Steven Nelson (art historian)

Last updated

Steven D. Nelson (born 1962) [1] is an American art historian. Nelson is the dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washingon, D.C.

Contents

Early life and education

As an undergraduate, Nelson studied studio art at Yale University, where he earned a Bachelor of the Arts in 1985. [2] He worked as a graphic artist for newspapers for several years before going on to earn a master's degree (1994) and PhD (1998) in art history from Harvard University. [2] [3] [4]

Career

Nelson served as Professor of African and African American Art at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 2000 – 2020 before retiring from that role. [5] He was appointed director of the UCLA African Studies Center in 2015, where he worked with faculty at UCLA, other University of California campuses, the Fowler Museum, and cultural institutions at Los Angeles. [4] [6] Nelson has also taught at Tufts University and Wellesley College [4] as well as held visiting faculty appointments at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, France. [6]

Nelson's scholarship focuses on contemporary and historical African and African diasporic arts, architecture, and urbanism, as well as African American art history and queer studies. [6] His book, From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. [7] [8] His writing has frequently appeared in African Arts [9] , where he formerly served as a consulting editor, as well as in other scholarly journals such as Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art [10] and Art Journal, where he also served as a former reviews editor. [11] He more recently co-edited Visualizing Empire: Africa, Europe, and the Politics of Representation with Rebecca Peabody and Dominic Thomas, published in 2021. [12]

Nelson has received grants and fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the Kress Foundation, and Harvard University Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. [4] In 2018, Nelson became the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art while on leave from his appointment at UCLA. In March 2020, his appointment as the third dean of CASVA was announced, and he began his position in July of that year. [5] [6] [13]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Gallery of Art</span> National art museum in the United States

The National Gallery of Art is an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was privately established in 1937 for the American people by a joint resolution of the United States Congress. Andrew W. Mellon donated a substantial art collection and funds for construction. The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.

The Tyler School of Art and Architecture is part of Temple University, a large, urban, public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Tyler currently enrolls about 1,350 undergraduate students and about 200 graduate students in a wide variety of academic degree programs, including architecture, art education, art history, art therapy, ceramics, city and regional planning, community arts practices, community development, facilities management, fibers and material studies, glass, graphic and interactive design, historic preservation, horticulture, landscape architecture, metals/jewelry/CAD-CAM, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture and visual studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steven Holl</span> American architect

Steven Holl is a New York–based American architect and watercolorist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Okwui Enwezor</span> Nigerian-American curator

Okwui Enwezor was a Nigerian curator, art critic, writer, poet, and educator, specializing in art history. He lived in New York City and Munich. In 2014, he was ranked 24 in the ArtReview list of the 100 most powerful people of the art world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrea Fraser</span> American performance artist

Andrea Rose Fraser is a performance artist, mainly known for her work in the area of Institutional Critique. Fraser is based in New York and Los Angeles and is currently Department Head and Professor of Interdisciplinary Studio of the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yale School of Art</span> Art school in New Haven, Connecticut

The Yale School of Art is the art school of Yale University. Founded in 1869 as the first professional fine arts school in the United States, it grants Masters of Fine Arts degrees to students completing a two-year course in graphic design, painting/printmaking, photography, or sculpture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barthélémy Toguo</span> Cameroonian painter

Barthélémy Toguo is a Cameroonian painter, visual and performing artist. He currently splits his time living and working in both Paris, France and Bandjoun, Cameroon. He works in a variety of media aside from visual and performing arts including photographs, prints, sculptures, videos, and installations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bili Bidjocka</span> Cameroonian artist

Bili Bidjocka is a contemporary Cameroonian artist best known for his installations and sculptures. He was born in Douala, Cameroon, lives in France since the age of 12, and works in Paris, Brussels and New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fatimah Tuggar</span> Nigerian artist

Fatimah Tuggar is an interdisciplinary artist born in Nigeria and based in the United States. Tuggar uses collage and digital technology to create works that investigates dominant and linear narratives of gender, race, and technology. She is currently an associate professor of AI in the Arts: Art & Global Equity at the University of Florida in the United States.

