University of Pittsburgh Library System

My research seeks to explore the black female identity as a psychological and artistic concept. Up until recently, my creative process has been solely informed by my own experiences and environments. After having completed the Brackenridge fellowship this past summer, I’m looking for a more historical perspective to inform my artistic practice. With this temporal focus in mind, I’d like to create a series of artwork that is inspired by archival research.

The Frick Fine Arts Library collection holds nine artist books made by the Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha. For her ASRA project, Grace Marston curated a mini exhibition in the Frick Fine Arts Library which investigated how these books correspond to Ruscha’s larger body of work. Although Ruscha has made a name for himself as a painter whose vibrant works explore the power of fonts and language, his books tend to primarily contain black-and-white photographs with minimal amounts of text. However, some of his books do contain word art in the forms of signs, album covers, or bleach-stained linen. To provide additional context for the exhibition, Marston also explored and displayed the contents of Artists & Photographs (1970), an editioned art collection published by Multiples, Inc. Artists & Photographs served as a portable exhibition in a box with contributions by nineteen American and European artists, including Ed Ruscha. Like Ruscha, many of the other artists who participated in the Artists & Photographs project did not primarily identify as fine art photographers, but rather as artists who use photography as an element in their practice. Through her study of Artists & Photographs, Marston discovered how Ruscha’s photobooks fit in with the larger photoconceptualist movement, in which artists rebelled against the established visual conventions of modern art photography. Of course, artist books are meant to be opened and perused, not confined to glass display cases. In order to provide the University of Pittsburgh community with greater access to Ruscha’s books, Marston hosted a pop-up event in which library visitors had the opportunity to handle and look through the books for themselves. At the conclusion of the semester, Marston wrote about her ASRA experience for the Department of History of Art and Architecture's blog, Constellations.

The Starzl archive is a collection of the correspondence and life’s work of Dr. Thomas E Starzl, the father of modern organ transplantation; this archive provides unique insight into the medical ethics involved in developing experimental kidney and liver transplant protocols beginning in the late 1950s. In the beginning of Dr. Starzl’s transplant practice, ethical oversight committees were in their early stages, so physicians were primarily responsible for ensuring the proper treatment of human subjects in experimental trials. This is distinct from the process research follows today, in which researchers are required to receive direct written approval from the institutional review boards (IRB) before proceeding with their experimental trials. As Starzl developed his protocols for transplant and tested anti-rejection drugs to prevent graft rejection, the IRB developed concurrently. Suddenly in the late 1970s, Dr. Starzl found himself in contention with the IRB, as his notion of tolerable risk differed greatly from the IRB’s conception. In one set of correspondence with the FDA and IRB, Dr. Starzl reveals his propensity to follow his own judgement despite the accepted guidelines to treat patients with no alternative options - his breach in protocol prompted an FDA investigation of his clinical practice.

Specifically, the issue the FDA investigated involved his requests for compassionate use of the experimental anti-rejection drug OKT3 in organs of patients who failed conventional therapies, at high risk for rejection. Although OKT3 later became the first monoclonal antibody approved for human use in 1986, at the time of the correspondence 1984-1986 with IRB and subsequent FDA investigation in 1986, OKT3 was an experimental compound. This case study provides excellent context for a discussion into the degree of autonomy we grant physicians to make ethical decisions in compassionate use cases, and what amount of oversight is necessary to protect patients. Although this case is historical, we may be able to draw many modern parallels between Dr. Starzl’s compassionate use requests and patient groups suffering from diseases with poor prognoses and only experimental drugs options. I plan to write and publish a research paper on the medical ethics involved in compassionate use cases and the IRB oversight of physicians.

I propose to do an in-depth visual and textual analysis of Philipon's "La Caricature" which is housed in the Frick Fine Arts Library. My proposed analysis will focus on the depiction of gendered violence throughout the journal. I plan to supplement this analysis by studying representations of women and violence in other modern and contemporary French publications. My project will combine my interests in French culture and gendered violence. It will contribute to previous scholarship on the volumes by examining them through a specifically feminist lens.

This project offers a comparative analysis of Pittsburgh’s queer communities and social life in the 1970s, the 1990s, and the twenty-first century. Along with communities around the country, queer individuals in Pittsburgh faced a variety of implicit and explicit discrimination, fed by the conservative turn towards a more hetero- and cis-normative culture after the Second World War. In response to direct systemic violence and social isolation, queer people began to create their own community spaces where they could turn for resources, support, and mutual aid. Using queer periodicals, event records, and personal accounts, I craft a narrative of these people and places to highlight how they enabled survival, love, and joy in the face of persecution. By drawing on resources created by and for queer audiences, my work transcends narratives of queer tragedy and trauma to consider how queerness can provide a space of community, vibrancy, and love. I also use my research to reconsider my own experiences of queer community in Pittsburgh in 2024. This has led me to reflect on the disappearance of the physical spaces that I read about and the seeming dissolution of the community itself. I have found that modern representations of queerness have been sanitized to conform and assimilate to narratives from dominant powers. Thus, my research also confronts modern definitions of “pride” and emphasizes the value of anticapitalism and queer liberation in creating a strong, healthy, and supportive community. I intend to use my findings to reflect on local queer histories and to create space for community in the present by creating a virtual space for creating and collecting contemporary records of queer communities. Queer archival materials are scarce and I hope that my work can make future research about queer communities easier. I also hope to establish a community across archives in Pittsburgh, as my research incorporates multiple sites, including the Heinz History Center and Carnegie Mellon University.