Pollock’s dissertation probes the intersection of Black women sculptors’ material conditions, strategies, and absences, with a view towards developing new frameworks to discuss the alternative, unrealized, and non-extant material of Black women’s figurative sculpture of the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries. She seeks to redress gaps in the archival record by charting the ways Black women’s sculpture and artistic labor—beyond a single object, a single material, or even a single continuous temporal dimension—has been animated by multi-medial reproduction and aesthetic interventions that drive a network of collective memory shared among Black women artists that stretches into the contemporary moment.

In three parts, her dissertation will consider Black women sculptors’ understandings of longstanding material hierarchy, and the system of power it instantiated, via analysis of extant sculpture completed in materials beyond bronze and marble; Black women sculptors’ modes of survival and bids to create lasting and monumental art objects while navigating structural barriers to access in the art market via a multi-object approach to the analysis of non-extant sculpture; and the aesthetic memory practices developed by Black women artists working in their wake that exhibit an archival impulse characterized by textual-visual strategies that bend space and time to dispute loss and bring the past perpetually into the present and future.

Ebonie Pollock, a scholar of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century African American and African diaspora, holds an A.M. in History of Art & Architecture from Harvard University and an A.B. in Art History & Archaeology from Washington University in St. Louis. Her scholarship has previously been supported by the Ford Foundation, the New York Public Library, the Tyson Scholars Program at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Social Sciences Research Council-Mellon Mays Graduate Initiative Program, and the Gordon Parks Foundation. She has contributed to Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art and the publications Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch (Yale University Press, 2024), and Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel (Paul Holberton Publishing, 2021).