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imaginista

Adele Nelson

Author

Adele Nelson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her BA in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and Art Semiotics from Brown University and her MA and PhD in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century art of Latin America, with a focus on the postwar and contemporary art of Brazil. Her research and teaching interests include transnational exchange between Latin America, Europe, and the United States; the close study of objects; and the history of modern art institutions, exhibitions, and pedagogy.

Dr. Nelson is the author of Jac Leirner in Conversation with/en conversación con Adele Nelson (Fundación Cisneros, 2011), which appeared in Portuguese translation in 2013. Her writings on art from Latin America have appeared in international magazines and academic journals, including Art in America, Art Journal, and ARTMargins. She has contributed to numerous museum publications, among them, Lygia Clark: Painting as an Experimental Field, 1948–1958 (Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, forthcoming 2020), Mário Pedrosa: De la naturaleza afetiva de la forma (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2017), Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium (Carnegie Museum of Art/The Art Institute of Chicago/Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016), Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015), Waldemar Cordeiro: Fantasia exata (Itaú Cultural, 2014), and Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s–50s (Newark Museum, 2010). She also contributed to the catalogue and helped to organize the award-winning exhibition Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927–1937 (MoMA, 2008).

Her current book project, Forming Abstraction: Art and Institutions in Postwar Brazil, studies how the practice and theory of abstract art developed in Brazil in the 1940s and 1950s in close relation to new modern art institutions. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Temple University, where she was an assistant professor of art history from 2012 to 2016.