Produced with support from the Mellon Foundation, this podcast series explores how the discipline of Art and Architectural History can foreground the issue of justice across temporal and geographic boundaries. For show notes and more info, visit arthistories.hcommons.org.
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Indigenous Curatorial Praxis with dr. heather ahtone
Saison 1 · Épisode 8
vendredi 3 juillet 2026 • Durée 46:35
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 on the Reunions initiative developed alongside the inaugural WINIKO exhibition, which reconnected descendant families with cultural materials held by the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. Dr. ahtone also reflects on locality, mentorship, and the decisions that have anchored her career in service to community rather than in the conventions of professional advancement.
Guests
dr. heather ahtone, Director of Curatorial Affairs, First Americans Museum (Oklahoma City). A citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, descended from strong Choctaw women, Dr. ahtone holds undergraduate degrees in Creative Writing and Printmaking and completed a doctoral degree in Interdisciplinary Studies with expertise in Art History, Anthropology, and Native American Studies. She has worked in the Native arts community since 1993, holding positions at the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum (now MoCNA), the Southwestern Association of Indian Arts, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, and the University of Oklahoma, where she began teaching in 2007.
Angelina Medina is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of History of Art & Architecture, specializing in contemporary U.S. diasporic and Latinx art, with a focus on gender and representation.
Host and Production Credits
Co-Hosts: Sarah M. Estrela, Amelia Hansen
Producer: Amelia Hansen
Co-Editors: Amelia Hansen; Sarah M. Estrela
Music: Jacob Napier
Research and Show Notes: Sarah M. Estrela
Key Topics Discussed
00:02:51 – Dr. ahtone traces her accidental path to curatorial work from Pre-Med, to Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts to Printmaking, before recognizing art history as a vehicle for community service in Oklahoma.
00:10:00 – Dr. ahtone pays tribute to her mentors Dr. Gregory Cajete, Barbara Hobson, and Dan Swan, who guided her thinking on the risks and possibilities of bringing indigenous knowledge into the Academy, as well as the late Dr. Mary Jo Watson, who founded the Native art history program at the University of Oklahoma.
00:12:25 – Dr. ahtone reflects on the professional pressures of mobility and the decision framework (centered on family, community service, and place) that has anchored her career at the First Americans Museum.
00:22:10 – Dr. ahtone describes her grounding practice as rooted in indigenous systems of knowledge, including a belief that ancestors are present and walk alongside the living.
00:32:49 – Dr. ahtone traces the museum as a colonial project: from the cabinets of curiosity assembled by European monarchies to the natural history museum's consolidation of Native American cultural materials, grounding that history in dominion theology and the fourteenth-century capitalization of land as its foundational logics.
00:36:07 – Dr. ahtone discusses the expedition illustrations of John White engraved and published by Theodor de Bry (1590) as a formative moment in the visual dehumanization of indigenous peoples, producing images that provided rhetorical justification for colonial domination and enslavement.
00:40:37 – Dr. ahtone explains FAM's commitment to an all-Native curatorial team, arguing that indigenous knowledge and community relationships enable the asking of questions and forms of accountability that a non-Native team could not bring to the work.
00:41:10 – Dr. ahtone discusses the Reunions initiative, developed alongside the inaugural WINIKO exhibition, which reconnected descendant families with cultural materials held in the Smithsonian's NMAI collection.
00:43:30 – Dr. ahtone argues that reconnecting extracted cultural materials with their communities of origin is the museum's responsibility rather than the Native community's burden, and that any labeled object offers a starting point on a map for finding its community.
Reading List
Bibliographic entries below follow the notes-bibliography formatting conventions of the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, ordered alphabetically by author surname.
Swan, Daniel C. Peyote Religious Art: Symbols of Faith and Belief. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
Sze, Arthur. The Willow Wind: Poems and Translations from the Chinese. Rev. ed. Guadalupita, NM: Tooth of Time Books, 1981 [1972].
