Ludden Lecture 2024: Steven Nelson
"Learning from Johannesburg: Moshekwa Langa’s Maps of Desire"
Established in 1966 to honor professor and former department chair Franklin M. Ludden (1916-2002), these lectures are intended to reflect an interdisciplinary approach to the study of art history, with a particular emphasis on theory and criticism. This year's Ludden Lecture will feature Steven Nelson.
Lecture Description:
This lecture explores how South African-born, Amsterdam-based artist Moshekwa Langa, who spent his youth under the rule of Grand Apartheid in South Africa, trades in ethnography, the historic relations of whites and blacks, and the systems of homelands in the nation state to create collaged and drawn geographies that point to the constructed nature of official South African maps. This discussion also looks at how Langa’s work, in its mixture of languages and semiotic systems, deconstructs the authority of maps and “official” information as a means to create new spaces and new ways to understand affiliation, and belonging, both racially and sexually.
Bio:
Steven Nelson is Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery in Washington D.C.. Before his appointment to CASVA in 2020, he was Professor of History of Art at UCLA and directed the African Studies Center. He has also served as president of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association. In addition to his award-winning 2007 book, From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa, Steven’s writings on the contemporary and historic arts, architecture and urbanism of Africa and its diasporas, African American art history, and queer studies have appeared in numerous anthologies, journals, and exhibition catalogues.
This event is free and open to the public.
