Reparative Histories of Art and Architecture

Summary In our eighth episode, dr. heather ahtone joins us to discuss Indigenous curatorial praxis and the long history of the museum as a colonial project. Dr. ahtone traces the path from sixteenth-century cabinets of curiosity through the natural history museum's consolidation of Native American cultural material to the more recent emergence of tribal-led institutions. The conversation centers o...

Summary In the seventh episode, Dr. Dana E. Katz discusses how art and architecture expose relations within and between minority societies. Reflecting on a career that began with a fifteenth-century predella panel depicting the persecution of Jews, Dr. Katz traces her movement from painting and sculpture to the architecture of the early modern Venetian ghetto, to a current project on mimicry and t...

Summary In our sixth episode, Dr. Steven Nelson reflects on a career spent widening the field of art history. Tracing his path from a background as a maker and graphic designer through his training and his work as an Africanist, Dr. Nelson describes how a commitment to difference, equity and social justice shaped his scholarship and his institutional leadership. The conversation moves across the c...

Summary In our fifth episode, Dr. Matthew F. Rarey discusses his art-historical research on the Black Atlantic and examines the intricate nature of social justice in the field. Throughout the conversation, Dr. Rarey draws on his book Insignificant Things , which focuses on bolsas de mandinga — pouch-form amulets of transcultural origin in the South Atlantic. These spiritual objects were intended t...

Summary In our fourth episode, Dr. Ana Ozaki (UPenn) joins us to discuss how she arrived at her method of "quilombo thinking" through her interdisciplinary studies in architecture and urban planning. Describing how that method has situated her to consider race in architectural analysis through a Black feminist historical lens, Dr. Ozaki examines how racism, sexism, and classism overlap. As communi...

Summary In our third episode of "Reparative Histories of Art and Architecture," guest interlocutor Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood (NYU) discusses the impact of her work and her approach toward justice, drawing primarily on her book, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020). She uses her concept of carceral aesthetics to understand how art made in and about prisons is conditioned by the i...

Summary In our second episode introducing the first of our interlocutors, Dr. Nicole K. Furtado (UC Santa Cruz) draws on insights from her studies in Indigenous Futurisms, literature, and remix theory to illustrate the impact of what she calls perspectivism on art history and social justice. Exploring how the question, "What does it mean to be human?" has influenced her academic inquiry thus far,...

Summary In our inaugural episode, Dr. Kirk Savage (Pitt) joins the series to introduce the grant project and to situate its central concerns within his long-standing scholarship on public monuments, race, and the politics of memory in American art and architectural history. The conversation moves between the arguments of Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves and Monument Wars and the contemporary rec...