Watson, Mary Jo, and heather ahtone. Art from Indian Territory: The State of Being American Indian. Oklahoma City: American Indian Cultural Center & Museum, 2007.
Acknowledgments
This podcast is made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, whose commitment to the humanities sustains the conditions under which scholarly conversations of this kind can be undertaken with care. We extend our deepest gratitude to the Mellon Foundation, to our guests for the generosity of their time and thinking, and to the institutional partners and communities whose collaboration anchors this work.
Suggested Citation
Estrela, Sarah M. and Amelia Hansen, co-hosts. "Indigenous Curatorial Praxis with dr. heather ahtone." Reparative Histories of Art and Architecture, episode 8, Recorded April 10, 2026, Released June 18, 2026.
Transcript and Contact
For inquiries, corrections, or accessibility requests, please contact reparative.haa@pitt.edu.
Mimicry and the Museum with Dr. Dana E. Katz
Saison 1 · Épisode 7
vendredi 3 juillet 2026 • Durée 55:10
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 the art museum. The conversation considers interdisciplinarity and team teaching, the methodological challenges of writing histories of objects that are no longer extant, and the question of whether "race" and "racism" are appropriate terms for the early modern period. Throughout, Dr. Katz attends to the role of form, the workings of popular memory, and the ways institutions naturalize and ritualize difference.
Guests
Dr. Dana E. Katz is Joshua C. Taylor Professor of Art History and Humanities at Reed College. She is the author of The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) and The Jewish Ghetto and the Visual Imagination of Early Modern Venice (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Her current book project, Mimicry and the Art Museum, redirects her inquiry into social difference toward the museum.
Zixiao Huangis a 4th-year Ph.D. Student in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, studying artistic exchange between Renaissance Italy and China, with a focus on how China was visually depicted and perceived across northern Italy and Europe.
Host and Production Credits
Co-Hosts: Sarah M. Estrela, Amelia Hansen
Producer: Amelia Hansen
Co-Editors: Amelia Hansen; Sarah M. Estrela
Everybody Means Everybody with Dr. Steven S. Nelson
Saison 1 · Épisode 6
mardi 16 juin 2026 • Durée 01:21:31
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 circulation and reception of images, the question of "what the work does" rather than only what it is, and the politics of heritage in the present. Drawing on projects from From Cameroon to Paris to his study of the Underground Railroad, Dr. Nelson considers mentorship, writing and voice, the structural barriers that constrain who enters the discipline, and what it means to sustain social justice work as it comes under attack.
Guests
Dr. Steven Nelson is Professor Emeritus of African and African American Art at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also served as Director of the African Studies Center. He was Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. His publications span the arts, architecture, and urbanism of Africa and its diasporas, as well as queer studies.
Shivani Kasumra is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh studying modernism in post-colonial South Asia.
Host and Production Credits
Co-Hosts: Sarah M. Estrela, Amelia Hansen
Producer: Amelia Hansen
Co-Editors: Amelia Hansen; Sarah M. Estrela
Music: Jacob Napier
Allison Naydan
Black Cartographies with Dr. Matthew F. Rarey
Saison 1 · Épisode 5
vendredi 22 mai 2026 • Durée 01:09:43
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 to bring peace to the mind and body of the wearer, offering cultural insight into the values and concerns of those who carried them. By centering these amulets, Dr. Rarey illuminates Black Atlantic art history while navigating archives that sought to erase Black life. We also take on questions of anachronism, the ethics of evidence, archives as instruments of domination, and the restitution of cultural objects.
Guests
Dr. Matthew F. Rarey, Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at Oberlin College, where he is Associate Professor of African and Black Atlantic Art. He is the author of Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2023), winner of the Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award and the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award.
Monica Daniels is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh focusing on African and African diasporic arts, especially through the lens of Black feminisms.
