Women Celebrating Women: Brookgreen Gardens’ Anna Hyatt Huntington Awards Luncheon Honors the Founder’s Legacy

By: Ashley Daniels

March marks Women’s History Month, and Brookgreen Gardens is doing its part to celebrate fellow female pioneers through what totals a trifecta of partnerships with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Coastal Carolina University.

The annual Anna Hyatt Huntington Awards Luncheon will take place on March 27 in the Leonard Pavilion. This beloved tradition honors the Brookgreen founder’s life and lasting impact on the arts and philanthropy.

At this year’s luncheon, the Anna Hyatt Huntington Woman of Vision Award will be presented to Brookgreen’s own nationally recognized curator, writer, lecturer, and art historian, Robin Salmon, who has worked here for an impressive 50 years. The award was created to pay tribute to a contemporary woman who embodies Huntington’s same creative and philanthropic spirit and uses her gifts and vision to advance the arts.

“I am deeply honored to receive this award,” says Salmon. “The women who have received it before me have had a much larger presence in the art world through supporting it financially and in many other ways, as well as supporting Brookgreen Gardens. But I have been here for 50 years, and I’m very proud of that. Brookgreen is a magical place – it’s like nothing else. And I never felt like I needed to go elsewhere to be challenged or to learn or grow in my career. It has changed so much through the years, and I’m pleased to have been a part of all of that.”

Salmon is humble but so well deserving of the award. A native of Columbia, South Carolina, Salmon serves as Brookgreen’s Vice President of Art and Historical Collections and Curator of Sculpture. In addition to work here, she also serves on the board of directors of the National Sculpture Society, where she was awarded the Medal of Honor, and on the Council of Advisors of the Women’s Suffrage National Monument Foundation.

Nationally, Salmon was appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury to a four-year term on the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee of the U.S. Mint. And locally, Salmon is president of the Georgetown County Historical Society and Museum board of directors and serves on the Georgetown County Women’s Hall of Fame Committee.

Following our interview, Salmon was headed to Charleston, where she and her team were taking some of Brookgreen’s collection to the Southeastern Wildlife Exposition held in the Charleston Place Ballroom. She says the sculpture collection at Brookgreen has increased quite a bit since 1975 – from around 375 pieces placed mostly outdoors to now over 3,000, indoors and out.

Much has changed since Huntington’s heyday as one of the finest American animal sculptors in the early 1900s, too.

“In Anna Hyatt Huntington’s time, there were actually many women sculptors,” says Salmon. “We just don’t know about them. Some of them are in our collection, actually. What comes to mind is an old poster that shows Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing, and the caption is, ‘She did everything that he did except wearing high heels and backwards.’

“That is the whole thought of what women sculptors did. They had to prove themselves. They had to be better, actually, than male sculptors, and they often didn’t get the credit,” she continues. “Anna was one of those sculptors who helped other sculptors, especially once she became well-known and had a presence in the art world. She extended that hand out to others and lifted them up. And I think that’s what this award is all about. … I hope that in my career here at Brookgreen, this is something that I have done for other artists.”

The award luncheon’s keynote speaker will be Thayer Tolles, Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, who has admired Salmon’s work as a scholar and leader over the last few decades since Tolles began working at The Met in 1989.

“I’m delighted to be participating in this and to support Robin’s incredible contributions, not only to Brookgreen but also to the world of American sculpture and really to promoting the legacy of figurative sculpture,” says Tolles. “She speaks to everything that Anna Hyatt Huntington had envisioned for the role of women in promoting the arts, so it’s really exciting.”

Tolles’ own success in the art world and her years at The Met, as we celebrate Women’s History Month, she says, is thanks to the renowned sculptor, Daniel Chester French, who sculpted the 1920 monumental statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

“Here at the Met, I am fortunate to work with a very important collection of historical American sculpture, and, in some strange way, I am a successor to this great sculptor,” she says. “He was also a trustee here for many years and a great mentor to women artists at the time. As a trustee, he had a large say in the acquisitions of sculpture and brought in many works by women, just as Anna Hyatt Huntington did in shaping the Brookgreen Collection. I hope to continue to add to the strength of our collections and focus on historically underrepresented artists, including women and artists of color. That’s really been my focus over the last few years.”

Tolles says it’s been many years since she last paid a visit to Brookgreen Gardens and cannot wait to return this month to celebrate Salmon and Brookgreen’s legacy.

“What a great place to be,” she says. “There are many artists that The Met and Brookgreen have in common. The origins of both of our collections are around this incredible moment in the early 20th century when artists like Anna Hyatt Huntington and others were working prolifically and making sculpture much more democratic and accessible for people to see and own.”

A second award will be handed out at the luncheon: the Next Generation Award to a Coastal Carolina University student whose creative gifts have a positive impact on the community. This year’s recipient is Theresa Glazer, a native of Rye Brook, New York, who has had a passion for art since childhood. Her love for art deepened once she became a student at Coastal Carolina University, where she is studying to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts in art studio with a minor in biology. Glazer’s inspiration for her art is rooted in nature, and the diverse landscapes and sculptures of Brookgreen Gardens have played a significant role in shaping her creative journey.

For more information on Brookgreen Gardens and the Anna Hyatt Huntington Awards Luncheon, visit the website at www.brookgreen.org or call 843-235-6000.