Ruin and Reparation: (Dis)Repair in Art and Architectural History

Ruin and Reparation: (Dis)Repair in Art and Architectural History

Graduate Symposium hosted by the History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of Pittsburgh

Friday March 22^nd-23^rd

Keynote speaker: Dr. Felecia Davis, Pennsylvania State University

Ruin and Reparation: (Dis)Repair in Art and Architectural History seeks to foster urgent conversations regarding the reparability and/or irreparability of longstanding historical narratives and structural inequities. In the Japanese artistic process of kintsugi (金継ぎ), broken pottery is repaired with a lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum, creating visible repairs that index the object's life. But how might we repair the fragments of a pot which never actually held water? Art, architecture, and their histories are implicated in processes that have upheld social hierarchies, enabled cultural dispossession, and created peripheries. And yet, artists, architects, scholars, and activists often use their creative agency to redress and upend these structural barriers. Is a reparative history of art and architecture possible? How can we move forward given the legacies we’ve inherited, if at all?

Register here. 

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE

FRIDAY MARCH 22^nd

12:00-12:15pm: Welcome, Kale Serrato Doyen

            Hybrid: FFA 104 [Seminar room] for in person attendance

12:15-2:00pm: Panel 1 – (RE)APPROPRIATING SPACE

  Hybrid: Presenters attending via zoom, FFA 104 [Seminar room] for in person attendance

Amanda Guido, Politecnico di Milano “An Occupied Monument: Forte Prenestino and the Creative Rewriting of Ruins”

Rahel Kesselring, Humboldt-Universaität zu Berlin “Scars Remind Us that Our Past is Real”: A Queer Ecologies' Attempt on Repair”

Santasil Mallik, Western University “Epistolary Architectures: Witnessing as Reparative History in Emily Jacir’s Letter to a Friend”

Jenna M. Wilson, University of California, Riverside “Haunting Ruins: Eastern State Penitentiary and the not-yet-here collapse of carcerality”

1:15-2:00pm: Sahar Hosseini, Faculty Respondent + Audience Q&A

2:00-3:00pm: Break

3:00-5:00pm: Keynote, Felecia Davis

            Hybrid: Posvar 1500 for in person attendance

Davis will present two projects, Fabricating Networks Quilt, Stories from the Hill District in Pittsburgh PA and The Black Flower Antenna. The quilt and antenna were commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and shown as part of the Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness exhibition in spring of 2021. The quilt operates as a computational textile or is made with fabrics and conductive textiles and fibers that are sensors connected to a microcontroller to communicate information to people. The makers of the quilt endeavored to make a seed project that could be used to connect with residents in a historically Black neighborhood in Pittsburgh to tell the stories of that neighborhood. The antenna uses invisible electromagnetic waves to call forth an invisible city made possible by wireless and Internet. Urbanistically the neighborhood showed the scars of destruction to make way for the interstate highway system, and new commercial development. These are common scars that many Black neighborhoods across the United States still show and are the marks of the history of systemic dismantling and destruction of those neighborhoods. The discussion of the quilt and antenna moves from material craft and making to construction of a symbolic space of connection between architect/artist and the residents of the Hill District. The making of the quilt and antenna is a starting point to consider constructing sustainable, physical and cyber architectures in Black neighborhoods.

SATURDAY MARCH 23^rd

12:30-2:00pm: Panel 2 – (RE)CONSTRUCTING COLLECTIONS

Hybrid: Presenters attending via zoom, FFA 104 [Seminar room] for in person attendance

Ava Romano, CUNY Hunter College “Alone Again Or: Excess and Access in the Met Collection”

Eric W. Ross, George Mason University “How Would You Reconstruct America?” Black Reconstruction at the National Museum of African American History and Culture”

Emilela Thomas-Adams, The Ohio State University “Silk and Skin: Recycling and Repair in a Late Medieval Object”

1:15-2:00pm: Deirdre Smith, Faculty Respondent + Audience Q&A

2:00-3:00pm: break

3:00-4:30pm: Roundtable Discussion: Integrating Latinx and Latin American Art History

            Hybrid: Posvar 1500, discussants and audience in-person

Within the graduate symposium’s framework of Ruin and Reparation, this roundtable reconsiders the porous and debated categories of Latin American and Latinx Art. Following closed ISLAA Forum discussions, graduate students open a conversation on the integration of Latin American and Latinx art history in museums, academia, and beyond. Discussants Camila Damico Medina (Temple University), Marco Polo Juarez Cruz (University of Maryland), and Liam Maher (Temple University) will examine these themes in light of their research and experiences, moderated by Diana Flatto (University of Pittsburgh) and Janina López (University of Pittsburgh) and with an introduction by Kale Serrato Doyen (University of Pittsburgh). Supported by Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). 

4:30-4:45pm: Closing remarks, Kale Serrato Doyen