Vol 10, No 1 (2025)   |   ISSN 2153-5914 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/contemp/2025.351 
http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu 

 

 

Questionnaire 
Introduction 

Kale Serrato Doyen 

  
About the Author  

Kale Serrato Doyen (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the History of Art and Architecture 
department at the University of Pittsburgh, where she studies Black and Latinx artists in 
modern and contemporary U.S. art history. Her dissertation maps structural racism in 
Pittsburgh through historic, architectural photographs from the Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive 
at the Carnegie Museum of Art. She was a recipient of the 2024-25 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation 
Innovation Fellowship and served as Symposium Chair for “Ruin and Reparation: (Dis)Repair 
in Art and Architectural History” in Spring 2024.

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Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture   http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu 
Vol 10, No 1 (2025)   |   ISSN 2153-5914 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/contemp/2025.351 

 

Through our departmental curriculum model known 
as the Constellations, our community in the History 
of Art and Architecture (HAA) defines Reparation as 
“the act of redressing and resisting aggression and 
erasure in their individual and institutional 
forms.”1 Our collective conversations wherein we 
defined the new Reparation Constellation led us to 
contend with our embodied positionalities and roles 
as scholars. By contending with how the history of 
art and architecture has enabled marginalization 
and cultural dispossession, we can sharpen our 

understanding of why, when, and for what ends this history has reinforced unjust social 
hierarchies. In the singular form, rather than plural, Reparation is a call for reparative action 
and a vehicle for social and disciplinary change. This curricular shift signals our responsibility 
as researchers and educators to reckon with challenging pasts in order to envision new futures. 

In Spring 2024, our graduate student symposium, Ruin and Reparation: (Dis)Repair in Art and 
Architectural History, helped inaugurate Reparation as a Constellation in HAA. Here, we 
foregrounded graduate student scholarship that contends with tensions of 
inherited imbalances of power in art and architectural history, with presentations by Rahel 
Kesselring, Santasil Mallik, Amanda Guido Ochoa, Ava Romano, Eric W.Ross, Emilela Thomas-
Adams, and Jenna M. Wilson. Our themes of ruin and reparation were brought home to 
Pittsburgh’s local context in a keynote address by Dr. Felecia Davis, Associate Professor of 
Architecture and Director of the SOFTLAB digital studio lab at Pennsylvania State University. 
She presented on her two computational textiles commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art 
for the 2021 exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, both of which 
draw on the histories and rituals of quilting and architecture in Pittsburgh to imagine new 
possibilities for sustainable, physical, and cyber architectures in Black neighborhoods. 

 

This questionnaire is motivated by the ideas developed from the Reparation Constellation and 
2024 symposium. I hope that the following questions and their responses from invited 
emerging and established scholars can prompt reflection on how our scholarship and pedagogy 
might mobilize repair and change in our field: 

• What does a reparative history of art and architecture mean to you?  

• Is a reparative history of art and architecture possible, given the legacies the 
discipline has inherited?  

• How have these questions shaped, and/or manifested in, your own teaching or 
research practice?  

• What methods are you or others using that move our discipline towards reparation?  

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 “Constellations.” Constellations | Department of History of Art and Architecture. Accessed June 15, 
2025. https://www.haa.pitt.edu/graduate/constellations.  

Questionnaire 
Introduction 

Kale Serrato Doyen 

 

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3  K a l e  S e r r a t o  D o y e n   

 

 

Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture   http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu 
Vol 10, No 1 (2025)   |   ISSN 2153-5914 (online)   |   DOI 10.5195/contemp/2025.351 

 

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