‘100 Women Campaign’ Reaches 90% Mark
The 100 Women Campaign is now 90% complete, a milestone in the initiative that began with the announcement, in October 2019, that Cornelia Hahn Oberlander would be the namesake of a new international prize in landscape architecture.
Helping reach this important point in endowing the Oberlander Prize was Linda Jewell, FASLA, professor emerita of landscape architecture and urban design at the University of California, Berkeley. Ms. Jewell has herself been recognized with several prominent awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects, including the Jot D. Carpenter Teaching Medal. Describing Oberlander as “brilliant, talented, curious, and generous,” she fondly recalled touring Vancouver with Cornelia and her husband, Peter, whose “status as local celebrities was evident from the many Vancouverites who greeted us to comment on a local issue or completed project.”
Suzanne Clary has also joined the cause, dedicating her support of the Oberlander Prize to the memory of Mary Rutherfurd Jay. A descendant of Founding Father John Jay, Mary Rutherfurd Jay studied architecture at MIT and Harvard University's Bussey Institute. Referring to herself as a garden architect, she began her practice in 1908, taking on primarily residential commissions in Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island. After embarking upon a world tour in 1912, Jay spent the next three decades lecturing extensively on international gardens, illustrating her talks with images from her travels. In 1931 she published The Garden Handbook, which summarized much of her practice, travels, and talks.
Ms. Clary is the president of the Jay Heritage Center in Rye, New York, where for the last decade she has helped interpret the home of John Jay and his descendants, a National Historic Landmark, and has conducted research into the narrative of enslaved and freed African American men and women who lived, worked, and were buried at the site. A Yale-educated art historian, Ms. Clary has also curated several exhibits on the life and career of Mary Rutherfurd Jay.
The 100 Women Campaign is just one of many ways to support the Oberlander Prize, the first and only international landscape architecture prize that includes a US$100,000 award, along with two years of public engagement activities. The prize will be awarded every other year, beginning in 2021. Influential historian John Beardsley has just recently been named the prize’s inaugural curator.