Contemporary African art is commonly understood to be art made by artists in Africa and the African diaspora in the post-independence era. However, there are about as many understandings of contemporary African art as there are curators, scholars and artists working in that field. All three terms of this "wide-reaching non-category [sic]" are problematic in themselves: What exactly is "contemporary", what makes art "African", and when are we talking about art and not any other kind of creative expression?

Rocco Sinisgalli is an Italian art historian, writer and architectural theoretician.

Chika Okeke-Agulu is a Nigerian artist, art historian, art curator, and blogger specializing in African and African diaspora art history. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Musgum mud hut</span>

Musgum mud huts or Musgum dwelling units are traditional domestic structures built of mud by the ethnic Musgum people in the Maga sub-division, Mayo-Danay division, Far North Province in Cameroon. Referred to in Munjuk as Tolek, the dwellings are built in a variety of shapes, such as tall domed or conical dwellings or huts, some with a reverse-V shape, and others with geometric designs.

Kira Lynn Harris (1963–2024) was an African-American mixed-media artist lived and worked in New York City.

S. Hollis Clayson is an art historian and Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University. Her work focuses on 19th-century Europe, particularly France, as well as exchanges between France and the United States. Clayson was the founding director of Northwestern's Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, serving from 2006 to 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rashid Diab</span> Sudanese painter and art historian

Rashid Diab is a Sudanese modern painter, visual artist and art historian. Having obtained his first academic degree in Sudan, he earned further academic degrees in visual arts and art history at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, and became a lecturer at the same university.

Marjorie Elizabeth Cropper is a British-born art historian with a special interest in Italian and French Renaissance and Baroque art and art literature. Dean of the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) from December 2000 through May 2020, she previously held positions as Professor of Art History at Johns Hopkins University and director of the university’s Charles S. Singleton Center for Italian Studies at Villa Spelman in Florence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mabel O. Wilson</span> American architect

Mabel O. Wilson is an American architect, designer, and scholar. She is the founder of Studio& and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

Moshekwa Langa is a South African visual artist whose work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, video, and photography.

Elizabeth Otto is an American art historian known for her feminist work on the Bauhaus. She is a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

References

  1. ↑ information sourced from Library of Congress Authorities data, via corresponding WorldCat Identities  linked authority file (LAF) . Retrieved on 2024-12-18.
  2. 1 2 Valentine, Victoria L. (2020-03-11). "Historic Appointment: Steven Nelson Named Dean of Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at National Gallery of Art". Culture Type. Retrieved 2024-12-18.
  3. ↑ "Steven Nelson". UCLA Art History. Retrieved 2024-12-18.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "Art historian takes reins of African Studies Center at UCLA". UCLA. Retrieved 2024-12-18.
  5. 1 2 Roeder, Kaela (2020-08-06). "National Gallery of Art's new dean talks diversity, COVID". Washington Blade. Retrieved 2024-12-18.
  6. 1 2 3 4 "Professor Steven Nelson Announced as New Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at National Gallery of Art, Washington". National Gallery of Art. Retrieved 2024-12-18.
  7. ↑ Glover, Will (2010). "Review of From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa". Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. 69 (2): 280–282. doi:10.1525/jsah.2010.69.2.280. ISSN   0037-9808.
  8. ↑ Delancey, Mark D. (2007). "Review of From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture in and out of Africa". The International Journal of African Historical Studies. 40 (2): 368–370. ISSN   0361-7882.
  9. ↑ Nelson, Steven (2001). "Writing Architecture: The Mousgoum Tòlék and Cultural Self-Fashioning at the New Fin de Siècle". African Arts. 34 (3): 38–93. doi:10.2307/3337877. ISSN   0001-9933.
  10. ↑ Okeke-Agulu, Chika (2010). "Nka Roundtable II: Contemporary African Art History and the Scholarship". Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. 26 (1): 80–151. ISSN   2152-7792.
  11. ↑ "Steven D. Nelson". Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Retrieved 2024-12-18.
  12. ↑ Steiner, Benjamin (2021). "Visualizing Empire. Africa, Europe, and the politics of representation ed. by Rebecca Peabody et al. (review)". Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. 22 (3). ISSN   1532-5768.
  13. ↑ News Desk (2020-03-09). "Washington, DC's National Gallery of Art Appoints New Dean of Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Art". Artforum. Retrieved 2024-12-18.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.