Three Lives honors marine scientists Easter Ellen Cupp, Anita B. Smith Hall, and June Grace Pattullo, under-considered firsts in the field of oceanography for their doctoral work conducted at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography between 1927 and 1960. It also reflexively gestures to the tradition of honoring great men in science through portraiture by engaging with the problematic of how to mark achievement when a career has been curtailed, and the archive comes up short. Cupp, Hall, and Pattullo worked between two waves of feminism, but were part of the American modernist wave preceded by Three Lives, Gertrude Stein's novella about three unremarkable women that is also about ways of documenting a life: what counts as remarkable, how to remark. Stein wrote in view of Paul Cézanne's portrait of his wife, a study in light and form that she must have contemplated often as she wrote. In her hand-drawn portraits for our Three Lives, artist Amy Adler focuses on women oceanographers who, like writers and painters of their time, studied fleeting elemental forms, their careers likewise all but fading from view, casualties of the failure to recognize and document. Adler uses the pastel portrait form to reflexively consider what is remarkable, what mediums and marks convey the double significance of being important yet unremarked. The series is accompanied by written contributions by Lisa Cartwright and Joe Riley that focus not only on the science contributions of Cupp, Hall, and Pattullo, but also on matters of gender, sexuality, race, and ability. That these women happened to be, respectively, queer, Black, and queer and disabled is taken up as integral to the problematic of reconstituting the form and matter of unremarked lives.
Background image: Photograph of Easter Ellen Cupp with microscope, c. 1935. Easter Ellen Cupp was the first woman in North America to receive a doctorate in oceanography and was a research associate at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. SIO Photographs, Eugene Cecil LaFond Papers, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego.
