Adele Nelson
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
M.A., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
A.B., Brown University
Adele Nelson specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century art of Latin America, with a focus on the postwar and contemporary art of Brazil. She teaches courses on modern and contemporary art of Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Her work is concerned with situating art in its social context. She is interested in networks of transnational artistic exchange and in the relationship between art production and art institutions, particularly biennials, museums, schools, and criticism. Her teaching and scholarship combine careful consideration of historical sources and the physical art object with theoretical models developed within the discipline of art history and in fields such as social history and cultural studies.
Prior to joining Temple University, Prof. Nelson taught at Southern Methodist University, the City College of New York, and New York University, where in 2006 she received the Dean’s Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award in the Humanities. From 2006 to 2009 she was a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and helped organize the exhibition Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927–1937 (2008). The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among other sources, supported her doctoral studies.
Author of Jac Leirner in Conversation with/en conversación con Adele Nelson (Fundación Cisneros, 2011), her publications include essays on the history of the São Paulo Bienal (São Paulo Biennial) and the emergence of abstraction in Brazil, the subjects of her current book project. Recent and forthcoming studies appear in Art in America, Art Journal, and the MoMA anthology Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents.