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Steven Nelson

@snelsonus

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Executive Director, Sam Gilliam Foundation and @ucla art history professor emeritus who sees lots of shiny objects. Opinions shared here are my own.

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Had a time last night at the book talk for Brian D. Goldstein’s opus on J. Max Bond, Jr. Brian was in conversation with Steven Nelson, whose fantastic facilitation kept us on the edge of our seats. The topic and caliber of presenters brought out — to my estimation — the most star studded Black design audience a scholar could hope for.

We were blessed by the presence of (in order of appearance), Bradford Grant, Melvin Mitchell, Edd Dunson, Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Lonnie Bunch, Warren Ansley, Peter D. Cook, Stanford Britt, and many others. A true testament to the life work of Max Bond, and to the excellent publication that gives us a peek into the inner workings of his life and legacy.

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FIFTY SHADES OF GREEN (Pt. 2)

…the one that took so many of the prettiest + most gifted—Hugh’s porcelain, Adonis face is already ravaged, dark eyes bitter. The sensuous mouth curls down. I haven’t heard the joyous Hugh laugh in years. But his paintings are sharp-edged + shattering,. Brilliant. He plants day + night without cease.

Zwischenzeit. That’s the word. The time between times. When people of Twilight pass people of Dawn. The time when liquid desire is birthed.

As I write, the sky suddenly darkens, rumbles. A violent gust of wind sweeps Loo’s papers and the Crane Hawk feather to the floor. Then the heavens open.

There is no ending today. Maybe ever. Only rain.

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IT ALL STARTS WITH ELLEN (Part Two)

“Ellen recommended you,” says college classmate Erik Kulleseid, a lanky Scandinavian swimmer I remember not well from college, except for a perhaps imagined vision of him sculpted like a Greek god wearing a black Speedo, skin slick with chlorinated water, holding the starting block in a middle lane of the Payne Whitney Gymnasium pool in that stretchy moment of anticipation before a race begins, Erik motionless with his broad shoulders draped over the block, and didn’t he come out as proudly gay senior year and dash our horny co-ed hearts? “to be the Program Chair for our 25th Reunion.”

I shake my head as if dislodging pool water from clogged ears. Me? I’ve never even been to one of our reunions. Never donated. I flinch every time I open one of the official letters from Yale, and read that stuffy faded blue ink that reminds me I never belonged, with the stink of serving dining hall food forever on my skin, along with the stain of my background.

“It’s incredible how you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps,” is what another pedigreed classmate—the exquisite alabaster-skinned former champion iceskater + gifted painter Hugh Steers, when he was still vibrantly alive + shimmying on the dance floor wearing my black wool pencil skirt better than I ever could—used to say, which at the time filled me with hot shame.

The year is 2010. For the first time, I feel the warm embrace of Yale, + plunge into the Program Chair role with the gusto of an outsider unexpectedly invited to the table. I put my experience as a P.I. to good use as I pore through info about our class of 1,200, marveling at the wild range of lives + experiences.

The reunion theme I choose: Inclusion. I’m determined the usual suspects won’t dominate the events with long-winded tales of achievements.

With all my years of teaching writing, drawing forth people’s voices, encouraging the raw + real, surely I can come up with a way to give everyone the chance to share their story.

The Morpho butterfly flutters through my fevered mind, transforming the faded ink of Yale into the most iridescent electric blue. In this way, the One-Minute Memoir is born.

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Available in bio: “Soft Censorship,” by Steven Nelson, October 197 (Summer 2026).

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Librarians define soft censorship as the removal of materials, the putting of them in hard-to-find places, requiring “permission” to use them, or not purchasing of them at all lest someone in the community be offended. In a museum it might be the rewording of a label, the alteration of a press release, the “contextualization” of a controversial artwork or the banishing of it to an out-of-the-way gallery.

As dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery from 2020 to 2025, and as one of the museum’s executive officers, I knew we were in danger of some kind of censorship from the Trump administration, and with a conference called “Color Lines Across the United States and Mexico,” inspired by the Gallery’s exhibition “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,” we had it.

The event was to explore constructions of race in the US and Mexico; analyze how Blackness, Brownness, and Latinidad operate in the oeuvres of select artists; and stress how attention to histories of race and racialization complicate our comprehension of American and Latin American art.

Not the sort of event likely to appeal to DOGE, which was then sharking around looking for culture to cut, and not long after its representatives visited the Gallery’s leadership, I was ordered to move the symposium out of the National Gallery—it didn’t matter where. It went from being a major event to one that was unadvertised, in-person-only in an 80-seat meeting room at Dumbarton Oaks.

It was not a huge gesture, but it was a significant one. By moving the symposium out of the Gallery and removing information about it from its website, the museum restricted access to it and the free exchange of ideas. Moving the symposium, which centered the primacy of Black and Brown people and their experiences in the histories of American art, was a tacit alignment with the administration’s desire to curtail Black opportunity, erase Black history, and ban the consideration of slavery and race in the interpretation of American history—an example of how museum soft censorship promotes the values of the Trump administration, becoming agents of authoritarian

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Planning to submit a proposal for #CAA2027? Explore the sessions chaired by AHAA members:

- “Visibility and Vulnerability: Native American Art, Settler Systems, and Repair” – AHAA-sponsored panel. Chaired by Miranda Belarde-Lewis, University of Washington, Jami Powell @powell.jami, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Bart C Pushaw @bart.pushaw, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Emily Leslie Voelker @emilyvoelker, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

