The 2014 Malloy Lecture in the Arts brought music mogul Clive Davis to Westport. Davis is a Grammy Award-winning producer, Artists & Repertoire (A&R) executive and is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as the only non-performer along with other legends such as Eric Clapton, Earth, Wind & Fire and James Taylor. From 1967 to 1973, Davis was the president of Columbia Records. He was the founder and president of Arista Records from 1975 through 2000 until founding J Records. From 2002 until April 2008, Davis was the chairman and CEO of the RCA Music Group.
Davis is credited with launching the careers of artists that achieved superstar status, such as Janis Joplin, Laura Nyro, Santana, Bruce Springsteen, Chicago, Billy Joel, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Loggins & Messina, Aerosmith, Whitney Houston, Barry Manilow and Daryl Hall and John Oates to name just a few.
Jacques d’Amboise, celebrated danseur and choreographer, was the 2012 Malloy Lecture in the Arts speaker. D’Amboise was made famous for his work as a principal dancer with the prestigious New York City ballet where he worked closely with storied choreographer George Balanchine. D’Amboise himself later choreographed ballets for the New York City Ballet. As well as ballets, d’Amboise performed in films, including Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Carousel.
D’Amboise also has an impressive commitment to arts education founding National Dance Institute in 1976 which has been bring dance to children for more than 40 years. D’Amboise has received numerous honors and awards, including 1990 MacArthur Fellowship, a 1995 Kennedy Center Honors Award, a National Medal of the Arts, a New York Governor’s Award and an Honorary Doctorate Degree from Boston College among others. He is also the author of two books: I Was a Dancer and Teaching the Magic of Dance.
Celebrated actor and author John Lithgow was the 2011 Malloy Lecture in the Arts speaker. As a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Lithgow serves on a commission to advance the cause of the humanities and social sciences, advocating for action by the government. He is also a staunch advocate for literacy and arts education for children.
Lithgow graduated from Harvard College in 1967 with an A.B. in history and literature. He remained connected with the institution and while on their Board of Overseers in the 90’s, created Arts First, an annual springtime festival of undergraduate arts and established the Harvard Arts Medal, presented yearly to alums who have gone into the creative arts. Past recipients include: Jack Lemmon, YoYo Ma, John Updike, Tommy Lee Jones, and Bonnie Raitt.
Lithgow has received two Tony Awards, six Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, an American Comedy Award, four Drama Desk Awards, and has been nominated for two Academy Awards and four Grammy Awards. He has received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and has been inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
In September, Canadian actor Christopher Plummer took the stage for the Malloy Lecture. Beginning with his film debut in Stage Struck, Plummer’s career has spanned six decades. He is known for portraying Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music, and has also portrayed several major historical figures, including Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington in Waterloo, Rudyard Kipling in The Man Who Would Be King, Mike Wallace in The Insider, Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station, and J. Paul Getty in All the Money in the World.
Over the course of his auspicious career, Plummer has received accolades for his work, including an Academy Award, a Genie Award, two Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a SAG Award, and a British Academy Film Award; he is one of the few performers to receive the Triple Crown of Acting. Having won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor at age 82 for Beginners and having received a subsequent nomination at 88 for All the Money in the World, Plummer is both the oldest Academy Award acting winner and nominee.
2010 featured two Malloy Lectures in the Arts. In April, acclaimed American cartoonist Rosalind “Roz” Chast delighted the audience with her unique perspective on cartooning.
Since 1978, Chast has published hundreds of cartoons in The New Yorker. Her cartoons have also been published in many other magazines including Scientific American, Harvard Business Review, Redbook, and Mother Jones. Her most recent book is a comprehensive compilation of her favorite cartoons called Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons of Roz Chast, 1978-2006. She also illustrated The Alphabet from A to Y, with Bonus Letter, Z, the best-selling children’s book by Steve Martin.
In recognition of her work, Comics Alliance listed Chast as one of twelve women cartoonists deserving of lifetime achievement recognition. In May 2017, she received the Alumni Award for Artistic Achievement at the Rhode Island School of Design Commencement ceremony.
