The University of Pittsburgh’s Department of History of Art and Architecture (HAA) will receive a $500,000 Mellon Grant to support the department’s “Reparative Histories of Art and Architecture” initiative. The initiative aims to make social justice a keystone of the department’s curriculum.
Pitt is one of 30 colleges and universities to receive funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A total of $14,000,000 in grants were announced in January to support humanities-focused research and programs.
Throughout the next two years, HAA intends to utilize their new funding to develop a cross-disciplinary approach to teaching students about the fields that will uplift marginalized perspectives within art and architecture. According to Kirk Savage, William S. Dietrich II Professor and principal investigator for the reparative histories initiative, social justice is integral to the relevance of art history today.
“How do we change how the field asks the kinds of questions that it's asked, the kind of methods that it has developed over its history?” Savage asked. “How do we modify those so that they can actually encompass these urgent questions of social justice today?”
Savage said this new approach will encompass more than contemporary art history topics like restitution of museum objects and explorations of contemporary art themes.
“We're also talking about how we understand the deep history of our discipline in the ancient world and in geographies very different from the one that we live in,” he explained.
Savage said the development of two new core classes for undergraduate and graduate students will aid in answering questions such as these. Eight student-faculty workshops will shape the focus of these courses, inspire new research methodologies, and create educational resources.
“Art history typically has been seen as a very elitist discipline,” Savage said. “To make these concerns relevant to people, no matter income, background, racial profile, to see that there are important entry points for them in the field that we study and do research in is very important to us.”
Savage hopes that Pitt’s work will inspire other educational institutions. HAA plans to make the resources developed through Mellon grant funding available to peer institutions.
“We're not going to single-handedly change the field,” Savage said. “We can incubate some new ideas and provide a challenge to the rest of the field to step up and do its own work.”
