Chiwoniso Kaitano has been the executive director of MacDowell since 2023. The oldest continuously operating artist residency in the United States, MacDowell’s mission is “to nurture the arts by offering talented individuals an inspiring residential environment in which to produce enduring works of the creative imagination,” according to its website. Located in the woody town of Peterborough, in Southern New Hampshire, MacDowell offers residencies in seven artistic disciplines for two to eight weeks year-round, awarding around 300 fellowships annually.
Prior to MacDowell, Kaitano was executive director of two arts education–focused nonprofits: Girl Be Heard, a global NGO, and Ifetayo Cultural Arts Academy in Brooklyn. Over the past two years, Kaitano has focused on raising MacDowell’s profile within the larger art sector. Though MacDowell is among the most respected residency programs in the world, she feels that organizations like it have slowly been pushed to the fringes of the art world discourse, something she hopes to change. In a time when art and culture are under attack, particularly by the current presidential administration, Kaitano believes residency programs are key to supporting artists.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.
ARTnews: Can you tell me a bit about MacDowell’s history and how you see it relating to our current cultural and political moment?
Chiwoniso Kaitano: We are the oldest artist residency continuously running in the United States, and certainly one of the older ones worldwide. We were founded in 1907 by Edward and Marian MacDowell, who were both pianists and composers themselves. We’re 118 years old, so we’ve managed to keep this enterprise going for almost 125 years. What we did over a century ago and what we do now hasn’t really changed. We’re a sanctuary, a retreat, a place for artists to come for two to eight weeks to create art. We have seven disciplines: architecture, film/video, interdisciplinary arts, literature, music composition, theatre, and visual arts. Every and any artistic medium is represented.
I’ve been in this job for two years—I’m starting my third year here—and I was new to the sector of [direct] artist support. I come from arts education, so it has been learning curve for me. The advantage of that is I’ve been able to bring relatively fresh eyes to a pretty old sector. Even in those two years, the cultural world has changed dramatically. From when I started this job and where we are now, being an artist-support organization is significantly different. The broader conversation along political and cultural lines is impacting us, and it’s certainly impacting many organizations that are smaller and younger than us. What we are trying to do, as a legacy organization or an organization of a certain age, is figure out how we can use that to help others in the broader art sector navigate and negotiate the space in this moment—and thrive in this moment and come out of it.
Being new to this community, one thing that has surprised me has been how residencies are on the fringe of the art sector. The big galleries and the big museums are the conversation now. The industry is really driving the direction and pace of creation for artists. Somehow in that whole mix, the place where art begins, which is the residency, has been relegated to the fringe of the ecosystem, and I’ve sort of made it my personal mission to bring us back to the center of the conversation.
What would you say are some of the biggest challenges that organizations like yours are facing right now?
Nonprofit arts institutions have always struggled with funding. I think that’s been true under any administration or any sort of cultural regime. That’s always been true. I think what’s different about this moment is that it’s not just a lack of arts funding, it’s the active deactivation of federal-level arts funding. That’s a problem, particularly to organizations that are much smaller than we are and rely on that resource. Coupled with that is—I’m going to call it censorship, the prescription on what art should be made, how artists are making it, what subjects they should be talking about. Artistic expression is definitely something that is a current challenge. Just look at Amy Sherald canceling her exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery because [the museum] wasn’t sure this was the right moment to be showing some of her art. I thought that was extraordinarily courageous of her, and maybe a symbol of how individual artists and institutional organizations like ours need to be acting and reacting in this space.
Would you say an organization like MacDowell in its direct support for artists being essential right now?
Our formula for a long time has been time, space, and freedom to create—that’s our mission. The conversations we’ve had internally over the last couple of years is, do artists still need support in the same way? Are artists residency still relevant in the same way? And the answer to that is decisively, “Yes.” We’re absolutely still relevant. One thing I always talk about is that the public—ordinary people, citizens—is interacting with art every day, whether it’s reading a book or newspaper, whether it’s going to museum, watching a film, or listening to a song. The creator of what you’re consuming started somewhere, and it started in a place of solitude and reflection—maybe in their private studio or maybe in a place like MacDowell, where they had a condition that could foment creativity. For me, it’s a privilege to be able a small part of this arts ecosystem: the place where art begins.
A significant percentage of MacDowell’s residents likely come from urban centers. Can you talk about what it means for them to be able to travel to Southern New Hampshire and be away from their daily lives and networks?
That’s a huge part of our kind of artistic residency formula. Over the last couple of years, I’ve meet residency directors from all over, and some of them have urban residencies where, for example, an artist is in a townhouse in Brooklyn. These are all wonderful and valid and necessary experiences. But the difference with MacDowell, which is 500 acres in the woods of Southern New Hampshire, is that there is this distraction-free component. Coupled with that is nature and the feeling you get when you’re away from your hectic, everyday life, when you’re away from the urbanity of it all, and you go for a hike. Artists’ sanctuaries and residencies are spaces specifically created to immerse an artist in that environment. I mentioned our formula of time, space, and freedom to create. The other components to that formula are nature and community. You’re in the woods with a small group of other artists in a place where you’re completely away from your day job, if you have one; your life in the city; doing groceries—all of that. We try to peel that away, so you are alone with your thoughts and your creativity in your private studio, in wooded seclusion, with all your material needs getting taken care of. Our goal is, for that moment in time, to help you unlock the thing it is you need to be reflective and to create something that will have impact on the culture. What’s to say that this formula works? I can say that we’ve been doing this at this point for almost 125 years, and our results, as it were, speak for themselves—Pulitzers, Academy Awards, Guggenheim Fellowships, Grammys.
You mentioned earlier that you have a background in leading an arts education organization. How have you applied your background is in arts education to your vision for MacDowell?
I have a very nonlinear career path. My academic credentialing is in law, specifically human rights law. I spent a brief amount of time working as a junior human rights advocate at Human Rights Watch. In between there somewhere, I worked in tech and software for 10 years. But the last 10 years of my life have been focused on arts administration. The intersection between arts education and artists residency perhaps is that arts education is a form of artist support. You are catching people when they are younger. I honestly think that some of the challenges we see now in the arts ecosystem—defunding, the lack of resources, artists struggling—is because we haven’t done enough to educate our public and audiences and our future publics and audiences about the importance of art in a functioning, healthy society. I certainly think there are some countries getting the mix right. Many of them tend to be in Europe, but the United States certainly has a long way to go in terms of educating audiences about how art can knit community and people together. We continue on the spot. This is a journey I’m on. I decided over a decade ago that this was a calling for me. It’s more than just a job. I feel called to work in the artist-support sector, to advocate and amplify as I am able to, and to make sure organizations that also see that as a responsibility for them as well.
I agree that the United States hasn’t done a good enough job about educating the public about the importance of art via arts education. It’s gotten even more dire with the recent cuts to the NEA and the NEH, which did bring art and culture to various communities across the country. Was MacDowell impacted by these cuts?
We were a recipient of NEA funding, and like many of our sister organizations in the sector, we received that letter a few months ago about termination of our grant. We are fortunate that it wasn’t a huge part of our budget, and because we do have generous supporters, they were able to step in and fill that gap for us. This is a community of artist-support organizations, and we know many smaller organizations that were severely impacted. For me and for MacDowell, the conversation is less “were we as an organization impacted?” Yes, we were. We were able to weather this particular storm, but we do have concern and care for the sector. I think there is power in numbers, and I think organizations like MacDowell do have a responsibility to lead in this moment and help and support them.