Ebonie Pollock

Academic Year 2026-2027
Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow
Ebonie Pollock smiling directly at the photographer in front of a gray background

Ebonie Pollock is a PhD Candidate in the History of Art & Architecture department at Harvard University. She is a scholar of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century African American and African diaspora, and 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. Prior to graduate study, she was a Curatorial Assistant at the Lowe Art Museum (University of Miami). She has contributed to  Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone  and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch , among other publications.

Gold Would Not Be Too Precious a Medium: The Material and Memory of Black American Women’s Modern Figurative Sculpture

Ebonie Pollock’s fellowship project is Gold Would Not Be Too Precious a Medium: The Material and Memory of Black American Women’s Modern Figurative Sculpture. This 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. The project 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.