Host and Production Credits
Co-Hosts: Sarah M. Estrela, Amelia Hansen
Producer: Amelia Hansen
Co-Editors: Amelia Hansen; Sarah M. Estrela
Music: Jacob Napier
Allison Naydan
The Brazilian Atlantic with Dr. Ana Ozaki
Saison 1 · Épisode 4
vendredi 27 février 2026 • Durée 52:53
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 communities comprised of fugitives and those outside the law, quilomboshave functioned as sites of active resistance even to the present day. Dr. Ozaki draws on these communities' histories to delineate ways of thinking that observe Brazilian architectural forms beyond their Portuguese colonial precedents. As a result, Ozaki's insights and critiques allow us to think critically about the ways that Brazilian and Atlantic histories have been told, which often center non-Black narratives in architecture especially.
Guests
Dr. Ana Ozaki, Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Architectural History, University of Pennsylvania. Trained as an architect in Brazil, she earned her Ph.D. in the History of Architecture and Urban Development from Cornell University and was the inaugural Mellon Race, Place and Equity Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. Her research investigates how racial ideologies have shaped architectural understandings of climate and environment across the Black Atlantic, with a focus on Brazil's connections to West and southern Africa.
Amrita Vinod is a Ph.D. Student in History of Art & Architecture, University of Pittsburgh focusing on the connected histories of architecture and landscapes in southern India and northern Sri Lanka.
Host and Production Credits
Co-Hosts: Sarah M. Estrela, Amelia Hansen
Producer: Amelia Hansen
Marking Time with Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood
Saison 1 · Épisode 3
vendredi 27 février 2026 • Durée 43:47
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 institution of the U.S. punitive system — conditions that can be a source of further insight rather than cause for devaluing the artwork. Marking Time features a diverse collection of art made by people while incarcerated, which Dr. Fleetwood uses to demonstrate the impact of the conditions under which it was created. The conversation also takes up questions of methodology, archives, global resonance, and the practice of justice as, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "love in action."
Guests
Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood is the Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU Steinhardt and in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. A MacArthur Fellow, she is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press, 2020) and curator of the traveling exhibition of the same name, which debuted at MoMA PS1.
Kale Serrato-Doyen is a Ph.D. Student in History of Art & Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh where she studies Black and Latinx artists in modern and contemporary art history of the United States.
Host and Production Credits
Co-Hosts: Sarah M. Estrela, Amelia Hansen
Producer: Amelia Hansen
Co-Editors: Amelia Hansen; Sarah M. Estrela
Jacob Napier
Indigenous Futurisms with Dr. Nicole Furtado
Saison 1 · Épisode 2
lundi 1 décembre 2025 • Durée 38:07
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, Furtado discusses her primary research focus, Indigenous futurities, a field in both academia and art that centers the role of Indigenous people in imagining the future. Furtado's work is supplemented through speculative aesthetics and remix theory, both of which concern methods of creating. Rather than accepting the futures prescribed by normative civilizational development, Furtado illuminates how speculative aesthetics imagine different ways the future might look, while remix theory reimagines combinations of preexisting ideas to create something new. Furtado also discusses her insight on perspectivism, a method that recognizes that nothing can be viewed with complete objectivity because everyone holds unique viewpoints. Throughout our conversation, Dr. Furtado discusses how she uses these practices to center Indigenous people and perspectives in the face of progressing social technologies that may otherwise prioritize colonial ideologies in art and academia.
Guests
Dr. Nicole Kuʻuleinapuananiolikoʻawapuhimelemeleolani Furtado, Assistant Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz. A Kānaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiian, writer, Dr. Furtado earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and her Master's and Ph.D. in English from University of California, Riverside. Her research develops the methodology of moʻolelo, or Kānaka Maoli-storytelling, to reimagine Indigenous futurities, and has appeared in the Science Fiction Research Association Review and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal.
Meghan Hipple, Ph.D. Student in History of Art & Architecture and Film and New Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Hipple studies the histories of art, technology, and postmodernism, with a particular interest in how digital and internet culture influence sociality and visual forms.
