Oak Spring Announces 2020 Stacy Lloyd III and Eliza Moore Fellows

The Oak Spring Garden Foundation is very pleased to announce our 2020 Stacy Lloyd III and Eliza Moore Fellowship recipients. 2020 will be the third year that we have offered these fellowships, named for Rachel “Bunny” Mellon’s children and established with generous support from the Gerard B. Lambert Foundation, to outstanding early-career scholars and visual artists working in areas related to plants, gardens, and landscapes.  Both fellowships include $10,000 awards, 2-4 week residencies at Oak Spring, and access to the foundation’s resources, including the Oak Spring Garden Library collection. 

Scroll down to read about each fellowship, and the 2020 awardees. 

 Stacy Lloyd III Fellowship for Bibliographic Study

This fellowship, established in honor of Bunny Mellon’s son Stacy Lloyd III, a former foreign service officer and bookstore owner, aims to support scholars who wish to use the Oak Spring Garden Library collection in their research. We are excited to welcome fellows Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen and Josepha Richards to the foundation in 2020.

Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her dissertation project investigates the artistic and knowledge production of painted and printed flower books from Germany and the Low Countries in the long seventeenth century (c. 1575–1725). Her research intersects topics in the history of art, science, and the book, and experiments with methods in material culture and digital humanities. Applying the concept of “making and knowing” and “learning by doing,” Jessie particularly engages with historical reworking/remaking as an empirical way to inquire into producing (color) images of the plant world. Aside from her academic activities, Jessie serves as an advisory committee member of the woodblock digitization project at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp and is contributing to an upcoming botanical illustration exhibition at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington D.C.

 Jessie’s research at Oak Spring will support her PHD dissertation on seventeenth-century flower books “Everlasting Flowers Between the Pages,” a project which investigates the artistic and knowledge production of early modern botanical watercolors and their contribution to the development of plant science.  

Josepha Richard is a historian specialised in 18-19th century China, with a specific interest in the urban history of Guangzhou (Canton) and Sino-Western interactions under the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). She received a PhD in Landscape History at the University of Sheffield, an MA in Art History from Paris IV Sorbonne University and an MA in Advanced Chinese Studies from Leeds University. Her thesis looked at the ways that Hong merchants used their private homes and gardens for social mobility in the global and local context of the Canton System (1757-1842). Recently she became an Oak Spring Garden Foundation fellow at the University of Bristol as part of the John Bradby Blake project. The latter combines history of art and science by analysing botanically accurate paintings of Chinese plants commissioned by British trader John Bradby Blake in late 18th century Guangzhou, and Blake's abundant handwritten manuscripts on the plants. 

As part of her Stacy Lloyd III grant, Josepha will be comparing Blake painting commissions and manuscripts held in OSGF with other archives containing parts of Blake's collections in the UK.

Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence

Named for Bunny Mellon’s daughter, artist Eliza Moore, this fellowship supports outstanding early-career visual artists who wish to dedicate a period of time to focus on their artistic work. In addition to the $10,000 award, the fellows are provided with access to the foundation’ resources, including the Oak Spring Garden Library collection. 

We are thrilled to welcome Emma Steinkraus and Maddison Colvin as our newest Eliza Moore fellows.

Emma Steinkraus is an artist, curator, assistant professor, and the visual arts editor of the contemporary poetry and art magazine Company Journal. Her work combines paintings, photo transfers, and installations to explore gender and ecology. Her current project documents the contributions of women to natural history and scientific illustration. A graduate of Williams College and the University of Iowa, Emma now lives in Virginia where she is an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Hampden-Sydney College. She has attended artist residencies at the Blue Mountain Center, Pyramid Atlantic, the Pajama Factory, and Cow House Studios in Ireland. Her work has been exhibited at 21c, the Susquehanna Art Museum, Target Gallery, and the Williams College Museum of Art.  

Emma plans to use her time at Oak Spring to work on a garden-inspired wallpaper project that explores the work and contributions of early modern female artist-naturalists. 

Maddison Colvin is an interdisciplinary visual artist residing in Oregon. Originally from Washington state, she received a BA from Whitworth University in 2008 and an MFA from Brigham Young University in 2013. Her work has been shown regionally, nationally, and internationally, and she is currently a member and co-director of Tropical Contemporary, an art collective and exhibition space in Eugene, Oregon. Besides her studio and curatorial practice, Maddison works as a graphic designer and an instructor of studio art at Linn-Benton Community College. Her work focuses on themes of ecology, built environment, and communal knowledge, and spans media from painting to video game design. The body of work she is currently building uses a combination of site scanning, photography, drawing, and writing to explore gardens as sites of control and contradiction.

Maddison will use her time at Oak Spring to work on a photo essay project about gardens, their shifting boundaries, their creators, and our relationships to plants.

Applications for our 2021 fellowships and awards will open in early Spring 2020. To learn more about opportunities for researchers and artists, please visit our https://www.osgf.org/fellowships-residencies.