PETERBOROUGH, NEW HAMPSHIRE.- The MacDowell Colony, the nation’s oldest artist colony, will present its prestigious Edward MacDowell Medal this year to photographer Robert Frank. The Medal is awarded annually to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the arts. Mr. Frank joins an impressive list of past recipients, including Aaron Copland, I.M. Pei, Eudora Welty, and Jasper Johns. He is the 43rd recipient of the MacDowell Medal and the third photographer to be recognized since the Medal was first given in 1960.
The honor was presented to Mr. Frank in a public ceremony during the annual Medal Day celebration on Sunday, August 18, 2002 at the MacDowell Colony grounds at 100 High Street in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Robert MacNeil, chairman of the MacDowell Colony, gave the Medal along with Carter Wiseman, president of the board, and Executive Director Cheryl Young. Philip Brookman, senior curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was the presentation speaker.
Mr. Frank, who is Swiss by birth, is considered one of the key visual artists to document postwar America. His acclaimed photography has been described as revealing profound tensions between the various strata of American society — rich and poor, black and white, North and South — in order to define the American experience. After the publication in 1958 of his seminal work, The Americans, Frank turned to making films, beginning with Pull My Daisy, in 1959. Frank’s influence as both a photographer and filmmaker is widespread and long-lived.
“He looked at America critically in the 50s when the United States was very proud of itself, when we were postwar, emergent, victorious, self-satisfied, and he captured the psychic barrenness,” says Sandra S. Phillips, chairman of this year’s Medal Selection Committee and the senior curator of photography for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “And he didn’t only capture the streets of the main cities; he drove across the country and reflected it. He’s simply the most influential photographer of the period, and I can’t think of anyone else more important.”
From 1955 to 1957, with two grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Mr. Frank crisscrossed the United States and produced The Americans, a visionary work that has been reprinted nine times. In the introduction to the book, Jack Kerouac wrote: “Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps, with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.”
Though Mr. Frank has also worked in film and video, his photojournalism remains a benchmark in his career. In 1990, The Robert Frank Collection was formed at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and in 1994, the Gallery exhibited Robert Frank: Moving Out, which explored the development of Frank’s artistry.
After the awards ceremony, there will be an interval for picnic lunches, and current artists-in-residence will open their studios to the public from 2 p.m. until 4 p.m. Medal Day is the only time each year that artists’ studios are open to the public. Visitors may bring a picnic lunch or buy a catered basket lunch from the Colony. There is no charge to attend the ceremony or the open studios.
The MacDowell Colony has provided artists of all disciplines with the time and private space for creative work since 1907. Situated on 450 acres of woodland in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the Colony welcomes more than 200 composers, writers, visual artists, architects, interdisciplinary artists, and filmmakers from the United States and abroad each year. The sole criterion for acceptance is talent; a panel in each discipline selects fellows. In 1997, MacDowell was awarded the National Medal of Arts “for nurturing and inspiring many of this century’s finest artists.”