Introducing the Series with Dr. Kirk Savage
Saison 1 · Épisode 1
lundi 1 décembre 2025 • Durée 46:38
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 reckonings — over Confederate monuments, the National Mall, and the figures not commemorated — that have reshaped the field over the past decade. Through the project's guiding questions, Dr. Savage describes the intellectual genealogy of Reparative Histories of Art and Architecture, the questions the series will pursue across its nine episodes, and the disciplinary stakes of approaching the built and sculpted environment as a record of who is remembered, who is erased, and on whose terms.
Guests
Dr. Kirk Savage is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. Savage is the author of Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 1997) and Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (University of California Press, 2009), and served as the Founding Principal Investigator of this project.
Dr. Paula V. Kupfer is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and the College of General Studies, offering in-person and online courses on the history of photography, the intersections of art and politics in modern Latin America, the long history of viral and circulating images, and reparative histories of art and architecture.
Host and Production Credits
Co-Hosts: Sarah M. Estrela, Amelia Hansen
Amelia Hansen
Music: Jacob Napier
Research and Show Notes: Sarah M. Estrela
Key Topics Discussed
0:02:51 — Dr. Katz traces her scholarly path to a single image: Paulo Uccello's predella panel The Profanation of the Host (c. 1467–68), which she encountered as a student and which hset the direction of her career-long inquiry into how art and architecture expose relations between minority societies. She describes a circuitous route to the discipline, from an undergraduate degree in Economics at the University of Michigan to the Peace Corps in Uruguay, to graduate study at the University of Chicago.
00:05:25 — Dr. Katz explains how the systemic inequalities she studies in early modern visual culture inform her approach to social justice both inside and outside the classroom, extending into outreach programs for elementary and middle school students.
00:09:28 — Dr. Katz reflects on interdisciplinarity as a professional necessity. She entered the field before the intersection of art history and Jewish studies was established, and on citational practice as an act of scholarly generosity toward the disciplinary traditions she draws on.
00:12:38 — Dr. Katz describes two team-taught pedagogical projects: "Art History Beyond the Visual" with Jenny Sakai, and "Non-Extant Art" with Dawn Odell, now a forthcoming edited volume, both of which press art history to account for what has been lost or destroyed through speculation and critical fabulation.
00:20:00 — Dr. Katz discusses her co-authored contributions to Seeing Race Before Race, engaging Geraline Heng's definition of racism as systemic rather than somatic. Zixiao Huang raises Paul Kaplan, prompting a discussion of how African and Asian figures were represented in the Adoration of the Magi tradition.
00:24:05 — Dr. Katz examines Artemesia Gentileschi's emergence as a #MeToo icon, focusing on the viral resurgence of Judith Cutting off the Head of Holofernes during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. Drawing on Elizabeth Cohen's scholarship, Katz argues that historical specificity is itself a form of justice.
00:31:03 — Dr. Katz traces the image of Simon of Trent from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) through its persistence as a popular cult, illustrated by her Fulbright panel interview, examining how early modern anti-Jewish imagery circulates through collective memory.
00:40:00 — Dr. Katz discusses Beyoncé and Jay-Z's Apesh*t (2018), filmed in the Louvre alongside the Mona Lisa and Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana, as a case study in the productive encounter between early modern and contemporary visual culture, and in new modes of popular critical looking at the museum as an institution.
00:42:46 — Dr. Katz explains her decision to lean into anachronism rather than resist it, using Sara Lipton's warning against teleological comparison and Geraldine Heng's definition of race as successive points of reflection before closing on Jás Elsner's argument in Critical Terms for Art History that the close reading of form remains art history's most distinctive contribution.
Reading List
Bibliographic entries below follow the notes-bibliography formatting conventions of the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, ordered alphabetically by author surname.
Works Cited in Conversation
Campt, Tina M. Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
The Carters (Beyoncé and Jay-Z). "Apeshit." Directed by Ricky Saiz. Music video, 2018. YouTube, June 16, 2018.
