Artists in the Woods
I live in a land among writers. It’s said that New Hampshire is home to more working authors per capita than any other state. E. E. Cummings, Elizabeth Yates, Dan Brown, Jodi Picoult, John Irving and Robert Frost all have ties to the Granite State.
You can’t ski Temple Mountain any longer, but you can drive over it and through the woods to reach MacDowell, one of my favorite places to mingle with artists. It’s the oldest artist residency in the country. The MacDowells were a married composer and pianist who bought a farm which was eventually transformed into an artist retreat. The collection of cabins in Peterborough is tucked between Temple Mountain and Mount Monadnock, which is supposed to be second only to Mount Fuji as the most-climbed mountain in the world.
MacDowell is quiet and consumed by nature, though less primitive than the dune shacks of Provincetown, another New England residency. Artists from around the world live at MacDowell for a few weeks or a few months. One day each summer, they open their studios to show the public what they’re creating.
When you step inside a studio, you see “tombstones” propped on wall ledges. The wooden tablets serve as century-old guestbooks. I imagine it’s the political equivalent of sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom at the White House. Some artists are so spooked by the legacy that they hide the tablets until they leave.
The artists of today live in some of the same cabins as the artists of yesterday—the greats like James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein and Thornton Wilder, who patterned Our Town after Peterborough. I would’ve loved to have met Studs Terkel or Spalding Gray or Nan Golden when they stayed at MacDowell.
There’s a ground-mounted solar array on the property which offsets the property’s entire electric load. The solar company where I once worked installed it, and I assisted with the marketing effort. That’s how I first learned of MacDowell.
There’s also a garden, where some of the food the artists eat is grown. Each day, picnic basket lunches are assembled and delivered to the doorsteps of the studios. It’s one of the rituals that artists often recall with fondness when they talk about the time they spent at MacDowell.
There are nearly three dozen studios, too many to visit in one afternoon. So I take the program they hand me, read the bios of each artist and draw stars next to the people I want to meet. My first stop is Firth Studio where artist, filmmaker and writer William E. Jones works on a series of paintings. I’m drawn to his choice of colors, his brush technique and his exploration of sexuality.
Next, I walk to the studio of visual artist and assistant professor David Andree, welcoming visitors from a rocking chair. He hikes our local mountains and creates 3D canvases by draping and connecting panels across the uneven landscapes.
Look how the art matches the line that divides rock from sky.
At my last stop, I see a California camper van with NMDLND license plates, a nod to a book that birthed a movie that won three Oscars. I look inside.
“She keeps a tidy space,” I think.
The GMC van belongs to Jessica Bruder, and it’s not unlike the vehicles where the people she chronicled in her book Nomadland slept. She herself lived in the 90s van for months while conducting research.
At MacDowell, Bruder is writing a book with the working title, The Providers. It’s an investigation of the underground abortion networks and mutual aid in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. Abortion networks existed before the high court’s recent decision but take on a new urgency today.
Today, several states ban abortion before people even know they’re pregnant. Nineteen attorneys general are even demanding that the federal government allow states with abortion bans to obtain private medical records of people seeking legal health care in other states. Becoming pregnant in this country guarantees you neither bodily autonomy nor privacy.
The underground networks teach people how to make safe, homemade abortion devices, share information about abortion pills and prepare people to drive bulletproof mobile abortion vans. Yes, it’s come to that. The Online Abortion Resource Squad runs a subreddit to help people seeking abortions. There’s also Aid Access.
Touring the cabins is second to the other purpose of the day, to award a lifetime achievement medal. This year’s Edward MacDowell Medal was awarded to Alanis Obomsawin, the Abenaki artist known for her documentary films that give voice to Indigenous peoples. The Canadian-American filmmaker was born in New Hampshire and turns 91 on Thursday.
After I met her, I walked to the James Baldwin Library and watched her short, Christmas at Moose Factory, one of nearly 60 films she’s produced over her lifetime.
Her film below was more difficult to watch. Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child is the story of a teenager who died by suicide after years of living in foster homes and shelters in Alberta.
For another perspective from a fellow Abenaki Native, listen to my podcast interview with Mali Obomsawin, a land rights activist. I don’t know if she and Alanis are related.