Rosanne Cash earns MacDowell Medal, ceremony postponed

May 18 (UPI) -- Rosanne Cash has earned the MacDowell Medal, celebrating artists, writers and composers, but the public celebration has been postponed until 2021, the artists' colony said Monday.

The MacDowell Colony shuttered operations in March amid the coronavirus pandemic and has postponed the annual Medal Day ceremony to August 8, 2021, a statement said. Along with the ceremony, visits to artists working studios and a picnic lunch have also been postponed to the same date.

The public ceremony typically draws more than 1,200 visitors to the 450-acre wooded campus in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and gives the public the chance to visit 32 working art studios.

Cash, the oldest daughter of Johnny Cash, is a Grammy-winning composer, performer, songwriter, best-selling author and essayist.

"From the shockingly intimate timbre of Seven Year Ache in 1981 to the reflective darkness of She Remembers Everything 37 years later, as a composer, singer, and someone who can, in a sense, summon ambiance, Rosanne Cash has distinguished herself from her contemporaries as she has escaped the weight of her celebrated forebears," this year's MacDowell Medal Selection Panel chairman, Greil Marcus, said in the statement.

Cash wrote the best-selling memoir Composed, and has earned four Grammy Awards and 12 nominations, including the 2019 nomination for her song, "Crossing to Jerusalem."

Despite her achievements, Cash said she was "profoundly humbled to be chosen," in a statement.

"To be included in a list with Aaron Copland, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, and so many more distinguished artists, is beyond my imagining - - something I would not have dared to dream or even consider," she added. "I do not place myself in any way equal, but I accept this honor with deepest gratitude, as an encouragement to do my best work, and in the service of future inspiration. My heart is full with this precious recognition."

Cash is the 61st artist to receive the award named after composer and pianist Edward MacDowell. Along with his wife, Marian MacDowell, he founded MacDowell Colony as the first artist residency program in the United States in 1907.

The artists' colony has awarded the medal annually since 1960 to honor artists in various creative fields.