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THE MACDOWELL COLONY TURNS 100

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PETERBOROUGH, N.H. — The MacDowell Colony, the nation’s first artist residency program, turns 100 in 2007. MacDowell will mark its centennial with a yearlong, nationwide celebration of creativity in honor of the more than 6,000 artists who have worked at the colony to date. The celebration includes a major publication, a new film, a film series, performances, exhibition and special events.

Together, the centennial events will provide a compelling picture of the importance of artistic creation to a successful society.

Robert MacNeil, broadcast journalist, writer and chairman of The MacDowell Colony, said, “Colony founders Edward and Marian MacDowell, true visionaries, were the first to recognize that creative artists need uninterrupted time and space in which to pursue their work, and that artists working in different disciplines have much to offer one another.

“In marking the colony’s centennial anniversary, we also recognize and reaffirm that creativity and the arts are part of the very essence of America, and rank high among our national values.”

In its first century, MacDowell has awarded fellowships to an array of exceptionally talented composers, writers, visual artists, architects, interdisciplinary artists, filmmakers, and playwrights. Every year, approximately 250 talented artists are awarded fellowships to spend up to two months at MacDowell, which is on 450 woodland acres in Peterborough. To date, MacDowell Fellows have come from 49 states and 50 nations.

Each fellow is provided with a private, fully equipped studio appropriate to his or her discipline, along with meals and accommodations. In 1997, The MacDowell Colony was awarded the National Medal of Arts “for nurturing and inspiring many of this century’s finest artists.” It is the only artist residency program to have received this prominent honor.

MacNeil adds, “The freedom to create is a freedom worth celebrating, not only for MacDowell’s landmark anniversary, but also in terms of our distinctive American culture. For what values better express a society’s vitality than the freedom of its people to create?”

The work of more than 6,000 artists will appear nationally as MacDowell Fellows help celebrate the centennial. For information on centennial events or other information, www.macdowellcolony.org/centennial.

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YANCEY RICHARDSON PRESENTS ANDREW MOORE, BARBARA KASTEN w/2 cuts

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NEW YORK CITY — Yancey Richardson Gallery presents exhibitions featuring the work of Andrew Moore and Barbara Kasten, on view through January 27.

The exhibition of recent photographs by Andrew Moore includes photographs taken between 2002 and 2006 in Russia, Sweden, Vietnam, North Dakota and Asbury Park, N.J. These works represent a move away from Moore’s previous focus on the architecture of a single geographical location in favor of an interest in the grandly scaled inhabited landscape. Whereas Moore has previously used architecture as a way to explore themes of history and culture, in his landscapes, Moore contemplates the existence of man in the larger world of a particular natural environment.

Moore has increasingly applied the themes and motifs of the tradition of painting to the creation of his photographic images. Moore’s “Sea of Fog” is a direct reference to Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic “Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog.”

In “Casino Rooftop” Moore pays homage to the American trompe l’oeil painter John F. Peto, a master of illusion who transformed paint into reality. In response, Moore turns the realism of photography into what seems at first glance a painting.

“Barbara Kasten: Constructs,” an exhibition of vintage 8-by-10-inch Polaroid photographs made between 1981 and 1983, features jewel-like abstractions created in the studio using mirrors, lights and geometric forms. They were originally exhibited in a solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1982, followed by the 1985 New York Graphic Society monograph of the work. This is the first time “Constructs” have been exhibited in New York.

Trained as a painter and sculptor, Kasten was at the leading edge of the early 1980s trend in photography away from documentation toward a studio-fabricated approach. Kasten’s interest in the geometric content of the work of Sol LeWitt, Al Held and Dorothea Rockburne and the Bauhaus precepts of staging, color theory, and distortion culminated in the “Constructs” series.

Her experiments with “nonobjective” photography place her in a continuum between Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and the emerging artist Eileen Quinlan.

The gallery is at 535 West 22nd Street. For more information, 646-230-9610 or www.yanceyrichardson.com.