Founded in 1907, MacDowell has nurtured the creation of new works by some of the country's most important artists, many when they were still emerging in their fields. The Graham Foundation Fellowship for Architects provides a residency at the MacDowell Colony and financial assistance for an architect engaged in work that explores the intersections between art and architecture.  Architect and interdisciplinary artist Jennifer Harmon is the recipient of the 2010 fellowship.  Harmon's work investigates the parallax between perceived and remembered space versus the actual constructed environment that we inhabit in our daily lives. During her MacDowell residency, Harmon created a series of projects utilizing drawing, wire sculpture, and cyanotype techniques that will serve as preambles to larger works to be deployed in Detroit's abandoned industrial structures during summer 2011. She also experimented with cyanotype exposures in old barn structures on the Colony's grounds, built a model of Nikola Tesla's wireless communications tower at Wardenclyffe, and created from memory designs and models a Bethesda, MD, hospital where she spent a year of her childhood.

The MacDowell Colony's mission is to nurture the arts by providing creative individuals with an inspiring environment in which to produce enduring works of the imagination. Founded in 1907, MacDowell welcomes more than 250 artists each year—including  architects, composers, filmmakers, interdisciplinary artists, theatre artists, visual artists, and writers—to work within its 450 woodland acres in Peterborough, NH, for up to two months. More than 7,000 artists have worked there, including Benny Andrews, Henry Cobb, Aaron Copland, Janet Fish, Osvaldo Golijov, Tom Kundig, Glen Ligon, Anna Schuleit, Alice Walker, and Thornton Wilder. The residency experience gives architects and other artists the rare opportunity to concentrate exclusively on their work in a setting that encourages critical exchanges, collaborations, and open discourse. In 1997, MacDowell became the only artist community to receive the National Medal of Arts, "for nurturing and inspiring many of this century's finest artists" and offering artists "the opportunity to work within a dynamic community of their peers, where creative excellence is the standard."