Mapping blackness in creativity
As a child in suburban Boston, art historian Steven Nelson spent hours with his family’s 1969 edition of “The World Book Atlas,” an outsized volume crammed with hundreds of color maps. “We never traveled,” he said, so the book was a stand-in for doing so. “It was the way I learned the world.” Nelson is a traveler now, having spent time in Africa and Europe. He has degrees from Yale and Harvard and is an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, his home base for his prolific book writing and arts criticism. He is a contributing editor at the journal African Arts. Nelson traveled back to Harvard this week to present three talks on “Mapping Blackness in African and Afro-Atlantic Art.” His presentations open the Richard Cohen Lecture Series on African and African American Art at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Nelson’s first lecture,...