Items Gallery

Welcome! This digital exhibit presents a collection of expressive objects created by women within the past century to publicly communicate their experiences with physical illness, either through the medium of literature or visual art. The women represented here are primarily situated geographically in the United States, with the two notable exceptions of Frida Kahlo and Virginia Woolf, who are respectively Mexican and English.

More information about the items and their relevance to this exhibit can be found in the item descriptions, which you can access by clicking through the gallery below, as well as on the two additional pages of this exhibit, which provide further context and some interpretive intervention from me. 

As you look through the items, I ask you to consider the large role that affect plays here, both in terms of the items themselves and how we, as viewers, relate to them. Physical illness is, in several ways, a fundamentally embodied and affective thing. Each specific experience of it can, perhaps, only be fully understood by the one whose body contains the experience. What does it mean for an item to attempt to capture, communicate, (re)present, and archive such a thing? How would it succeed at doing so, if it can? If it can't, what does it capture, communicate, (re)present, and archive instead?