Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas, Austin
Adele Nelson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also Associate Director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS). Nelson specializes in postwar and contemporary art of Latin America, with a focus on Brazil. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society. She is the author of Jac Leirner in Conversation with Adele Nelson (2011; Portuguese translation, 2013). Her writings have appeared in international magazines and academic journals, including Art in America, Art Journal, and ARTMargins. She has contributed to various museum publications, among them, Mário Pedrosa: De la naturaleza afectiva de la forma (MNCARS, 2017), Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium (Carnegie/AIC/Whitney, 2016), Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents (MoMA, 2015), Waldemar Cordeiro: Fantasia exata (Itaú Cultural, 2014), and Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927–1937 (MoMA, 2008). Her new book, Forming Abstraction: Art and Institutions in Postwar Brazil, will appear in January 2022 in the Studies on Latin American Art series from the University of California Press.
Published to coincide with Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964 at MoMA, art historian Adele Nelson analyzes the Sala de Fotografia, a last-minute, “in-between” and hitherto unexamined exhibition organized by Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante for the second edition of the São Paulo Bienal.
Made of 1200 cigarette packs, Jac Leirner’s Lung works both reflect the consumerism of which they are born but also transcend far beyond it while conjuring tropes from Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Pop Art as well as Neo-Concrete art of her native Brazil.
