Yoko Ono, 91, will be honored in a brief, public ceremony on art residency MacDowell’s Peterborough campus on July 21. MacDowell will present the 64th MacDowell Medal to Ono’s longtime music manager David Newgarden.
Yoko Ono, 91, will be honored in a brief, public ceremony on art residency MacDowell’s Peterborough campus on July 21. MacDowell will present the 64th MacDowell Medal to Ono’s longtime music manager David Newgarden.
Yoko Ono will be the next recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal.
Since 1960, Peterborough-based MacDowell, the oldest artist residency program in the nation, has honored those who have had an indelible impact on art and culture with the Edward MacDowell Medal.
MacDowell Chairman of the Board, Fellow and best-selling author Nell Painter will present the 64th medal to Ono’s longtime music manager David Newgarden in a brief ceremony on Sunday, July 21, on MacDowell’s 450-acre wooded campus.
Ono’s influential career as an artist began in the New York scene in the early 1960s and has continued across seven decades.
Ono, 91, has developed a body of work that encompasses performance, experimental filmmaking, conceptual and participatory art, music, visual arts and global peace activities.
The breadth of her pioneering work runs from the avant-garde to the pop and dance music charts.
“It’s an incredible honor that my mother, Yoko Ono, will be awarded the MacDowell Medal,” said her son Sean Ono Lennon. “The history and list of past recipients is truly remarkable. It makes me very proud to see her art appreciated and celebrated in this way.”
Ono is the first Asian woman to receive the honor.
“MacDowell is honored to celebrate Yoko Ono for her groundbreaking, distinctly inventive, and enormously influential interdisciplinary art,” Painter said. “There has never been anyone like her; there has never been work like hers.
”Over some seven decades, she has rewarded eyes, provoked thought, inspired feminists, and defended migrants through works of a wide-ranging imagination. Enduringly fresh and pertinent, her uniquely powerful oeuvre speaks to our own times, so sorely needful of her leitmotif: Peace.”
“Early in the Vietnam War,” Painter said, “Ono and her husband John Lennon collaborated on ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and ‘War Is Over,’ adding ‘if you want it.’ Words we cherish right now.”
Only one other interdisciplinary artist, Merce Cunningham in 2003, has received the Edward MacDowell Medal.
American avant-garde multimedia artist, Grammy-winning composer and musician Laurie Anderson chaired this year’s medal selection panel.
The presentation day is the only day the MacDowell grounds are open to the public. Visitors can visit the 31 working studios and speak with artists.
Composer Edward MacDowell and his wife, pianist Marian MacDowell, founded what was then called the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough in 1907 as a way to foster artists and provide the time and a place to create.
Past medal recipients include Robert Frost (1962), Willem de Kooning (1975), Isamu Noguchi (1982), Louise Bourgeois (1990), Stephen Sondheim (2013), Toni Morrison (2016), David Lynch (2017) and Art Spiegelman (2018).
