Oak Spring Garden Foundation Announces 2023 Fellows

Oak Spring Garden Foundation is pleased to announce our 2023 Fellows. These fellowships are designed to support early-career practitioners, working on new projects that focus on plants, gardens, and landscapes, and the arts and culture of them.  

Since 2018, we have offered our annual Stacy Lloyd III Fellowship for Bibliographic Study and our Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence, named in honor of OSGF founder Bunny Mellon’s children, to outstanding scholars and artists. Our Fellowship in Plant Science Research and our Fellowship in Plant Conservation Biology and have been awarded annually since 2021.

Applications for 2024 Fellowships opens February 14th, 2023.

See below to learn about each Fellow.

---

Phillippa Pitts, 2023 Stacy B. Lloyd III Fellow

Phillippa Pitts is a Horowitz Foundation Fellow for American Art at Boston University. Her research questions social, political, and racial borders within American art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, highlighting the aspirations and anxieties around expansion, immigration, xenophobia, and Indigeneity that underpin such constructions.

---

Nazafarin Lotfi, 2023 Eliza Moore Fellow

Nazafarin Lotfi is currently a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University. Through her multidisciplinary approach, she explores humanness in relation to nonhuman bodies and places that are defined by practices of map-making and gardening. To learn more about her work, visit her website.

---

Ingmar Staude, 2023 Plant Conservation Biology Fellow

Dr. Ingmar Staude is Senior Scientist of the group "Systematic Botany and Functional Biodiversity" at Leipzig University. Ingmar’s research focus is centered around understanding nature’s strategy to cope with anthropogenic global change using theoretical, inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches.

---

Anna Wyngaarden, 2023 Plant Science Research Fellow

Anna Wyngaarden is a masters candidate at the University of Georgia. Her research focus is centered around rare plants and more specifically, rock outcrop communities in the Southeastern U.S.

Oak Spring Garden Foundation Announces 2023 Botanical Artists in Residence

The Oak Spring Garden Foundation is pleased to announce that Beverly Allen, Carol Woodin, and Jean Emmons have been selected for the Botanical Artist in Residence (BAiR) program in 2023. They will also be joined by John Pastoriza-Piñol, a 2020 deferred BAiR. We are excited to host Beverly, Carol, and Jean, and John for three-weeks this spring.

Artists selected for the Oak Spring Garden Foundation’s BAiR program receive a $1,000 individual grant and devote their time at Oak Spring to working on their botanical art, either using material from the formal garden at Oak Spring or from the broader 700-acre Oak Spring landscape. Our hope is that they may also draw inspiration from the Oak Spring Library’s collection. Artists live on-site in nicely appointed shared housing with a studio in close proximity. At the culmination of the residency, each artist has the option to sell one completed work for $1,000 to Oak Spring, and the finished piece will be accessioned into the Oak Spring Library as a contribution to the developing Oak Spring Florilegium.

This residency program is designed to support artists who are practitioners of botanical illustration – which sits at a unique intersection of art and science and is well represented in the Oak Spring Garden Library collection. Applications for the 2024 Botanical Artists in Residence will February 14th, 2023.

To learn more about each of the artists and their work, read below.

---

Beverly Allen

Beverly Allen is an Australian based botanical artist. Her works are often life sized and inspired by the native flora of Australia. She is also the co-founder and president of the Florilegium Society at the Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney. View her work here.

Corymbia ficifolia, watercolor on paper, 49 x 40 cm, 2018 © Beverly Allen

---

Carol Woodin

Carol Woodins is based in Hudson Valley, New York. She has freelanced as an artist for over 20 years, specializing more recently on orchids. View her work at Carol Woodin Botanical Art or on Instagram.

Maize Morado, Zea mays, watercolor on vellum, 16 x 18 inches, 2020 © Carol Woodin

---

Jean Emmons

Jean Emmons is a Botanical Illustrator based in Washington State, U.S.A. Her work is informed by light and her technique is, “based on medieval manuscript illumination on vellum.” To learn more about her work visit https://jeanemmons.com/. Follow her work on Instagram.

Iris ‘Full Tilt Boogie’, watercolor and gouache on Kelmscott vellum, 28 x 36 cm, 2022 © Jean Emmons

John Pastoriza-Piñol

John Pastoriza-Piñol is a Botanical Illustrator based in Melbourne, Australia. He considers himself a contemporary visual artist whose practice sits within the genre of botanical art yet rebels against its continued traditional representations. He was originally selected for our 2020 Botanical Artist in Resident program and deferred his residency due to COVID-19 complications. We are pleased to finally welcome him to Oak Spring. View his work here.

Magnolia x soulangeana, Chinese Magnolia, Watercolor on Arches, 300gsm, 23.4 x 33.1 in, 2022 ©John Pastoriza-Piñol