Thursday, February 26, 6:30 – 8pm
Dawoud Bey. Untitled #1 (Picket Fence and Farmhouse) (detail), 2017. © Dawoud Bey. Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly, New York / Los Angeles
Free; registration required.
About the Event
For the 30th Annual Graduate Student Symposium on the History of Art, Steven Nelson will deliver the keynote lecture, “Why the Underground Railroad Matters.” Nelson is professor emeritus of art history and African American studies at UCLA.
In “Why the Underground Railroad Matters” Nelson seeks to show how people use the Underground Railroad’s visual, textual, and spatial evidence to construct heritage and promote a vision of history that underscores their lives in the present day. He explores the complex network and its place at the intersection of material culture, art, architecture, history, travel, heritage, and human experience. This is not a history of the Underground Railroad but a look at its role in the stories we tell about ourselves and others.
Dawoud Bey. Untitled #1 (Picket Fence and Farmhouse), 2017. © Dawoud Bey. Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly, New York / Los Angeles
About the Speaker
Steven Nelson
Nelson is a professor emeritus of art history and African American studies at UCLA and former dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. His scholarship focuses on the arts, architecture, and urbanism of Africa and its diasporas and on queer studies. Nelson has held visiting appointments at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
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