Elsner, Jás. "Style." In Critical Terms of Art History, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, 98–109. 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Pleydenwurff, Wilhelm (Illustrator), Hartmann Schedel, and Michael Wolgemut. The Nuremberg Chronicle. Anton Koberger for Sebald Schreyer and Sebastian Kammermeister, 07-12, 1493]
Suggested Further Reading
Bhabha, Homi K. "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse." In The Location of Culture, 85–92. London: Routledge, 1994.
This podcast is made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, whose commitment to the humanities sustains the conditions under which scholarly conversations of this kind can be undertaken with care. We extend our deepest gratitude to the Mellon Foundation, to our guests for the generosity of their time and thinking, and to the institutional partners and communities whose collaboration anchors this work.
Suggested Citation
Estrela, Sarah M. and Amelia Hansen, co-hosts. "Mimicry and the Museum with Dr. Dana E. Katz." Reparative Histories of Art and Architecture, episode 7, Recorded March 27, 2026, Released June 18, 2026.
Transcript and Contact
For inquiries, corrections, or accessibility requests, please contact reparative.haa@pitt.edu.
Research Assistance and Show Notes:
Key Topics Discussed
00:02:50 – Dr. Nelson traces his path to art history through a course on Japanese medieval art at Yale, in which he read Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, crediting Professors Carolyn Wheelwright and Anne Eden Gibson, before a seven-year career as a graphic designer and a return to graduate school.
00:04:57 – Dr. Nelson reflects on the shift from "difference" to "equity" to "social justice" as a reflection of where discourse stands at a given moment, naming Cornel West's early 1990s argument that racial inequality is not only a problem for people of color as intellectually formative.
00:11:45 – Dr. Nelson describes the tools he retained from art-historical training, Yve-Alain Bois's lesson about attending to the material of the work, and those he built from Black Studies and Chicano Studies, orienting everything around the question of what the artwork or building does.
00:17:51 – Dr. Nelson identifies the throughline across From Cameroon to Paris, the film Karmen Geï, and his Underground Railroad project: a preoccupation with how objects and images circulate, what happens to them when they do, and how manufactured heritage gets produced and deployed.
00:22:50 – Dr. Nelson argues that federal pressure on the Smithsonian is less about erasure than about making history not matter, citing Tad Stoermer's formulation. He also describes bringing Anna Deavere Smith's "Ghosts of Slavery" to the National Gallery as an example of the work that provokes such a response.
00:27:56 – Dr. Nelson makes the case for a capacious discipline: his governing principle that "everybody means everybody" means traditional and critical art histories must coexist in the same big tent, and that broadening who participates changes the intellectual work itself.
00:37:53 – Dr. Nelson reflects on how the discipline sometimes domesticates rather than absorbs critical challenges, and describes assigning Audre Lorde's "The Master's Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master's House" to a graduate seminar and provoking intense student resistance as a lesson in how an outside text exposes a field's limits.
00:43:18 – Dr. Nelson discusses pedagogy and voice: building student confidence through weekly writing and student-designed exams, and naming Toni Morrison, Norman Bryson, James Baldwin, and Mary Oliver as the writers he returns to when stuck. He describes a lesson from Art Journal editor Janet Kaplan ("Who do you want to talk to?") as foundational.
00:58:38 – Dr. Nelson addresses anachronism and presentism, drawing on historian Greg Dening's argument that the writing of history is always about the present, and cautions against applying twenty-first-century social justice models to the art of the past.
01:16:26 – Dr. Nelson and Dr. Estrela discuss structural barriers to participation in the discipline, such as childcare, first-generation status, and institutional prestige. Dr. Nelson describes concrete measures taken at CASVA including budgeting childcare into fellowships, allocating apartments by need rather than rank, and consistently prioritizing candidates from less-resourced institutions.
Reading List
Bibliographic entries below follow the notes-bibliography formatting conventions of the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, ordered alphabetically by author surname.
