The MacDowell Colony, the nation’s first and most celebrated
artist residency program, is marking its 100th anniversary this year. For a
century, the Peterborough, N.H., institution has provided a working retreat for
more than 6,000 artists. While there, James Baldwin toiled on Notes of a Native Son, Aaron
Copland conjured Appalachian
Spring and Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town. Tom Putnam,
chairman of Markem, a Keene, N.H.–based manufacturer of specialized printing
machinery with $300 million in annual sales, sits on MacDowell’s board. He
talked with features editor Emily DeNitto about the model MacDowell can offer
businesses and the importance of fostering creativity in the
workplace.What makes MacDowell so special?
 There are two things that stand
out in my mind. One is the physical environment and the other is the community,
the interdisciplinary nature of the group that’s there and the energy that’s
created around sharing the work. The physical environment is unusual in that each artist has a
separate building as a studio. It isn’t just a room in a building, it’s a whole
separate building that is off in the woods. You can’t see any other buildings
from any given studio. The artists don’t live in their studios; they have rooms
in an old farmhouse. They eat at the dining facility, and then they walk or bike
through the woods to their very own space that is there for them to use in
whatever way they see fit. So that’s all that goes on there: creating.
Yes. For instance, the visual
arts studios for the painters and the sculptors are freshly painted for each new
occupant. You can tack things to the wall, you can paint on it. Each artist uses
the walls to do something. We have 14 or 15 freshly tuned pianos in the
composers’ studios for each composer, and there are 32 studios in all. The
environment is very focused on providing the best creative setting. These folks then get together every day, and there’s invariably
a sharing of what they have done. The tradition at MacDowell, though it’s not
required, is that the artists, at some time in their residency, will have an
open studio and invite the others to come see and talk about what they’re doing.
There’s a lot of interchange. What kind of lesson can this model provide
businesses?
Today’s business world needs
creative people—people who come to work with their brain switched on. Those
thinking beyond the boundaries and making contributions to the success of the
business are the most valuable. At Markem we’ve gone to considerable lengths to encourage
creative thinking. We’ve run a poetry slam among our 1,400 employees worldwide,
and we do all kinds of things to get people to think creatively. One of the
lessons I took back from MacDowell is that it’s important to provide an
environment that is conducive to creative work, whether it’s in a finance office
or a manufacturing floor or in R&D.
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