Author: casey

Three Lives is one of six exhibitions in Embodied Pacific, a four-year Getty PST ART: Art and Science Collide research partnership between UC San Diego Visual Arts and Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography foregrounding intersections of art and science in the history of oceanography, a field that shares with photography, biography, and typography a focus on graphical forms of knowing. Led by Lisa Cartwright and Nan Renner, Embodied Pacific features multiyear projects by thirty artists working with researchers in laboratories, field sites, and archives in SoCal and the Pacific Islands. Three Lives is a curatorial effort of Lisa Cartwright, Joe Riley, Stephania Torres-Londono, Leandro Martínez Depietri, Clarissa Chevalier, and Stephania Torres-Londono sited at Gallery QI and the UCSD Library’s art gallery. These exhibitions feature work engaging with what we know, and forms of knowing, about three key figures in the history of oceanography: Easter Ellen Cupp, June Pattullo, and Anita Hall, who are the subjects of projects by artists Amy Adler, Johnnie Chatman, Nicolas G. Miller, Lauryn Smith, and Jeffrey Stuker (on view at QI) and Judit Hersko, Kimberly Heard, Chanell Stone, Lauryn Smith, and Jeffrey Stuker (on view at Geisel Library). These sister Three Lives exhibitions invite immersive engagement in questions about how we structure the histories of the hidden worlds that are the ocean and its little-known researchers. These projects recognize the power of rendering absence and the importance of interrogating our formal means of graphic documentation.

What can we know about the lives and practices of scientists for whom no adequate record remains? Inspired by writer Gertrude Stein’s modernist trilogy Three Lives (1909) and artist Amy Adler’s A Woman of No Importance (2002), the works in this double-sited exhibition approach the subjugated histories of Easter Ellen Cupp, Anita Smith Hall, and June Pattullo—scientists who would remain unseen in the history of oceanography but for a handful of archival materials held by family members and the UC San Diego Library’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archives. These scant records, along with a trio of short biographies drafted by librarian Deborah Day in 1999, form the basis for what we know about the lives of these influential scientists. Easter Ellen Cupp, who was the first woman to earn a PhD at Scripps (in 1934), was passed over for a job at the fledgling oceanography institute in La Jolla despite her major contribution of a diatom atlas that would become the global standard for a century.  She spent the rest of her life teaching science in the San Diego public school system, a position she secured through the efforts of her life partner Dorothy Rosenbury, with whom she lived for more than half a century in a Kensington cottage where they tended rose bushes and where she pursued photography and fielded communications about her influential diatom atlas from scientists all over the world until her death in 1999. Denied her PhD by her Scripps committee, MFA ichthyologist Anita Smith Hall returned to a professorship at Hampton Institute, where she founded the nation’s first marine biology program in a historically Black college. June Pattullo, the first woman to receive a PhD in physical oceanography, arrived in San Diego with her life partner Elizabeth Strong, a fellow Marine Corps aviator with whom she tracked coastal ocean wave dynamics. When, as a professor at Oregon State, she succumbed to early onset cognitive decline, Strong completed her own PhD to continue their collaborative research.

Like the stories in Stein’s Three Lives, the works in these exhibitions are deceptively straightforward in their depictions of these women. The works by Amy Adler and Nicolas G. Miller are, at first glance, figural realism—until we notice the fact that Adler has meticulously hand-rendered in pastel the grain of the portrait photographs that serve as the iconic markers of these three careers. In her trademark style, the portraits that hang in the library, photographic copies of the pastel works, insist we take yet another step back from the aura of the original and the air of importance it imparts.  The highly realist trio of scaled down figurative sculptures by Nicolas G. Miller are also the result of a process that is traditional at its core. Miller hand-sculpts the figures in “digital clay” while using photographs as references. In other words, he sculpts from observation of archival photographs, much as Adler draws from these same sources.  Miller’s precise details of aspects such as expression and garments is picked up by Lauryn Smith, whose clothing patterns draw from the history of the garments worn by these women, and those she imagines for them, interpreting uniform and style reflecting the complex role these women played as public figures negotiating conflicting professional, domestic, queer, Black, and gendered expectations and roles. Johnnie Chatman’s landscapes position the figures as marked absence through the convention of the silhouette, invoking the scientific history of land survey photography, bringing this tradition and the romanticized work of American landscape artists such as Ansel Adams into open dialog with the history of documentation strategies in the field of oceanography. The theme of absence is underscored by Chanell Stone, whose ocean surface offers no figure and no gaze, and by Kim Heard, whose painting imagines the women together, in a conjectural encounter—an oceanographic table of elements whirling around them in what might be a domestic space. Jeffrey Stuker’s film underscores the fact that what appears to be realist and scientific documentation is in fact always a reflexive study in forms of representation and simulation, both about entities of oceanographic importance (diatoms, wave patterns) and about the histories of those who render knowledge of the ocean, one of the most difficult of Earth’s mediums to document and to know.