YADDO: MAKING AMERICAN CULTURE
Founded in 1900 by philanthropists Spencer and Katrina Trask, Yaddo has emerged as America’s premier artists’ retreat, nurturing the talents of thousands of writers, painters, composers, and other creative artists. When its first guests arrived in 1926, Yaddo was hailed by The New York Times as a “new and unique experiment, which has no exact parallel in the world of fine arts.” As Yaddo’s second season began, a reporter for the Herald Tribune wrote, “It is a peculiar gratification to see in America such carefully conducted contributions as this to the nourishing of the spirit and its works in what we are told ad nauseam is a materialistic age. One sonnet would justify the whole experiment and render it immortal.”
Since that time Yaddo has attained almost mythic status, quietly enduring a century of trials and triumphs while hosting thousands of artists and writers, including such luminaries as Hannah Arendt, Milton Avery, James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, Aaron Copland, Philip Guston, Patricia Highsmith, Langston Hughes, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Meyer Schapiro, Virgil Thomson, and William Carlos Williams.
In 1999, in celebration of the upcoming centennial of its founding, Yaddo and The New York Public Library entered into a partnership to make Yaddo’s archive available to the public and scholars for the first time. The Yaddo Records, now cataloged and housed in the Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division, include hundreds of boxes of artworks, letters, photographs, manuscripts, guest records, date books, rare glass negatives, and sound recordings covering the period from 1870 to 1980. Additional installments to the Library’s holdings from Yaddo’s ongoing records will be made through 2026, the hundredth anniversary of Yaddo’s first official season for invited guests.
Although the materials on view date from 1880 to 1980, the exhibition’s major focus is the period from Yaddo’s first official season in 1926 through 1980, the closing date for materials currently held in the Yaddo Records. The tumultuous period covered by the Yaddo Records was one of enormous social and cultural change. The hardships of the world wars, the economic and political turmoil of the Great Depression, the paranoia of the McCarthy era, the racial segregation of the Jim Crow era, and the rise of the Civil Rights, women’s, and gay rights movements are among the events that shaped Yaddo, the lives of the artists who sought shelter there, and the works they produced. With this exhibition, the influence of these events, and Yaddo’s pivotal role in shaping 20th-century American culture, are revealed.
Micki McGee, Fordham University
Spencer Trask & Co. Curator for Yaddo: Making American Culture