The MacDowell Colony bestowed the 59th Edward MacDowell Medal, and its first to a comic artist, to cartoonist Art Spiegelman Sunday afternoon.
Before bestowing the MacDowell Medal to Spiegelman at Sunday’s ceremony, MacDowell Colony Chairman Michael Chabon, apologized on the Colony’s behalf for its previous bias against comics as an art form even as he struggled to put a name to exactly what Spiegelman does as an artist.
“We are here to award the first MacDowell Medal ever given to an artist working in the discipline of … See what I mean?” Chabon said when his pause caused laughter. “Do we call it comics? Comic art, graphic storytelling, cartooning, cartoon art? Or is ‘Cartoon Art’ the guy we are giving the medal to?”
There is a stigma attached to the art of comics in that it appeals to a mass audience, Chabon said, a stigma MacDowell is guilty of perpetrating for most of its history.
“On behalf of the MacDowell Colony I would like to extend our apologizes,” Chabon said. “Comics, we’re sorry. We’re trying to make amends.”
Over the past couple of decades, the Colony has bestowed an increasing, though small, number of fellowships to cartoon artists and graphic novelists. And currently at the Colony there are three fellows in residence working on graphic novels, he said.
“And here we are today bestowing a Medal that has before now adorned the mantle pieces of Aaron Copland, Robert Frost and Toni Morrison on Art Spiegelman,” Chabon said. “So let the word go forth, to cartoonists around the world there is a place for you and your art at the MacDowell Colony.”
Spiegelman is best known for the graphic novel “Maus,” which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. “Maus” tells the real life story of his parent’s experiences as Polish Jews in a German death camp during World War II, portraying the Jewish people as mice and Nazis as cats.
“Maus” was dark and raw and changed the face of comics, Chabon said.
Spiegelman was born in Sweden during the course of his parents post-war journey from Auschwitz to New York, Chabon said. “The immigrant child of immigrants and of a wandering people trailing grief and disaster.”
Chabon compared the art form of comics and immigrants. “Comics, like immigrants, have been accused of fostering crime, low morals and indecent behavior. They have been piled onto the bonfires by mobs calling for their destruction. They have been looked down upon, ignored, denied their due seat at the common table. And yet, like our immigrants, comics have been a secret source of strength in our culture – of innovation and discovery and above all of the transmission of narrative. Art Spiegelman’s story is an American story, meaning it starts somewhere else, far away.”
Chabon challenged the audience to see the “stories all around us” of those who remain in the shadows and who like comics are looked down on, despised and are ignored.
“The history of comic arts in this country echoes the history of its immigrants,” Chabon said.
Founded in 1907, MacDowell has awarded the medal annually since 1960 to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to American culture.
Hillary Chute, a literary scholar and author focusing on comics and graphic novels; visual artist, graphic memoirist, introduced Spiegelman and talked about her collaboration with him on “MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus.”
“‘Maus’ blew the whole field open along with the boundaries of art and literature,” she said.
Making a comic book about the Holocaust in the 1980s was thought to be risky by some, she said, and pulled one of her favorite quotes from “MetaMaus” which was a response from Spiegelman to a journalist at a book fair in the 1980s who asked Spiegelman if he thought making a comic book about the Holocaust was in bad taste to which he responded, “No I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste.”
During the ceremony MacDowell Board President Andrew Senchak honored retiring executive director Cheryl Young for her dedication to the colony and its mission for the past 30 years. Young joined the Colony in 1988 as its director of development. She has been executive director of the Colony for the past 22 years. She plans to remain in her position till her successor is in place early 2019.