The Union Leader : Yoko Ono honored with Edward MacDowell Medal (by Kathryn Marchocki)
Yoko Ono’s longtime music manager, David Newgarden, displays the 64th annual Edward MacDowell Medal, which he accepted on Ono’s behalf on Sunday. MacDowell President Christine Fisher, right, and board chairman Nell Painter, standing behind Newgarden, applaud.
PETERBOROUGH — Arts icon and activist Yoko Ono was awarded the 64th annual Edward MacDowell Medal on Sunday for her “ground-breaking, distinctively inventive, and enormously influential” career as an interdisciplinary artist over seven decades.
“There has never been anyone like her; there has never been work like hers … 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,” author and board Chairman Nell Painter told an estimated 1,100 guests at the MacDowell.
Ono, 91, was unable to travel to accept the award in person but watched via livestream.
Ono began her career in the mid-1950s and practiced in New York, the United Kingdom and her native Japan. Her body of work encompasses performance, experimental filmmaking, conceptual and participatory arts, music, visual arts and global peace activities. A retrospective of her work currently is on exhibit at the Tate Modern in London.
She joins other notable recipients of the MacDowell Medal, including John Updike, Robert Frost, Willem de Kooning, Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois, Stephen Sondheim, Toni Morrison and David Lynch. She is the first Asian woman to receive the honor.
Art historian and keynote speaker Nora Halpern described Ono’s work as “vehicles to contemplation and roadmaps to a kinder, peace-filled, collective future.”
“It has always bothered me that the majority of the world knows Yoko best through her relationship to her late husband,” Halpern said.
Ono and Beatle John Lennon married in 1969.
“I feel very fortunate that I got to know Yoko, first and foremost, as an artist in her own right, as a woman who has never stood in anyone else’s shadow. It was, in fact, her power as an artist which first drew Lennon to connect with her. Theirs was a union of equals and they were powerful collaborators in art, activity and life,” she added, noting their collaborations include the song “Imagine,” the “universal anthem for positive change.”
MacDowell is the nation’s oldest artists’ community. Its 450-acre campus offers a serene setting for artists from throughout the country and world. Leonard Bernstein composed his “Mass” there, author James Baldwin wrote some of his most well-known works, including “Giovanni’s Room,” and Thornton Wilder penned “Our Town.”
MacDowell President Christine Fisher said 9,215 artists have had residencies. Medal Day is the one day each year that the grounds are open to the public, when arts lovers can visit its 31 working studios and speak with resident artists.
Guests write wishes for peace on slips of paper that they later tie to the two Yoko Ono Wish Trees installed at the MacDowell campus July 21.
Kathy Marchocki/Union Leader Correspondent
In accepting the medal on Ono’s behalf, her long-time music manager, David Newgarden, said: “To the artists in the audience, Yoko encourages you to use your art to change the world. Today, I would like to pass the torch from Yoko to a future generation of creatives. Be bold. Be competent. Be brave. Be adventurous. Be revolutionary. Be true to yourself.”
The event was highlighted by the installation of two Yoko Ono Wish Trees on campus. Since 1996, Ono has invited people to write personal wishes for peace on paper and tie them to the branches at Wish Tree installation sites around the world.
“MacDowell is honored to join the ranks of one of the very limited number of international locations with — not one, but two — Wish Trees,” MacDowell Executive Director Chiwoniso Kaitano said.
Guests tied their wishes written on white slips of paper to the branches of a peach and plum tree in the MacDowell orchard. At day’s end, they were to be collected and sent to Ono, then forwarded to her Imagine Peace Tower, an installation located off Reykjavik, Iceland, that Ono dedicated to the memory of her late husband. To date, more than 2 million people have shared their wishes.
“I wish to meet John in heaven and pray a song to him,” one note said. “I wish that we all know peace on earth, as humans here and now,” said another.
Article published on https://www.unionleader.com