- “Fire! American Art and the Pyrocene (1800–Present)” – chaired by Thomas Busciglio-Ritter @mister_melville, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Kimberly Minor, University of Nebraska at Omaha

- “Form, Matter, Difference: Rethinking Disability in Art History” – chaired by Cyle Michalka Metzger, Bradley University, and Jason Weems @jaydwub, University of California, Riverside

- “Folkcraft of the United States, 1876-1976” – chaired by Elizabeth Driscoll Smith @elizabethdriscollsmith, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Sara Christine Morris @sara_c_morris, Crocker Art Museum

- “Making Do: Salvage and thrift economies within & beyond the long 19th century” – chaired by Emily W. Gephart @epigramethyl, Sch of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts Univ and Maura A. Coughlin @mauraacoughlin, Northeastern University

- “Past Imperfect: Critical Revisionism and the Historiography of American Art Today” — chaired by James W. Denison @jameswdenison, University of Hong Kong

- “Self-Writing and the History of Art” – chaired by Gwendolyn D. Shaw @professorshaw, University of Pennsylvania and Steven D. Nelson @snelsonus, University of California Los Angeles

- “Sovereignty, art, and the cultural collective” – chaired by Anne Helmreich @archivesamerart_director, Archives of American Art @archivesamerart, Smithsonian Institution @smithsonian and Lara M. Evans @art_allovr, PhD, First Peoples Fund

- “Resilience: Unorthodox Biographies of Women Artists” – chaired by Aliza R. Edelman @alizaedelman, Melissa L. Mednicov @mmednicov and Erin Devine @erindevine.creative for Woman’s Art Journal @womansartjournal.

📅 Proposal deadline: August 31.

@caavisual

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Two exhibitions of lasting impact just opened at @themuseumofmodernart : 1-3 Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt @huyghepierre curated by @stuartcomer and team; 4-5 Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa curated by @martino.stierli and (@ikemanubis) and team.

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My work Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (2003-2006), inspired by French philosophers Deleuze and Guittari’s “Mille Plateaux” (1980); made using the actual library of a con artist chased out of a Swiss town by INTERPOL.

200 self-help buisness books was a sign of madness back then… now? The Fribourg police gave me permission to use several items from a crime scene for this piece made in collaboration with @kunsthallefriartfribourg and then Director Sarah Zuercher @sarah_zurcher . Thrilled to find it par hasard in @archdigest’s new feature on dear friend and amazing collector Rodney Miller’s @leancook stunning new home, designed by @merrittchase with national treasure Franklin Sirmans @franklinsirmans curating the artworks.

I love that anyone could live with this work, which is also inspired by Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (1980) which introduced the idea of money in capitalist society becoming a “phantom object”. This is pre-bit coin and financial crises.

For a decade I was invited to show this expanding installation at public instutions worldwide. Senegal sent a rep from the ministry of finance to interview me. When markets collapsed, every artist talk became a town hall meeting. Book covers were stolen every time I showed the piece! Steven Nelson @snelsonus wrote a lovely piece featuring this work when I represented the USA and Diaspora for the 2006 Dakar Bienalle.

Hannes Famira @famirafonts worked on the intense design of this work with me, these are photos of books, - subtle gradations in colour saturations and tears and wrinkles appear in the covers. Note the ubiquitous orange tan…

This post made me realise that 1980 was a great year for critical writing, I was 8, must have absorbed this osmotically while hanging out at U of C when my brothers were at Lab School and my mom and Aunt Nancy were teaching there too!

Installations featured are;
Rodney Miller’s home
The Dakar Bienalle, IFAN museum 2006
Friart Kunsthalle Fribourg 2003

Not featured but also showed versions of this work;
Kunstraum Lakeside Klagenfurt
Stedelijk Museum Bureau (SMBA)

Capitalism and Schizophrenia
approx.250cm x 125cm, print edition 1/25.

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Huge congratulations to our @arthistorytyler PhD candidate Emily Schollenberger (@e_schollenberger) for presenting her paper, “Connective Memory and Colonial Cartographies in Emma Nishimura’s Japanese Canadian Internment Landscapes,” at the Annual Graduate Student Symposium on the History of Art, generously hosted by the @barnesfoundation.

Now in its 30th year, the symposium brought together graduate students from nine regional doctoral programs and featured a keynote lecture by Dr. Steven Nelson (@snelsonus).

We’re proud to see Emily contributing to such important conversations on memory, landscape, and histories of internment. Congratulations to all who participated in this milestone year!

#ArtHistory #PhDLife #GradResearch #BarnesFoundation #TylerArt @tyler_artandarchitecture

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CAA 2026 is a wrap! @on_gardening and I didn’t dress like our books’ covers this year, but we loved cheering on our titles and their wonderful authors, and the annual reunion that brings us all together.

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@hufinearts
Africana Americanxs In Transit Across the Black Kairibe Symposium.
Nov 15, 2025 at Howard University.
Billy Gerard Frank, Thomas Allen Harris, Wanda Raimunid-Ortiz, Harmonia Rosales, and Steven Nelson 👏👏👏🔥💯❤️

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@hufinearts
Africana Americanxs In Transit Across the Black Kairibe
November 13-15, 2025
Howard University
Symposium - Screening at Blackburn Digital Auditorium
https://finearts.howard.edu/gallery-art/events-calendar

Ana Lucia Araujo, Lucrezia Cippitelli, Alejandro de la Fuente, Simone Frangi, Billy Gerard Frank, Raimi Gbadamosi, Thomas Allen Harris, Montre Missouri, Steven Nelson, Raziel Perin, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz Klotz, Harmonia Rosales💯👏🔥

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