The Cultural Landscape Foundation Announces Chicago Stewardship Excellence Award Recipients
Release Date: 06/19/08
In celebration of the Cultural Landscape Foundation’s (TCLF) tenth anniversary, the organization is honoring ten individuals who share the vision of "stewardship through education" in 2008. Throughout the year, under the celebratory umbrella of Ten-4-Ten, TCLF will bestow Stewardship Excellence Awards on those individuals across the nation in order to spotlight stewardship stories that have the power to educate and inspire future generations of cultural landscape stewards.
The first Ten-4-Ten Stewardship Excellence Award was bestowed on Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. in Charleston, South Carolina, in March. The two Chicago honorees are:
Julia S. Bachrach was selected to receive this award in honor of her years at the Chicago Park District, where she has been actively maintaining the archives, advocating for park preservation and securing National Register and National Historic Landmark status for many worthy parks. The award is also given in honor of her contributions to landscape architectural history through her publications, exhibitions, lectures, interviews, and tours all of which demonstrate her continuing dedication to educating Chicagoans about their shared landscape heritage.
Cindy Mitchell is being honored for her four decades of exemplary dedication to the wise stewardship of Chicago’s unrivaled collection of historic parks and boulevards. This includes her work as a Chicago Park District Commissioner, as well as her 27-year commitment to Friends of the Parks, an organization that she co-founded and served as President for ten years. She also is an active, involved member of the Mayor’s landscape committee in Chicago. In all of these capacities on both sides of the public and private arena, Ms. Mitchell has provided vision, continuity and leadership.
The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), established in 1998, is the only not-for-profit foundation in America dedicated to increasing the public’s awareness of the important legacy of cultural landscapes and to help save them for future generations.
TCLF was founded in 1998 because our collective knowledge and understanding of the American landscape has so declined as to be absent not only from educational curricula, but from the hearts and minds of too many. While individual study programs exist—emphasizing the environment, art, culture, and history, a comprehensive or holistic focus on the larger cultural landscape that fosters a stewardship ethic does not. Considering this dilemma in the context of new challenges and opportunities that have emerged over the past four decades since the birth of the environmental movement and two decades into declining arts education, suggest that a fresh approach is required—one that interprets and values an expanded land ethic, balancing nature, scenery, and culture. TCLF aims to reunite art and the environment, bridging the divide of often segmented special interest groups. TCLF’s organizational aspiration is to instill a reverential attitude towards representative examples of American landscapes, from the most sophisticated to the most humble and, in the process, nurture a nature-culture stewardship ethic.
To learn more go to: www.tclf.org/awards/awards_2008.htm
- Contact Phone: 312 742 7529