My mother, Isabel Vasseur, who has died aged 78, was a well-known figure in public art commissioning in the UK from the 1980s onwards, and was in the vanguard of a generation of innovative curators who revitalised public art in the last decades of the 20th century.
Her involvement in public art began in 1981, when she joined Eastern Arts, a publicly-funded regional arts body covering the east of England. She then went on to curate public art programmes for the Garden festivals in Glasgow in 1988 and Gateshead in 1990, and in 1992 to conceive and curate Lux Europae, an international exhibition of light installations across Edinburgh, coinciding with a European Summit there.
For 20 years she also ran her own public art agency, ArtOffice, and was a popular lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London, where she taught public art commissioning in the 90s. Among her many achievements, she was instrumental in bringing about a reappraisal of the work of the Independent Group of artists who flourished in the 50s. A trustee of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead and the Royal Society of Sculptors in London, her ArtOffice archive is now held at the Henry Moore Foundation.
Isabel was born in Hammersmith, west London, to Margaret (nee Bourne), a civil servant, and William Wardrop, an engineer. Her parents separated before her birth and were subsequently divorced; she was brought up as an only child by her mother.
After attending a number of schools, including Sutherland House in Cromer, Norfolk, a convent school in Yarmouth of the St Louis order, and finally Gallstone Technical College near Yarmouth, at 17 she joined the Parisian dancing troupe the Bluebells, with whom she toured Europe and New York before spending a year dancing in Las Vegas. There she was regarded as a troublemaker for persistently questioning the ban preventing black and white artists from staying at the same hotel.
Moving to London, Isabel danced at the Savoy theatre and met François Vasseur, an artist, with whom she moved to New York, where she mixed with artists and film-makers and earned a living as a waitress at Max’s Kansas City eatery, unofficial HQ of the Andy Warhol set.
She and François then moved to Paris, where they were married in 1966. They had two children, Blaise and myself, and we lived in Turkey and London before moving to Norfolk in 1974, where Isabel briefly became a professional photographer before joining Eastern Arts.
She will be remembered with affection by a generation of curators for her fearless approach to putting art into the public realm. She was a person who would not be held in check; “a lightning strike of a woman” as the arts writer Isobel Harbison once described her.
Her marriage to François ended in divorce in 1980. She is survived by her second husband, Tim Bliss, a neuroscientist, whom she married in 1994, and by Blaise and me.