Oak Spring Garden Foundation Announces 2019 Fellows and Artists in Residence
OSGF
We have selected 12 individuals to participate in the OSGF’s growing art and research programming for 2019. This year’s awardees include four Fellows and eight Artists in Residence.
2019 is the second year OSGF has awarded the Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence and the Stacy Lloyd III Fellowship for Bibliographic Study, named in honor of Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon’s children and established with generous support from the Gerard B. Lambert Foundation. Each Fellow receives $10,000 and access to the materials and landscape of the Oak Spring Garden Library and 700-acre Oak Spring estate.
“We were really impressed by the work that our inaugural Fellows and residents accomplished in 2018,” OSGF President Peter Crane said. “The larger group that we are supporting this coming year have very diverse backgrounds and bodies of work, and we are sure that the outcomes will be equally impressive.”
The awardees are detailed below, and also on our respective pages:
2019 STACY LLOYD III FELLOWSHIP FOR BIBLIOGRAPHIC STUDY RECIPIENTS
In 2019, OSGF is also awarding two Stacy Lloyd III Fellowships; the Foundation’s most significant award in support of bibliographic scholarly research.
Lindsay Wells
2019 Stacy Lloyd III Fellow
Lindsay Wells holds an M.A. in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She aims to use the Fellowship to research her doctoral dissertation, which explores how nineteenth-century houseplant horticulture influenced the botanical imagery of the British Aesthetic Movement.
“My research as a Stacy Lloyd III Fellow will not only challenge our current understanding of botanical motifs in Victorian visual culture, but also foster critical exchanges between art history and the environmental humanities,” Wells said. “The Oak Spring Garden Library Collection contains hundreds of items of direct relevance to my project.”
Kristan Hanson
2019 Stacy Lloyd III Fellow
Kristan Hanson has an M.A. in Art History from the University of Chicago, and an M.A. in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kansas, where her research focuses on women and horticulture in late nineteenth-century French visual culture.
“My dissertation topic aligns perfectly with Rachel Lambert Mellon’s collection of rare and unique materials pertaining to plants, gardens, and landscapes as well as her interest in French Impressionist paintings,” Hanson said.
2019 ELIZA MOORE FELLOWSHIP FOR ARTISTIC EXCELLENCE RECIPIENTS
Jennifer Scheuer currently holds a position as Visiting Assistant Professor at Purdue University, and was selected as an Eliza Moore Fellow to expand her artistic research based on plants, medicine, the body and healing throughout history.
“I have been working with archives and historical books in my artistic research and greatly value the time to spend with historical and contemporary primary documents,” Scheuer said. “Dedicated time at [Oak Spring] will be an opportunity to create new series of work...and for internal growth in understanding of the relationship between humans and plants.”
Ellie Irons is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working at the intersection of socially engaged art and urban ecology. Irons was selected as a Fellow to extend work on her Feral and Invasive Pigments project, which she started in 2013. The project “involves making watercolor paint from the leaves, petals, and berries of spontaneous plants growing in urban areas or places otherwise impacted by human activity,” Irons said.
ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
OSGF is also pleased to announce eight artists who have been selected for its 2019 Artists in Residence. The Artist in Residence (AiR) Program continues the Mellons’ long history of generous support for the arts and the environment. It provides the opportunity for artists and writers to pursue and accomplish their own creative endeavors in a beautiful rural environment. Four artists in the spring and four in the fall will spend six weeks immersed in the landscape and community of OSGF in Upperville, Virginia. The aim of the AiR program is for artists to be inspired by each other, the 700-acre landscape, historic gardens, and the Library's collection of rare books on plants, landscape and gardens.
For many artists, residencies are a vital part of the artistic process, giving them time and space to focus, untethered by daily distractions, in a community of artists who can enhance reflection and energize new work in unexpected ways, while surrounded by a different landscape than their home environments.
OSGF is an operating foundation with a mission to support and inspire fresh thinking and bold action on the history and future of plants, including the art and culture of plants, gardens and landscapes. The Foundation is an emerging member of the Alliance of Artists Communities, and is pleased to be developing robust programming to support artists and scholars doing mission-aligned work.