This year’s recipients are Barbro S. Osher, Sir Mark Jones, Nicholas Thomas, and Deedee Wigmore.
BARD GRADUATE CENTER HONORS RECIPIENTS OF THE 2015 IRIS FOUNDATION AWARDS
New York, New York, February 3, 2015—Dr. Susan Weber, founder and director of Bard Graduate Center, has announced the recipients of the nineteenth annual Iris Foundation Awards for Outstanding Contributions to the Decorative Arts. This year’s honorees are Barbro S. Osher (Outstanding Patron), Sir Mark Jones (Outstanding Achievement in Scholarship), Nicholas Thomas (Outstanding Mid-Career Scholar), and Deedee Wigmore (Outstanding Dealer). The awards will be presented at a luncheon at the Colony Club, New York City, on April 22, 2015.
In announcing the awards, Weber noted: “This year’s honorees, through their professional commitment and intellectual pursuits, have brought about a greater recognition of the social, cultural, and historical significance of design, material culture, and the decorative arts.”
About the Honorees
Barbro S. Osher, Honorary Consul General of Sweden in San Francisco, is president of the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation and chair of the Bernard Osher Foundation. She was the owner and publisher of the Swedish-American newspaper Vestkusten for seventeen years and the founder of the San Francisco chapter of Swedish Women’s Educational Association (SWEA). She is the first woman to receive the Hazelius gold medal from the Nordic Museum in Stockholm—an honor so rare that it has only been awarded nineteen times since its inception in 1893. In 2014, the Swedish government awarded her the honorary title of Professor, a title that dates back to the 1700s, for her deep commitment and significant contributions to Swedish cultural life. She was instrumental in bringing the widely popular exhibition, Anders Zorn: Sweden’s Master Painter, to San Francisco in 2013 and New York in 2014. In addition, she is an honorary member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received numerous other recognitions and honorary degrees.
Sir Mark Jones, the current Master of St Cross College, Oxford, has written extensively on the history of the medal, fakes and forgeries, collecting and museums, and restitution. He received his undergraduate degree from Worcester College, Oxford and his master’s from the Courtauld Institute of Art. He began his career in 1972 at the British Museum where he later was appointed head of the department of coins and medals and organized the exhibitions The Art of the Medal (1979) and Fake? The Art of Deception (1988). From 1992 to 2001, he was director of the National Museums Scotland. As director of the Victoria and Albert Museum from 2001 to 2011, he oversaw its extensive renovation and expansion program. Knighted in 2010 for services to the arts, he is chairman of the Pilgrim Trust and a trustee of numerous museums and galleries.
Nicholas Thomas, who first visited the Pacific in 1984 to research his PhD thesis on the Marquesas Islands, has since written extensively on indigenous art, empire, and material culture, and curated exhibitions in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, many in collaboration with contemporary artists. His books include Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (1991), Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (1999), and Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (2010), which was awarded the Wolfson History Prize. Since 2006, he has served as director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, which was a finalist for the Art Fund’s Prize for Museum of the Year in 2013.
Deedee Wigmore, a dealer in American art, is the founder of D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc., a gallery specializing in the major historic styles with a primary emphasis on the period from 1900 to 1980. Of particular interest to the gallery are the 1930s-1940s realists and the postwar abstractions by Op and Color Field artists. In addition, she and her husband Barrie are passionate collectors of the American Aesthetic Movement. Works from their collection have appeared in many of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Aesthetic Movement exhibitions; the Munson-WilliamsProctor Arts Institute’s exhibition A Brass Menagerie (2006), which was presented at Bard Graduate Center in 2007; and Aesthetic Ambitions: Edward Lycett and Brooklyn’s Faience Manufacturing Company at the Brooklyn Museum (2013). Over the years, she has spoken at museums throughout the United States on connoisseurship and the collecting of American art.
About the Iris Awards:
The Iris Foundation Awards were created in 1997 to recognize scholars, patrons, and professionals who have made outstanding contributions to the study and appreciation of the decorative arts and thereby help to sustain the cultural heritage of our world. The awards are named for Bard Graduate Center Founder and Director Susan Weber’s mother, Iris Weber. Proceeds from the Iris Foundation Awards Luncheon fund graduate student scholarships and fellowships.
About Bard Graduate Center
Founded in 1993, Bard Graduate Center is a graduate research institute in New York City. Its Gallery exhibitions and publications, MA and PhD programs, and research initiatives explore new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture. A member of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH), it is an academic unit of Bard College.
