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Centennial Series
by Dan Krall
IT IS SOMEWHAT IRONIC THAT THROUGHOUT THE HISTORY of the
Landscape Architecture program at Cornell, moments of importance
have often been repeated. In an earlier article, I noted that the
first three winners of the Rome Prize Fellowship in Landscape Architecture
at the Academy were Cornellians: Edward Lawson (1915), Ralph Griswold
(1920), and Norman Newton (1923).
A similar circumstance occurred
in the mid 1980s when three women won the landscape architecture
fellowship. Joanna Dougherty, the 1985 winner and first woman recipient
(there had been 53 previous male winners since 1915), received her
MLA from Cornell in 1984. The following year (1986) Elizabeth Hermann
(MLA ’83) won the award and in 1988 Linda J. Cook (MLA ’84)
won the landscape architecture fellowship.
Thus the first three
women awarded the fellowship in landscape architecture were graduates
of Cornell. During this same period two other Cornellians were also
at the Academy. Kathryn Gleason (BS in LA ’79 and current
department chair) was a Fellow from 1986-88 in Archaeology. Likewise,
Michael Van Valkenburgh (BS in LA ’76) was an Advanced Design
Fellow at the Academy in 1988.
The decades-long omission of women from the fellowships in the School
of Fine Arts reflected the deeply ingrained conservatism of the
Academy. While women were admitted to the classics departments from
the time of the Academy’s founding, even these individuals
were denied access to the Academy building with the exception of
the library. As one author noted, “The belief was officially
expressed that women would distract the men fellows, who should
devote themselves to the serious and divine calling of their art.
This historical but misconceived notion of the nature of art, and
of women, at least had an idealistic ring to it.”
It was not
until 1963 that the first fellowships in the Fine Arts were awarded
to women (in architecture and painting). Interestingly, between
1963 and the time of Ms. Dougherty’s award in 1985, eleven
women had won fellowships in architecture. |
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