Polymath Douglas Ewart excels as a jazz composer and multi-instrumentalist. He's a prolific painter, sculptor and conceptual artist. He designs and fabricates instruments. He writes poetry, teaches and informally mentors a raft of artists. But don't call this modern day da Vinci a Renaissance man.
"I'm an African man or a Jamaican man — I have all the jobs," he said, laughing.
Ewart has been named the 25th McKnight Distinguished Artist, Minnesota's most esteemed and richest arts prize. The honor goes to someone who has "made significant contributions to the state's cultural life" and comes with a $100,000 stipend. Past winners include poet Robert Bly, theater founder Lou Bellamy and composer Libby Larsen.
"I'm elated and humbled," said the 76-year-old Ewart. "My mind flips to be recognized by my peers like this."
A self-described universalist who thinks of "the earth as one country and everyone as a citizen in it," Ewart founded the record label, Arawak Records. He has led such ensembles as the Nyahbingi Drum Choir, Quasar, Clarinet Choir, and Douglas R. Ewart & Inventions. His conceptual concert, "Crepuscule," features musicians, dancers, poets, visual artists and others in an artistic exultation.
One of the things that make him so unique is that he blurs lines and genres, said DeAnna Cummings, program director for arts and culture at the McKnight Foundation.
"To say Douglas is an interdisciplinary artist doesn't do justice to him," said Cummings. "His artistic practice is intersectional, diverse, complex and surprising, which makes this selection really special at a moment when the impulse is to categorize someone or articulate a purity."
Ewart is best perhaps known for his decades-long association with the Chicago-based AACM (Association for the Advancement of the Creative Musician), the legendary jazz and new music collective founded in 1965 by pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and a raft of jazz supremos. Ewart started as a student there before joining the ensemble and periodically taking the leadership reins.