National Book Award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates came to Westport in November for the year’s second Malloy Lecture in the Arts. Oates published her first book in 1962 and has since published over 40 novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them, two O. Henry Awards, and the National Humanities Medal. Her novels Black Water, What I Lived For, Blonde, and short story collections The Wheel of Love and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.
In 1978, Oates moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where she continues to teach in Princeton University’s creative writing program; she and her late husband Raymond J. Smith operated a small press and published a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.
Vartan Gregorian, President of the Carnegie Corporation, delivered the Malloy Lecture in April. Gregorian is the twelfth president of Carnegie Corporation of New York, a grant-making institution founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1911. Gregorian served as president of Brown University and from 1981 – 1989 served as president of the New York Public Library.
Gregorian is also the author of The Road To Home: My Life And Times, Islam: A Mosaic, Not A Monolith, and The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 1880-1946. A Phi Beta Kappa and a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Training Fellow, he is a recipient of numerous fellowships, including those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council and the American Philosophical Society. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Celebrated American poet, William James Collins, known as Billy Collins, was the designated honoree for the Malloy Lecture in the Arts in 2006. Collins is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including The Rain in Portugal, Aimless Love, Horoscopes for the Dead, Ballistics, The Trouble with Poetry, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. He is also the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds. A Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York and Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Winter Park Institute of Rollins College, he was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. In 2016 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 2005, the “Genius of Mozart” took center stage at the year’s Malloy Lecture in the Arts featuring acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell and pianist Frederic Chiu.
Bell is an American Grammy award-winning violinist and conductor who made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1985, at age 17, with the St. Louis Symphony. He has since performed with many of the world’s major orchestras and conductors.
Chiu is a Chinese American classical concert pianist and Westport resident. During his formative years, he won numerous piano competitions, including the Kosciuszko Foundation Chopin Piano Competition and the Music Teachers National Association Competition, both in 1984. He was awarded the American Pianists Association Fellowship (formerly known as the Beethoven Foundation) in 1985. He was given the Petschek Award by the Juilliard School in 1994, which led to a recital in Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center.
Husband and wife artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude discussed their inspiration for “Gates” – their groundbreaking environmental art installation in Central Park. The pair first met in Paris and fell in love creating artwork together when Christo painted a portrait of Jeanne-Claude’s mother.
Their works include the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris, the 24-mile (39 km)-long artwork called Running Fence in Sonoma and Marin counties in California, and “Gates” in New York City’s Central Park.
Two prolific literary legends, Arthur Miller and Tom Cole, headlined the 2003 Malloy Lecture in the Arts in lively conversation with the more than 700 audience members, including actor Gene Wilder.
Miller was an American playwright, essayist and prominent figure in 20th century American theater and culture. Among his most notable works are All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and A View from the Bridge. The iconic Death of a Salesman is widely regarded as one of the finest, most iconic works of the era.
Playwright, screenwriter and fiction writer Tom Cole wrote the screenplay for Sundance Film Festival favorite Smooth Talk with and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for his provocative Medal of Honor Rag about a Vietnam soldier’s encounter with a psychiatrist. Cole’s stories were published in the Atlantic, Esquire, Saturday Evening Post and Kenyon Review among others. His first story, “Familiar Usage in Leningrad” won the Atlantic First Award in 1961 and was a top winner in the O. Henry Prize Stories Anthology.
The inaugural Malloy Lecture in the Arts was held in September and featured Philippe de Montebello who served as the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1977 to 2008. On his retirement, the legendary de Montebello was both the longest-serving director in the institution’s history, and the third longest-serving director of any major art museum in the world.
Born to a French aristocratic family, de Montebello immigrated to the United States in the 1950s and was educated in New York City at the Lycée Français. He then went on to graduate from Harvard with a degree in art history, and earned an MA from New York University, after which he embarked on a career in Fine Arts. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the art world.
