Rachel Nelson is Interim Director of UC Santa's Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS). She also teaches in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at UCSC. Nelson is currently organizing a major group exhibition about art, prisons, and justice, Barring Freedom, which will be on view at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice before traveling to UC Santa Cruz and San José Museum of Art. She is also coordinating a symposium and related book to accompany that exhibition, called Visualizing Prison Abolition. A solo exhibition of artworks by Carlos Motta called We The Enemy and a related symposium "Bodies at the Borders" at UCSC and SFMOMA are also recent projects. Nelson publishes widely on contemporary art and politics, including in Third Text, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and African Arts. Nelson has a Ph.D in Visual Studies from UCSC.
Written in response to letters from Tim Young, who is currently on death row in San Quentin State... more Written in response to letters from Tim Young, who is currently on death row in San Quentin State prison, this article considers the response by prison authorities to Covid-19 in relation to the continued practice of capital punishment in the United States. Death row holds a distinct space in the U.S. social imaginary, maintained the legal and ideological mechanisms through which death is understood as a social good. Questioning if concern is possible in a pandemic for people who are supposed to be dead—and languish in our prisons waiting for execution dates—the article considers the socio-political production that this paradigm allows in the time of the coronavirus.
In the decade since Okwui Enwezor asserted the relevance of art biennials staged at sites of soci... more In the decade since Okwui Enwezor asserted the relevance of art biennials staged at sites of social and political trauma, it has grown abundantly clear that art is increasingly imagined to do something in these extreme and unlikely contexts. However, what art is being imagined to do in such circumstances remains under-explored. This article considers the alchemies of art and biennial practices by revisiting the exhibition developed in New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. It situates that biennial, ‘Prospect New Orleans’, within the outpouring of imagery that emanated from the storm, images that both reveal and maintain the institutionalized racism and policies of economic neglect that ensured the storm was so very devastating. The article considers the roles the biennial project and its artworks played within visual systems that produce large swathes of the population as disposable in the face of every storm.
Since 2007 Kiluanji Kia Henda’s artworks have been shown extensively on the international art cir... more Since 2007 Kiluanji Kia Henda’s artworks have been shown extensively on the international art circuit and included in exhibitions from Guangzhou to São Paulo, from Luanda to Venice. By considering some notable art projects and exhibition experiences that have occurred in this compressed time span and these different locations, this essay addresses the young Angolan artist’s engagement with the perils and possibilities of art practice as it transverses multiple art worlds. Kia Henda’s artworks engage with the potential of mis-seeing, the visual equivalent of mistranslation, in cultural exchanges between Angola and the larger world.
Written in response to letters from Tim Young, who is currently on death row in San Quentin State... more Written in response to letters from Tim Young, who is currently on death row in San Quentin State prison, this article considers the response by prison authorities to Covid-19 in relation to the continued practice of capital punishment in the United States. Death row holds a distinct space in the U.S. social imaginary, maintained the legal and ideological mechanisms through which death is understood as a social good. Questioning if concern is possible in a pandemic for people who are supposed to be dead—and languish in our prisons waiting for execution dates—the article considers the socio-political production that this paradigm allows in the time of the coronavirus.
In the decade since Okwui Enwezor asserted the relevance of art biennials staged at sites of soci... more In the decade since Okwui Enwezor asserted the relevance of art biennials staged at sites of social and political trauma, it has grown abundantly clear that art is increasingly imagined to do something in these extreme and unlikely contexts. However, what art is being imagined to do in such circumstances remains under-explored. This article considers the alchemies of art and biennial practices by revisiting the exhibition developed in New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. It situates that biennial, ‘Prospect New Orleans’, within the outpouring of imagery that emanated from the storm, images that both reveal and maintain the institutionalized racism and policies of economic neglect that ensured the storm was so very devastating. The article considers the roles the biennial project and its artworks played within visual systems that produce large swathes of the population as disposable in the face of every storm.
Since 2007 Kiluanji Kia Henda’s artworks have been shown extensively on the international art cir... more Since 2007 Kiluanji Kia Henda’s artworks have been shown extensively on the international art circuit and included in exhibitions from Guangzhou to São Paulo, from Luanda to Venice. By considering some notable art projects and exhibition experiences that have occurred in this compressed time span and these different locations, this essay addresses the young Angolan artist’s engagement with the perils and possibilities of art practice as it transverses multiple art worlds. Kia Henda’s artworks engage with the potential of mis-seeing, the visual equivalent of mistranslation, in cultural exchanges between Angola and the larger world.
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