The MacDowell Colony artist residency program has announced that a $200,000 gift from an anonymous donor will fund a new fellowship in honor of literary agent Charlotte Sheedy. The fellowship, which grants an annual residency of up to two months at MacDowell, will be awarded to writers representing populations across racial and cultural boundaries.
"The MacDowell Colony commits itself, every day, to supporting, fostering, and nurturing diverse artists in their daily struggle to make art," said MacDowell chairman and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon as he introduced the Sheedy Fellowship. "That commitment is written into the Mission Statement. It's been coded into MacDowell's DNA from the day in 1954 that James Baldwin walked into Baetz Studio and got down to work."
Chabon added: "Isolation, indifference, and lack of opportunity are the common lot of artists everywhere, but for an artist marginalized by cultural difference, as Charlotte Sheedy has always known, those effects are trebled by an inheritance of cruelty and injustice. They are intensified by mechanisms of discrimination both covert and plain as day. For these artists the struggle to make art takes a deeper toll and can lead to deeper despair.... This amazing gift, honoring a remarkable woman who has long been a staunch advocate for and nurturer of writers, will allow MacDowell to fight harder, and hopefully to lasting effect, on behalf of those whose struggle has been so long, hard, and wearying."
