Announcing the Winners of the 2025 Mendel Sato Research Award
WashU Libraries are excited to announce the winners of the fifth annual Mendel Sato Research Award. Congratulations to Washington University students Katie Plum and Cleonique Hilsaca for their excellent projects that explore and highlight unique primary source material from the Julian Edison Department of Special Collections.
Katie Plum (BA, Architecture ’25) won the undergraduate award for her exhibition proposal Out on Olive, created for Associate Professor Zeuler R. Lima’s research course, Capstone Seminar in spring 2025. Her project is a proposal for an immersive exhibition at the National Building Arts Center (NBAC) in Sauget, Illinois that examines the intersection between architectural and queer history in St. Louis. Plum uses a multidisciplinary approach that centers around four salvaged window fragments from Olive Street in St. Louis now housed at NBAC. Using the digital project Mapping LGBTQ+ St. Louis Project in consultation with Miranda Rectenwald, curator of Local History, and Emery Cox of NBAC, Plum created a proposal that is a blend of museum exhibition, art installation, and immersive theater.
Lima, associate professor of architecture and urban design and history-theory, wrote in a statement of support for Plum, “Both the research she developed and the design she proposed were rigorous and beautifully presented through texts, architectural drawings, and an illustrated book,”
Cleonique Hilsace (MFA-Illustration and Visual Culture ‘25) received the graduate award for her zine, The Brownies’ Book: The First Black Children’s Literary Magazine, created for Associate Professor Aggie Toppins’ spring 2025 class, Zines as Critical Practice.The Brownies’ Book was a magazine created by W.E.B. Du Bois and his colleagues to provide a positive representation of African Americans for young readers while countering racist stereotypes in children’s literature during the early twentieth century. Hilsace conducted a visual analysis of The Brownies’ Book held by the Library of Congress, created new illustrations inspired by the original artwork, and consulted research material in the Rare Book Collections about the periodical. In addition to this, she conducted research with the TL;DR Zine Archive that is part of the Dowd Illustration Research Archive to analyze the construction, layout, and design of the zines. In her application Hilsace said, “I really wanted to learn how to use research in my creative practice, and how to make scholarship fun and accessible to myself and others.”
In a letter of support for Hilsace, Aggie Toppins, associate professor in communication design and chair of undergraduate design at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, wrote, “Cleonique’s project execution demonstrated care, ingenuity, and genuine interest in bringing new light to a little-known piece of historical literature, making innovative use of the format, and thoroughly exploring the potential of the project.”
We are delighted to share both projects on the Libraries’ Open Scholarship Institutional Repository:
The Brownies’ Book: The First Black Children’s Literary Magazine
You can view past winning projects on the Mendel Sato Research Award Projects page on Open Scholarship.