Oak Spring Garden Foundation awards two early-career fellowships
OSGF
(UPPERVILLE, Va.) The Oak Spring Garden Foundation (OSGF) has awarded two newly established early-career fellowships of $10,000 each, named in honor of Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon’s children, Eliza Moore and Stacy Lloyd III. The two awards were established with generous support from the Gerard B. Lambert Foundation.
Lucia Monge, the recipient of the 2018 Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence, spent her childhood in Lima, Peru, where she first developed her sense of the natural world in her grandfather’s garden. In 2015, Monge completed a Master of Fine Art in Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and is now a Professor at Brown University. Her artwork focuses on the way people relate to plants and other aspects of the natural world, and also incorporates perspectives from science with collaborations. Some of Monge’s art is inspired by Charles Darwin’s observations of plant motion. Monge plans to expand upon these ideas by using books by Darwin housed in the Oak Spring Garden Library.
“The drawing, photo, sculptural, and learning outcomes I anticipate for this fellowship will be seeds and not necessarily an end point in my practice,” Monge said. “Ultimately, all of these investigations will inform a body of work that is participatory in nature and invites us to reconsider plants in new ways.”
Ashley McKay Boulden, the recipient of the 2018 Stacy Lloyd III Fellowship for Bibliographic Study, is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art and Architectural History at the University of Virginia’s McIntire Department of Art. Her dissertation focuses on engraved ornament prints that circulated in Paris during the eighteenth century, including the embroidery patterns of Charles Germain de Saint-Aubin. Her particular focus is the 258-page manuscript “Recueil de plantes” by Saint-Aubin housed in the Oak Spring Garden Library, which has not previously been digitized or widely researched.
“The Oak Spring Garden Library collections are essential for this research as I work to identify the specimens Saint-Aubin studied for his Flora botanica,” Boulden said. “My work will reframe Saint-Aubin’s botanical illustration and foreground the ‘Recueil de plantes’ as critical to refining our understanding of wider stylistic debates and transitions.”
In addition to the $10,000 award, each fellow will spend a minimum of 14 days on the historic Oak Spring estate and work with the rare book and art collections in the Oak Spring Garden Library.
Lucia Monge and Ashley McKay Boulden are the inaugural recipients of what will become an annual award. OSGF is currently accepting applications for the 2019 Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence and the 2019 Stacy Lloyd III Fellowship for Bibliographic Study.
OSGF is a private operating foundation established by Bunny Mellon in 1993. OSGF began operations in its current form after her death in 2014. The foundation’s mission is to support and inspire fresh thinking and bold action on the history and future of plants, including the art and culture of gardens and landscapes.