Howdy! I’m Ike. This fall I’ll be starting my fourth year as a PhD student in History of Art and Architecture. My dissertation will focus on antinuclear art from the 1970s and 1980s, but I’m also interested in art histories of gender and sexuality. In summer 2020 I was lucky enough to work as the Graduate Student Research Fellow in the Greer Lankton Archive at the Mattress Factory museum in Pittsburgh. Lankton was a transwoman artist who lived and worked in New York in the 1980s. She exhibited work at major institutions and was a contemporary of artists like Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, and David Wojnarowicz. Yet, where these artists have come to be well-known, Lankton’s work has been neglected in the art historical canon. As an outcome of my research in 2020, I’m very fortunate to be able to organize an exhibition drawing from Lankton’s archive which will open at the University Art Gallery this fall.

I’ve partnered with Dr. Alex J. Taylor who teaches our department’s undergraduate Exhibition Seminar to implement a module on writing for exhibitions through the Humanities Engage Curricular Development Opportunity for Ph.D. Students. Over two semesters, undergraduates get hands on experience in developing and designing an exhibition at the University Art Gallery in Frick Fine Arts. Complementing this Greer Lankton archive show, the undergraduate exhibition seminar is curating an exhibition on Andrey Avinoff, a gay man and former director of the Carnegie Institute, whose papers Pitt has recently acquired.

Exhibition writing is a very particular (and difficult!) genre. Effective exhibition text has to strike a balance between being compact and being informative. Exhibition text must also be accessible. This form of writing is thus also difficult to teach without examples. I am developing this module drawing from the written material from the Lankton show including wall texts, labels, and catalogue essays. These three formats work together to reinforce an exhibition’s central thesis. An introductory wall text sets out to provide relevant context and the show’s central theme. Labels, then, provide the scaffolding for the show. Labels connect the works on display to the theme outlined in the wall text and include relevant information gathered from research. Catalogue essays allow for additional and longer form research and interpretation, to further expand on the show’s central thesis.

The module I am developing will teach from the material I have written for the Lankton show. For example, when writing wall texts, students will select the art objects on which they would like to research and write. In 50 or so words, students will need to be able to communicate all relevant information on their artwork. We will then workshop these texts together in class. The goal is for students to finish the module with strong communication and writing skills that they can take with them elsewhere. Chief among these skills is the ability to workshop their writing, to be able to give and receive feedback.

Students are also learning how to work with collections and archives to make them available for public audiences. Archives are brought to life in this way. We are able to remember the past in part by the efforts of those who catalogue and index historical objects. The Greer Lankton Archive, for example, was donated to the Mattress Factory by the Lankton family. Mattress Factory archivists Sarah Hallett and Sinéad Bligh as well as other archive fellows and interns have been working hard to digitize the collection to make it available online. This collective effort immortalizes Lankton’s work as well as the artist herself. Speaking from my experience, there’s a kind of magic to working in an artist’s archive. I became very close to Greer Lankton by way of her possessions, her journals, and her artwork. When I experienced these objects in the museum, I imagined how she would have interacted with them, held them, wrote in them. It was as if these objects folded the space and time between Lankton and myself so that we were able to meet across decades. This is the magic of archives. Beyond the writing skills students will develop, it is my hope that while working with the Andrey Avinoff papers the students will also get to experience this type of archival magic.