woven cotton rayon and acrylic paint
53” x 69”
2023

05/15/2026

Composer, multi-instrumentalist, educator, and music theorist Anthony Braxton breaks down the Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct.

A pioneering force in contemporary music, Braxton’s expansive career spans jazz, opera, improvisation, and interdisciplinary composition.

Join us on June 28 in Peterborough, New Hampshire, as we celebrate Braxton, the 66th Edward MacDowell Medalist.

For more information, visit the link in our bio.

05/13/2026

Award-winning filmmaker and five-time MacDowell Fellow Kimi Takesue () has been added to The Criterion Collection, home to some of the world’s most celebrated films and filmmakers.

“Directed by Takesue: Crossings and Encounters” premiered this month, launching 11 of her films on the Criterion Channel. Honored to have her work presented alongside cinematic giants such as Yasujirō Ozu, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, and Abbas Kiarostami, Takesue describes this recognition as the greatest achievement of her filmmaking career.

“The visually mesmerizing and deeply reflective films of Kimi Takesue traverse genres—including documentary, fiction, and experimental forms—to explore the charged spaces between observer and observed. Often centered on the act of travel, Takesue’s work follows tourists and locals as they navigate shared yet unequal terrain… Through her immersive long takes, Takesue invites audiences into moments of intimacy and unease that continually challenge our assumptions.” —

Congratulations Kimi on this extraordinary recognition and achievement. We are so proud to call you a friend and Fellow.

05/12/2026

Bess Wohl’s ‘Liberation’ has won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Drama!

“An unadulterated pleasure. Powerfully moving and funny. When these women talk, we want to hear every word... Looks at community and individuality, determination and self-determination, in an elegiac and impassioned manner.” – The New York Times

Set in 1970s Ohio, the play follows Lizzie, who gathers a group of women to talk about changing their lives and the world, drawing directly from the story of Wohl’s own mother and the consciousness-raising feminist groups of the era.

Congratulations to two time MacDowell Fellow, Bess Wohl ( ‘10, ‘17) on this remarkable, well deserved win.

05/11/2026

MacDowell Fellow Coleen Baik ( ‘26) held May’s MacDowell Downtown audience captive as she presented three animated works and guided attendees through her evolving creative practice.

Baik’s first film, Tuscany, [slide 2] was drawn frame by frame in Photoshop over 15 months and explores fear, rebirth, and the cyclical nature of passage. Through her later films, Chamoe and 엄마 나라 | Mother Land, Baik developed new visual styles and animation techniques. The latter marked a shift toward a looser, more abstract narrative approach. She also experimented with phonotrope animation, a technique that uses a turntable and camera to reveal motion imperceptible to the naked eye.

Baik is now fully embracing hand-drawn animation in her newest film, Vespertine, created with graphite on index cards. She developed sequences for the film during her residency at MacDowell.

05/07/2026

Virgil Thomson’s definition of music was famously “that which musicians do.” His compositions drew from the rhythms of everyday speech and the simple harmonies of the hymnbook, a distinctly American vernacular that set him apart from his European contemporaries.

Thomson was the 18th recipient of the MacDowell Medal. This year, we are honored to continue this tradition by presenting the 66th Medal to composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton.

Please join us on June 28 in Peterborough, New Hampshire to celebrate Braxton’s contributions to contemporary music.   For more information on Medal Day, visit the link in our bio.

05/06/2026

Directed by Leonardo Pirondi (.pirondi ‘25) and produced by Paulo Carneiro ( ‘26), Tropical Fractals premieres this week at Indie Lisboa (). Congratulations Fellows!

On an interstellar journey, a group of scientists studies the last living vestiges of Earth. The artificial intelligence, Museo, becomes a portal to the crew’s diaries and a fragmented archive of humanity. On Earth, the one believed to be the last of the humans traverses a ruined planet that is slowly recovering, little by little, from the apocalypse it endured.

May 07 2026, Thursday, 19:15 (72’) Cinema São Jorge, Room Manoel de Oliveira • C.3

Pirondi’s films have been exhibited in various festivals, such as the Toronto International Film Festival, the Tiger Short Competition in Rotterdam, the New York Film Festival, Viennale, Mar del Plata, FICUNAM, BFI London, and Festival du Nouveau Cinéma. He is a Sundance Institute Fellow and holds B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees in film from the California Institute of the Arts.

05/05/2026

Tangible Tale
April 15 - May 29
The Mayor Gallery ()
9 Bury Street, London

For 25 years, Lisa Corinne Davis ( ‘17) has drawn on her lived experience to explore the complex relationship between race, culture, and systems of societal classification—questioning the human impulse to categorize. Her paintings layer warm, organic marks with warped geometric grids reminiscent of maps and genetic diagrams, creating surfaces that shift and pulse with hypnotic energy.

Inspired in part by falsified Soviet maps, her imagined geographies interrogate information, power, and belief. In an era shaped by surveillance and artificial intelligence, Davis’s work raises urgent questions about truth, trust, and the precarious nature of personal identity.

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