Joe Sussi
Degree: PhD in Art History and Environmental Studies (focus in Contemporary Art and Environmental Justice)
Expected Graduation Date: Spring 2024
Prior Degree
BA in Art History, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH
MA in Art History, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
2023 Scholarships
Alice Wingwall Travel Award in Art History
Marian Donnelly Student Award
I Am Originally From Chatham, NJ
WHY I CAME TO THE UO AND HOW I CHOSE MY MAJOR
I selected the University of Oregon for its unique focus on interdisciplinary scholarship. My research focuses on how toxicity has shaped culture and vice versa, so I was particularly interested in a university that would be able to accommodate and provide access to the resources and intellectual community I wanted that had similar interests. I was also very familiar with the work of my primary advisor, Dr. Emily Eliza Scott, whose work was formative for me in my own trajectory. Her placement here represented to me the possibility for the type of interdisciplinary scholarship I wanted to do within the field of Art History.
I originally studied Polymer Science and Engineering in my undergraduate, but decided in my final year of studies that it was not a compatible match for me. I was becoming skeptical of how the sciences constructed objectivity without much questioning of how or why. At the time, I wasn’t sure what to do, but I was required to take an Art History class to fulfill an elective, and I found my curiosity being satiated in that environment. I received a lot of support from the graduate teaching assistants and the professors at Case Western, which motivated me to pursue that degree. I am not sure I would have made that switch if it wasn’t for their support. In Art History and Visual Culture studies, I was able to explore a lot of questions I had about the sciences, particularly how cultural, social and aesthetic values intersect with scientific knowledge. I was especially surprised by how the concept of nature and ecology was reflected in the visual arts. My own engineering focus in polymer science concerned research in developing green alternatives for plastics, and the artists I was exposed to in my first art history seminar were thinking in more complex ways about nature and ecology and really questioning the assumptions of sustainability that I had not really had the time to ask when in engineering.
UNIQUE QUALITIES I BRING TO MY STUDIES
My background in engineering makes my research unique but I also do not have a traditional academic background. I am a first generation college student with limited exposure to the arts and humanities until I went to college. I had not been to an art museum prior to moving to Cleveland and not until I took an art history course. My father didn’t finish high school and worked at supermarkets his whole life, finally landing at the bakery at Costco and my mother started off going door to door selling telephones before making a break in management. These experiences, though not my own, inform my perspective and make me particularly sensitive to academic expectations and what I perceive as incommensurate disciplinary responses to performance. My own education experience of feeling an inability to ask questions and be forced through a system also informs a pedagogy of wanting skill development and purpose to be placed at the forefront for students and emphasized.
My Puerto Rican heritage also informs my research topics and subjects. My mother’s family is from Puerto Rico and are Taino/Afro-Caribbean. Being born in the United States, I feel often disconnected from the place of my mother’s cultural background, which was an important aspect of my childhood and upbringing. The political tension between Puerto Rico as a commonwealth and colony of the United States is something I explore in one of my chapters by considering how perceptions of toxicity have shaped the island and constructed disciplinary regimes of ordering human/biological life.
MY INFLUENTIAL PROFESSORS
Dr. Emily Eliza Scott pushes me to think more critically about visuality and aesthetics in relationship to environmental violence in ways that continuously surprise me. She is a very generous listener and very clear and deliberate with her wording. During the early periods of the pandemic, she formed a small group of graduate students that she was working with to share work, readings and presentations with. These meetings helped create a sense of community and a space to share and receive feedback on work in progress, something we were all desperately needing then and now. Her capacity for collaborative work has inspired many of my colleagues and myself to create collaborative research and artistic collectives, which has been incredibly rewarding and something that I would have doubted in myself if it wasn’t for that type of model.
MY EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
I am involved with the GTFF (the union for Graduate Employees), several graduate student readings groups and art collectives. Reading groups and art collectives are important to me to create a space that is separate from the university where we can think critically about the institution and also how we may contribute to the Eugene community. I worked in an arts collective to elevate the stories of the UO Urban Farm and the importance of that space.
MY GREATEST LEARNING EXPERIENCE AT UO
I went on a tour of environmental pollution with the local environmental justice organization, Beyond Toxics, as part of a course I took called Unnatural Disasters in Winter 20202 taught by my advisor Dr. Emily Eliza Scott. That was a life changing learning experience listening to Lisa Arkin, director of Beyond Toxics, talk about the scale and experience of environmental violence in Eugene, OR, and the deep history of environmental racism that underlies that violence. It was an experience unlike any other that I have had and I am incredibly fortunate to have had that opportunity when I did.
AFTER GRADUATION
My hope is to become a professor at a university teaching Art History and Environmental Studies. It has been my goal for over a decade and that is what I hope to be able to do afterward. I want to teach students who have not had the best exposure or experiences learning about the arts and humanities and think it is a waste of time. I hope to encourage them to think about how the arts and humanities can amplify their work and allow them to be critical of their of own disciplines and working practices. I think there is not enough done to help students make these connections, particularly under-represented and marginalized students. I want to be involved in students lives to help them find that work of art or that book that really makes them, first, feel a connection with and, second, change their perspective.
YOUR GIFT
This award provided the essential resources to conduct an interview with the artist Kim Abeles and conduct field research pertinent to the artist’s work (including seeing several important works I am writing about and accessing her archives). For the purposes of these travel awards, I went to Sacramento, CA and Los Angeles, CA. In Sacramento, I was able to see several works of art in person that I had only seen grainy photographs of. I am writing about expanded art practices that include multiple years of photography, sculpture, installation and performance work. These pieces were exhibited for the first time in many years and to be able to see that work was an incredible opportunity. In LA, the travel grant supported me to interview the artist and to visit many sites in LA that were pertinent to her project. The work in question, Mountain Wedge (1985-87) explored how smog produced from industrial and automobile pollution obscured the view of the massive San Gabriel Mountains from downtown Los Angeles. This provocation became an obsession for Abeles who, for two years, took 274 photographs of the view from her downtown studio in an attempt to capture it. Having failed this, she walked sisteen and a half miles to the base of the mountain from her studio, and only at that point did she finally see the mountain. This photographic work and performance piece informed much of her later practice. To be able to experience LA over a week and have extended conversations with the artist is, truly, a dream come true as an art historian. I feel the most generative and informed when I am able to do fieldwork, which made this experience especially important for me.
These scholarships have been incredibly supportive of my research over the course of my time here at the UO. I have received both the Alice Wingwall Award and the Marian Donnelly Award twice, which has been a godsend as far as making my high demands for research possible. Than you so much for this support! I am impressed that you want to support the arts so fervently. At a moment when institutional funding for the arts and humanities continues to plummet and the futurity of art history departments looks dire, it is thanks to the people who established the Alice Wingwall and Marian Donnelly Awards that this kind of productive research is possible.