Gangitano, Lia, and Steven Nelson, editors. New Histories. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1996.
Lorde, Audre. "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 110–13. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984.
Nelson, Steven S. and Huey Copeland, editors. Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World. Seminar Papers 4. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.
Ramaka, Joseph Gaï, dir. Karmen Geï. Senegal/France/Canada: Les Ateliers de l'Arche, 2001. 82 min.
Shikibu, Murasaki. The Tale of Genji. Translated by Royall Tyler. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
Smith, Anna Deavere. "This Ghost of Slavery: A Solo Reading." Lecture 2 of Chasing That Which Is Not Me/Chasing That Which Is Me. A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., May 5, 2024.
This podcast is made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, whose commitment to the humanities sustains the conditions under which scholarly conversations of this kind can be undertaken with care. We extend our deepest gratitude to the Mellon Foundation, to our guests for the generosity of their time and thinking, and to the institutional partners and communities whose collaboration anchors this work.
Suggested Citation
Estrela, Sarah M. and Amelia Hansen, co-hosts. "Everybody Means Everybody with Dr. Steven S. Nelson" Reparative Histories of Art and Architecture, episode 6, Recorded February 6, 2026, Released June 17, 2026.
Transcript and Contact
For inquiries, corrections, or accessibility requests, please contact reparative.haa@pitt.edu.
Research Assistance and Show Notes:
Key Topics Discussed
00:02:37 – Dr. Rarey explains how his beginnings in archaeology led to art history and the question of how one reconstitutes a diaspora without an archive, crediting his professor Dana Rush.
00:07:53 – Dr. Rarey discusses his view that social justice is both a problem and a possibility in art history, using his book to exemplify how it is applicable in the field.
00:17:35 – Dr. Rarey describes anachronism and presentism as conditions that must be ethically managed rather than eliminated, arguing that recognizing them provides a pathway for justice and advocacy.
00:29:06 – Dr. Rarey refutes the idea that art history needs new tools, claiming instead that existing techniques can be revisited without seeking a totalizing conclusion.
00:37:24 – Dr. Rarey discusses both the problems of relying on historical documents as evidentiary archives and the value they retain, noting that critical analysis of archives applies in any context.
00:46:26 – Dr. Rarey underscores the importance of developing relationships between institutions and communities.
00:55:50 – Dr. Rarey explains how he has disengaged from typical structures of research by treating his writing as the thinking in his work, rather than the reverse.
01:00:15 – Dr. Rarey reflects on the implications of using Indigenous maps in academic study.
01:03:50 – Using the film Dahomey (2024) as an example, Dr. Rarey addresses disciplinary discourse on the restitution and return of cultural objects.
Reading List
Bibliographic entries below follow the notes-bibliography formatting conventions of the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, ordered alphabetically by author surname.
Works Cited in Conversation
Diop, Mati, dir. Dahomey. Les Films du Bal/Fanta Sy, 2024. Distributed by Les Films du Losange (France) and MUBI (North America and United Kingdom).
This podcast is made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, whose commitment to the humanities sustains the conditions under which scholarly conversations of this kind can be undertaken with care. We extend our deepest gratitude to the Mellon Foundation, to our guests for the generosity of their time and thinking, and to the institutional partners and communities whose collaboration anchors this work.
For inquiries, corrections, or accessibility requests, please contact reparative.haa@pitt.edu.
Co-Editors: Amelia Hansen; Sarah M. Estrela
Music: Jacob Napier
Research Assistance and Show Notes: Allison Naydan
Key Topics Discussed
00:03:28 – Dr. Ozaki describes architecture as a discipline that felt insufficient for the social, racial, and political questions she wanted to pursue, especially as a woman practicing in Brazil. She traces a path from undergraduate training in architecture and Fine Arts, to a double Master's in architecture and urban planning at the University of Cincinnati, to a Ph.D. in the history of architecture and urban development at Cornell.
