ChathamU's Joseph Amodei is Working to Free the Vaccine
In March of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was just starting to spread in the U.S. and the timeline for vaccine roll-out was wildly unknown, Assistant Professor of Immersive Media, Joseph Amodei was already banding together with a worldwide health equity collaborative known as Free the Vaccine, which consists of “artists, activists, students, grandparents, longtime health equity advocates, and everyone in between” and works to make the vaccine ‘for the people.’ This idea echoes the ideology of Dr. Jonas Salk, who created the polio vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh. When asked who would own the patent to the polio vaccine, Salk responded, “Could you patent the sun? It’s a people’s vaccine.” According to Joseph, a people’s vaccine is predicated on, “the promise to share the intellectual property and the manufacturing technology of current vaccines with the rest of the world for free.”
“We prefer the term ‘the people’s vaccine,’ because billions of dollars of publicly funded money has been the bedrock for a lot of this research. Our work is finding out who we need to reach and who has the power to sign these commitments; it’s also taking a fairly complex pipeline and distilling it into imagery to reach a wider audience in a meaningful way. We do this work through many processes, but generally, we operate with an idea of artistic activism.”
Assistant Professor of Immersive Media, Joseph Amodei
Joseph’s artistic work has long been centered around social activism—you can read more about it here on Pulse@ChathamU—and as of late, health equity and access have come to the forefront of their research. With Free the Vaccine, Joseph has collaborated on a number of activist campaigns—check out this exhibition of Free the Vaccine efforts—including haunting the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Vaccine Research as the ghost of Jonas Salk during Halloween 2020. According to Joseph, the campaign had three objectives: “to create interesting and irresistible imagery, to raise awareness of Salk’s connection to vaccine research, and to connect with people in a safe and relatively easy way.” Ultimately, the hope was to get a meeting with the Center for Vaccine Research and persuade their leadership to join the World Health Organization’s COVID Technology Access Pool and sign the Open COVID Pledge, which would help allow for a free and accessible vaccine across the world and thus help conclude the pandemic.
Joseph, dressed as Jonas Salk, canvasses with Free the Vaccine branded tombstones
“We wanted to connect Salk’s legacy of vaccine equity in Pittsburgh to people doing the research today as a way to try and convince them to share in that legacy and educate the public about it. There is a world where vaccines could be made much more equitable and have been before here in our own backyard.”
Joseph did end up getting in touch with the Center for Vaccine Research at the University of Pittsburgh and now meets weekly with a group called the Community Vaccine Collaborative. Initially Joseph and their collaborator, adjunct Chatham faculty member, Kisha Patterson, worked with this team to try to get them to sign the Open COVID Pledge: “It's still very hard to convince people in power to do the right or just or equitable thing. It is very difficult when there is a lot of money to be made. But there is a lot of harm reduction, care, community building, and support that can be done and that is worth it in itself,” says Joseph.
The ideas of harm reduction, care, and community-building are integral to their work as a creative activist and as a result, integral to their instruction to other aspiring creative activists. Joseph cites the artistic activism of the lunch counter sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement as another powerful example of what activism can look like and can influence: “Part of [these activists’] success is that a lot of people don't understand that these were performances. These were planned, trained events. The activists would practice getting smoke blown into their face and coffee poured on them. They trained to be able to create this type of image that when nationalized led to some of the Civil Rights reform that was achieved during that time. These images elicit a strong emotional response and that was their plan. By connecting these emotional responses to changes that they want, that's another example of artistic activism.”
Joseph’s Beginner Guide to Artistic Activism
Goals—the lofty dreams or horizon line you’re looking towards
Ex. Get the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Vaccine Research to sign the COVID pledge & make the vaccine accessible to the whole worldStrategies—broad patterns for making a thing happen
Ex. Interactive media and imagery, employing the legacy of Jonas SalkObjectives—detailed, actionable, measurable steps along the way to achieve the goal
Ex. Do this by Halloween of 2020 and get a meeting with the Center for Vaccine ResearchTactics—little steps along the way
Ex. Design website, do research, create deliverables
If artistic activism is something that you’re interested in, we encourage you to attend Joseph’s introductory workshop on September 18th as part of the SculptureX 2021 Conference. The content from this article was edited and condensed from a lecture on artistic activism that Joseph gave on September 1; you can view the full talk here.