University of California Press is set to publish a new book from UT Art History Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) Adele Nelson this coming January 2022. Forming Abstraction: Art and Institutions in Postwar Brazil studies postwar Brazilian art and culture, highlighting the importance of exhibitionary and pedagogical institutions in the development of abstract art in Brazil.
Art produced outside hegemonic centers is often seen as a form of derivation or relegated to a provisional status. Forming Abstraction turns this narrative on its head. By focusing on the formation of the São Paulo Biennial in 1951; the early activities of artists Geraldo de Barros, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, and Ivan Serpa; and the ideas of critics like Mário Pedrosa, Nelson illuminates the complex, strategic processes of citation and adaption of both local and international forms. The book ultimately demonstrates that Brazilian art institutions and abstract artistic groups—and their exhibitions of abstract art in particular—served as crucial loci for the articulation of societal identities in a newly democratic nation at the onset of the Cold War.
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, Artelogie, and ARTMargins. She has contributed to numerous museum publications, among them, Lygia Clark: Painting as an Experimental Field, 1948–1958 (Guggenheim Bilbao, 2020), Mário Pedrosa: De la naturaleza afectiva 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), and Waldemar Cordeiro: Fantasia exata (Itaú Cultural, 2014). 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 research has been supported by the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, UT Austin, and Temple University, where she was an assistant professor of art history from 2012 to 2016.
She is co-organizing, with MacKenzie Stevens, the exhibition Social Fabric: Art and Activism in Contemporary Brazil for the Visual Arts Center at UT Austin to open in September 2022. The project received The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Grant.