00:11:50 — Dr. Ozaki describes a crisis during her graduate studies, when the transnational scope of her project required immense encouragement from her advisors and mentors. Ozaki credits this encouragement with sustaining what became quilombo thinking.
00:14:01 — Dr. Ozaki defines quilombo thinking as a methodology grounded in Black feminist theory, situated within what she calls the "Brazilian Atlantic" as a distinct diasporic formation, informed by Beatriz Nascimento's understanding of the quilombo as a living, ongoing way of being rather than a static, historical site.
00:20:40 — Dr. Ozaki pushes back against "post-racial" ideology, particularly Brazil's mythology of racial democracy as coined by Gilberto Freyre, drawing on Djamila Ribeiro's argument that anti-racism is a structural, rather than individual, responsibility.
00:24:30 — Dr. Ozaki places quilombo thinking alongside antropofagía as a specifically Brazilian disciplinary purchase with anti-colonial potential and reflects on the post-2020 institutional self-censorship she encountered when a proposed seminar was retitled.
00:28:33 — Dr. Ozaki discusses her contribution to the collaborative digital humanities project, "The World We Became: Map Quest 2350," specifically its quilombo and maroon mapping strand, organized around Christina Sharpe's framework of annotation and redaction as a practice of engaging archives.
00:36:00 — Dr. Ozaki frames social justice in architectural terms: architecture's historic complicity in racial and colonial regimes, and its structural role in producing and accumulating capital through the transformation of land and nature into property and commodity.
00:41:15 — Dr. Ozaki discusses expanding the concept of Blackness beyond the register of labor alone—thinking with Tiffany Lethabo King, Saidiya Hartman, and Sylvia Wynter, and situates the plantation and its afterlives within the ongoing climate crisis as a site of architectural complicity and potential intervention.
00:46:00 — Dr. Ozaki cites the Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America exhibition and its Black Rconstruction Collective as a model of reparative intellectual labor in their distribution of honoraria and credits across the group. Ozaki names Anna Tsing's Feral Atlas as an example of collaborative digital work that resists academic incentive structures.
Reading List
Bibliographic entries below follow the notes-bibliography formatting conventions of the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, ordered alphabetically by author surname.
Ribeiro, Djamila. O que é lugar de fala? Belo Horizonte: Letramento/Justificando, 2017.
Acknowledgments
This podcast is made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, whose commitment to the humanities sustains the conditions under which scholarly conversations of this kind can be undertaken with care. We extend our deepest gratitude to the Mellon Foundation, to our guests for the generosity of their time and thinking, and to the institutional partners and communities whose collaboration anchors this work.
For inquiries, corrections, or accessibility requests, please contact reparative.haa@pitt.edu.
Music:
Research Assistance and Show Notes: Allison Naydan
Key Topics Discussed
00:02:39 – Dr. Fleetwood discusses how her family sparked her path in a life of inquiry.
00:07:28 – Dr. Fleetwood redirects the conversation on social justice in her work toward justice in general, and how she views justice as love in action through a forward-facing approach.
00:13:38 – Dr. Fleetwood discusses her views on methodology, holding that methods are tools for inquiry: while scholars need to make their work legible, they should not confine themselves to one approach.
00:35:42 – Dr. Fleetwood discusses the value of conceptual terms such as prison art and carceral aesthetics, which recognize art's direct relationship to institutions, citing artist Sable Elyse Smith as an example.
Reading List
Bibliographic entries below follow the notes-bibliography formatting conventions of the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, ordered alphabetically by author surname.
Works Cited in Conversation
Boesten, Rosa Ruth, dir. Master of Light. One Story Up/Docmakers/Vulcan Productions, 2022. HBO Documentary Films.
This podcast is made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, whose commitment to the humanities sustains the conditions under which scholarly conversations of this kind can be undertaken with care. We extend our deepest gratitude to the Mellon Foundation, to our guests for the generosity of their time and thinking, and to the institutional partners and communities whose collaboration anchors this work.
