Barbara Winston Blackmun passed away on July 6, 2018, shortly after celebrating her ninetieth birthday. She was an outstanding scholar of Benin art who was known by colleagues and students for her cool head and her kind, open heart. Her many publications on Benin court art demonstrated the potential of the carved ivory altar tusks for understanding the history of Benin art; provided a new methodology with which to study the corpus of Benin art; and established an iconographical “dictionary” that has been a boon to subsequent students of Benin art.
Barbara Winston was born in Merced, CA in 1928 and grew up in national parks where her father managed camps for the Civilian Conservation Corps.1 She graduated from UCLA with a BFA in Fine Arts and a teaching certificate in 1949 and took a job as a public school teacher in Trona, CA, in the Mojave Desert. There...