Los Angeles artist Betye Saar has won the 2014 Edward MacDowell Medal, a lifetime achievement award given by America’s oldest artists’ colony, joining an elite roster of honorees dating back to 1960.
She’ll receive her award Aug. 10 in ceremonies on the MacDowell Colony’s 400-plus acre campus in Peterborough, N.H. The cast-bronze medal bears the image of the man who founded the colony in 1907 as a gathering place where artists in diverse disciplines could mingle while pursuing their individual work.
Saar, 87, joins a diverse list of MacDowell medalists that includes last year’s winner, Stephen Sondheim, and Sonny Rollins, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Edgard Varese and Steve Reich among composers, playwright Edward Albee, architect I.M. Pei and writers Philip Roth, Thornton Wilder, Robert Frost, Joan Didion and Alice Munro. Winners can come from any of seven categories — architecture, visual art, music composition, theater, writing, filmmaking and interdisciplinary art.