For inquiries, corrections, or accessibility requests, please contact reparative.haa@pitt.edu.
Host and Production Credits
Co-Hosts: Sarah M. Estrela, Amelia Hansen
Producer: Amelia Hansen
Co-Editors: Amelia Hansen; Sarah M. Estrela
Music: Jacob Napier
Research Assistance and Show Notes: Allison Naydan
Key Topics Discussed
00:03:04 – Dr. Furtado discusses her journey from studying science fiction to Indigenous futurisms and perspectives.
00:07:48 – Dr. Furtado interrogates how and whether social justice can be defined, and the significance of the conversations stemming from this debate.
00:13:20 – Dr. Furtado explains how she applies interdisciplinary approaches to developing a method of discussing problems within her communities.
00:16:50 – Referencing artists Solomon Enos and Noah Harders alongside scholars Sylvia Wynter and José Muñoz, Dr. Furtado returns to the central inquiry of what it means to be human, specifically in relation to technology in art, and further defines and expands the parameters of "futurism."
00:21:35 – Using her short story as an example, Dr. Furtado explores how she applies speculative aesthetics, mentioning her mentors, Professors Sherryl Vint and Nalo Hopkinson, who helped Furtado begin her own creative writing and academic practice.
00:28:36 – Dr. Furtado examines remix theory, articulating the agency students need within their research and professional development, sharing how academics such as Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua and Mark Amerika guided her.
00:35:25 – Dr. Furtado concludes by returning to Indigenous perspectivism, arguing that it is essential for addressing art-historical nuances otherwise inaccessible through objective analysis alone. By way of example, she references her discussion with colleague Dr. C.J. Jackson about John Gast's allegorical history painting, American Progress (1872), which illustrates the concept of Manifest Destiny.
Reading List
Bibliographic entries below follow the notes-bibliography formatting conventions of the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, ordered alphabetically by author surname.
Works Cited in Conversation
Amerika, Mark. remixthebook. University of Minneapolis Press, 2011.
Furtado, Nicole Kuʻuleinapuananiolikoʻawapuhimelemeleolani. "Indigenous Futurisms." In The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, and Sherryl Vint. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024.
This podcast is made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, whose commitment to the humanities sustains the conditions under which scholarly conversations of this kind can be undertaken with care. We extend our deepest gratitude to the Mellon Foundation, to our guests for the generosity of their time and thinking, and to the institutional partners and communities whose collaboration anchors this work.
For inquiries, corrections, or accessibility requests, please contact reparative.haa@pitt.edu.
Producer:
Co-Editors: Amelia Hansen; Sarah M. Estrela
Music: Jacob Napier
Research Assistance and Show Notes: Allison Naydan
Key Topics Discussed
00:02:37 – Dr. Savage explains how social justice emerged as a priority with inspirations such as activist Professor Angela Y. Davis and his mentor, Professor Paula S. Fass, from childhood to his early career.
00:07:42 – Dr. Savage explains the role of social justice throughout his academic career, beginning with the publication of his first book, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves (1997; 2018), his interdisciplinary involvement with the College Art Association (CAA) and the American Studies Association (ASA), and the organization Monument Lab. Savage also touches on the exhibitions Beyond Granite: Pulling Together and Hamza Walker's MONUMENTS (The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, The Brick; 2025–26).
00:41:00 – Dr. Savage shares his perspective on advancing social justice causes in the face of presentism and anachronism, using his book, Monument Wars (UC Press, 2011), as an example of his own experience.
Reading List
Bibliographic entries below follow the notes-bibliography formatting conventions of the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, ordered alphabetically by author surname.
This podcast is made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, whose commitment to the humanities sustains the conditions under which scholarly conversations of this kind can be undertaken with care. We extend our deepest gratitude to the Mellon Foundation, to our guests for the generosity of their time and thinking, and to the institutional partners and communities whose collaboration anchors this work.
For inquiries, corrections, or accessibility requests, please contact reparative.haa@pitt.edu.
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