Women and the Collaborative Art of Gardens explores the garden and its agency in the history of the built and natural environments, as evidenced in landscape architecture, literature, art, archaeology, history, photography, and film. Throughout the book, each chapter centers the act of collaboration, from garden clubs of the early twentieth century as powerful models of women’s leadership, to the more intimate partnerships between family members, to the delicate relationship between artist and subject. Women emerge in every chapter, whether as gardeners, designers, owners, writers, illustrators, photographers, filmmakers, or subjects, but the contributors to this dynamic collection unseat common assumptions about the role of women in gardens to make manifest the significant ways in which women write themselves into the accounts of garden design, practice, and history. The book reveals the power of gardens to shape human existence, even as humans shape gardens and their representations in a variety of media, including brilliantly illuminated manuscripts, intricately carved architectural spaces, wall paintings, black and white photographs, and wood cuts. Ultimately, the volume reveals that gardens are best apprehended when understood as products of collaboration. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of gardens and culture, ancient Rome, art history, British literature, medieval France, film studies, women’s studies, photography, African American Studies, and landscape architecture.

This book explores the garden and its agency in the history of the built and natural environments, as evidenced in landscape architecture, literature, art, archaeology, history, photography, and film. It reveals the significant ways in which women write themselves into the accounts of garden design, practice, and history.

The Sister Chapel (1974-78) was an important collaborative installation that materialized at the height of the women‘s art movement. Conceived as a nonhierarchical, secular commemoration of female role models, The Sister Chapel consisted of an eighteen-foot abstract ceiling that hung above a circular arrangement of eleven monumental canvases, each depicting the standing figure of a heroic woman. The choice of subject was left entirely to the creator of each work. As a result, the paintings formed a visually cohesive group without compromising the individuality of the artists. Contemporary and historical women, deities, and conceptual figures were portrayed by distinguished New York painters-Alice Neel, May Stevens, and Sylvia Sleigh-as well as their accomplished but less prominent colleagues. Among the role models depicted were Artemisia Gentileschi, Frida Kahlo, Betty Friedan, Joan of Arc, and a female incarnation of God. Although last exhibited in 1980, The Sister Chapel has lingered in the minds of art historians who continue to note its significance as an exemplar of feminist collaboration. Based on previously-unpublished archival materials and featuring dozens of rarely-seen works of art, this comprehensive study details the fascinating history of The Sister Chapel, its constituent paintings, and its ambitious creators.

This book reveals a personal artistic journey to sacred sites around the world (such as Stonehenge, Caves in the South of France, and Ayers Rock in Australia) and the art that was inspired by the symbols and connections at each location. It contains beautiful spreads in full color of the artist?s work, photographs of the sites where she gained her inspiration and personal observations written especially for each of the ten chapters.

This title was first published in 2002. To date, studies explaining decorative practice in the early modernist period have largely overlooked the work of women artists. For the most part, studies have focused on the denigration of decorative work by leading male artists, frequently dismissed as fashionably feminine. With few exceptions, women have been cast as consumers rather than producers. The first book to examine the decorative strategies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women artists, Women Artists and the Decorative Arts concentrates in particular on women artists who turned to fashion, interior design and artisanal production as ways of critically engaging various aspects of modernity. Women artists and designers played a vital role in developing a broad spectrum of modernist forms. In these essays new light is shed on the practice of such well-known women artists as May Morris, Clarice Cliff, Natacha Rambova, Eileen Gray and Florine Stettheimer, whose decorative practices are linked with a number of fascinating but lesser known figures such as Phoebe Traquair, Mary Watts, Gluck and Laura Nagy.

This guide takes you on an illustrated tour of the very best of the gardens of the University of Cambridge, some of the most beautiful, unique and historical horticultural spaces of any University around the world. For students and alumni, their families, Cambridge locals and for lovers of private gardens, Tim Richardson's book on the most exquisite gardens in and around the university of Cambridge's colleges combines brilliant research and elegant prose with stunning photography by Clive Boursnell. Following on the heels of Oxford College Gardens, this book invites an armchair appreciation of the history, horticulture and atmosphere that these hallowed gardens provide. The gardens are as rich and varied as the colleges themselves, often set within stunning architecture, and include formal quadrangles, naturalistic planting, walled gardens, rooftop oases, productive plots and watermeadows as well as the private spaces enjoyed exclusively by the college masters, porters and fellows. Allow this sumptuously illustrated book to take you on a dreamlike tour of these truly unique gardens, and drink in the atmosphere of one of the world's most beautiful universities.