Steven Nelson, Dean, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art 

David J. Getsy, Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History, University of Virginia 

Mapping Art History and its Futures: Steven Nelson in Conversation with David Getsy 

In this conversation, Steven Nelson and David Getsy will explore the practice, politics and poetics of writing art history. Drawing from his pioneering scholarship on African and African American art, Nelson will discuss his own practice of writing, which has crossed genres from autobiography to criticism, and shaped fields beyond art history, including architecture, urbanism, and film. For this occasion, Nelson will read passages from his latest two new manuscripts: “Structural Adjustment: Mapping, Geography, and the Visual Cultures of Blackness” and “On the Underground Railroad.”  

Steven Nelson is the dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (the Center), responsible for its fellowships, meetings, research, and publications. Nelson has published widely on the arts, architecture, and urbanism of Africa and its diasporas and on queer studies. Nelson is professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he served as director of the African Studies Center. He is also a member of the Boards of Trustees of the Kress Foundation and the Bard Graduate Center. He has held visiting appointments at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and has been appointed a fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Association of Art History (UK). Nelson previously served as president of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association. Before assuming the role of dean, he was the Center’s Andrew W. Mellon Professor. Nelson earned a BA in studio art from Yale University and an AM and a PhD in art history from Harvard University.

David J. Getsy is an art historian, curator, and art writer focusing on modern and contemporary art. He has published widely on American and European art from the nineteenth century to the present, and his current projects address queer methodologies, links between transgender studies and art history, and archive-based recoveries of suppressed or lost histories of queer and genderqueer performance. His books include Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (2022; winner of the 2023 Robert Motherwell Book Award); Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (2015, reissued 2023); and the widely-read anthology of artists’ writings, Queer (2016). He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he is the inaugural Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History.