Summary
In our sixth episode, Dr. Steven Nelson reflects on a career spent widening the field of art history. Tracing his path from a background as a maker and graphic designer through his training and his work as an Africanist, Dr. Nelson describes how a commitment to difference, equity and social justice shaped his scholarship and his institutional leadership. The conversation moves across the circulation and reception of images, the question of "what the work does" rather than only what it is, and the politics of heritage in the present. Drawing on projects from From Cameroon to Paris to his study of the Underground Railroad, Dr. Nelson considers mentorship, writing and voice, the structural barriers that constrain who enters the discipline, and what it means to sustain social justice work as it comes under attack.
Guests
Dr. Steven Nelson is Professor Emeritus of African and African American Art at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also served as Director of the African Studies Center. He was Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. His publications span the arts, architecture, and urbanism of Africa and its diasporas, as well as queer studies.
Shivani Kasumra is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh studying modernism in post-colonial South Asia.
Host and Production Credits
Co-Hosts: Sarah M. Estrela, Amelia Hansen
Producer: Amelia Hansen
Co-Editors: Amelia Hansen; Sarah M. Estrela
Music: Jacob Napier
Research Assistance and Show Notes: Allison Naydan
Key Topics Discussed
00:02:50 – Dr. Nelson traces his path to art history through a course on Japanese medieval art at Yale, in which he read Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, crediting Professors Carolyn Wheelwright and Anne Eden Gibson, before a seven-year career as a graphic designer and a return to graduate school.
00:04:57 – Dr. Nelson reflects on the shift from "difference" to "equity" to "social justice" as a reflection of where discourse stands at a given moment, naming Cornel West's early 1990s argument that racial inequality is not only a problem for people of color as intellectually formative.
00:11:45 – Dr. Nelson describes the tools he retained from art-historical training, Yve-Alain Bois's lesson about attending to the material of the work, and those he built from Black Studies and Chicano Studies, orienting everything around the question of what the artwork or building does.
00:17:51 – Dr. Nelson identifies the throughline across From Cameroon to Paris, the film Karmen Geï, and his Underground Railroad project: a preoccupation with how objects and images circulate, what happens to them when they do, and how manufactured heritage gets produced and deployed.
00:22:50 – Dr. Nelson argues that federal pressure on the Smithsonian is less about erasure than about making history not matter, citing Tad Stoermer's formulation. He also describes bringing Anna Deavere Smith's "Ghosts of Slavery" to the National Gallery as an example of the work that provokes such a response.
00:27:56 – Dr. Nelson makes the case for a capacious discipline: his governing principle that "everybody means everybody" means traditional and critical art histories must coexist in the same big tent, and that broadening who participates changes the intellectual work itself.
00:37:53 – Dr. Nelson reflects on how the discipline sometimes domesticates rather than absorbs critical challenges, and describes assigning Audre Lorde's "The Master's Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master's House" to a graduate seminar and provoking intense student resistance as a lesson in how an outside text exposes a field's limits.
00:43:18 – Dr. Nelson discusses pedagogy and voice: building student confidence through weekly writing and student-designed exams, and naming Toni Morrison, Norman Bryson, James Baldwin, and Mary Oliver as the writers he returns to when stuck. He describes a lesson from Art Journal editor Janet Kaplan ("Who do you want to talk to?") as foundational.
00:58:38 – Dr. Nelson addresses anachronism and presentism, drawing on historian Greg Dening's argument that the writing of history is always about the present, and cautions against applying twenty-first-century social justice models to the art of the past.
01:16:26 – Dr. Nelson and Dr. Estrela discuss structural barriers to participation in the discipline, such as childcare, first-generation status, and institutional prestige. Dr. Nelson describes concrete measures taken at CASVA including budgeting childcare into fellowships, allocating apartments by need rather than rank, and consistently prioritizing candidates from less-resourced institutions.
Reading List
Bibliographic entries below follow the notes-bibliography formatting conventions of the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, ordered alphabetically by author surname.
Works Cited in Conversation
Bois, Yve-Alain. Painting as Model. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
Gangitano, Lia, and Steven Nelson, editors. New Histories. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1996.
Lorde, Audre. "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 110–13. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984.
Nelson, Steven S. From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Nelson, Steven S. "Karmen Geï: Sex, the State, and Censorship in Dakar." African Arts 44, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 74–81.
Nelson, Steven S. and Huey Copeland, editors. Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World. Seminar Papers 4. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.
Panofsky, Erwin. Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955.
Ramaka, Joseph Gaï, dir. Karmen Geï. Senegal/France/Canada: Les Ateliers de l'Arche, 2001. 82 min.
Shikibu, Murasaki. The Tale of Genji. Translated by Royall Tyler. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
Smith, Anna Deavere. "This Ghost of Slavery: A Solo Reading." Lecture 2 of Chasing That Which Is Not Me/Chasing That Which Is Me. A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., May 5, 2024.
Stoermer, Tad. A Resistance History of the United States. Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2026.
Suggested Further Reading
Baxandall, Michael. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
hooks, bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: New Press, 1995.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Powell, Richard J. Black Art: A Cultural History. 3rd edition. London: Thames & Hudson, 2021.
West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
Acknowledgments
This podcast is made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, whose commitment to the humanities sustains the conditions under which scholarly conversations of this kind can be undertaken with care. We extend our deepest gratitude to the Mellon Foundation, to our guests for the generosity of their time and thinking, and to the institutional partners and communities whose collaboration anchors this work.
Suggested Citation
Estrela, Sarah M. and Amelia Hansen, co-hosts. "Everybody Means Everybody with Dr. Steven S. Nelson" Reparative Histories of Art and Architecture, episode 6, Recorded February 6, 2026, Released June 17, 2026.
Transcript and Contact
For inquiries, corrections, or accessibility requests, please contact reparative.haa@pitt.edu.
