Nasher Prize Graduate Symposium: keynote announcement and last call for submissions

Keynote speaker Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons will cap off three days of scholarly presentations and discussions as part of the Nasher Prize Graduate Symposium, focused on the work of 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate Otobong Nkanga. Campos-Pons is an artist and Professor of Fine Arts, Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Fine Arts, Drawing, Performance, Installation at Vanderbilt University. She was curator of Otobong Nkanga: Gently Basking in Debris, an exhibition at the Frist Museum in Nashville, Tennessee.

The Nasher Prize Graduate Symposium–dedicated to the work of Nkanga and open to graduate students from around the world, studying in any field–will take place virtually from February 27–March 1, 2024. The multi-day event will address a broad audience of art historians and museum professionals, allowing symposium participants to receive feedback from fellow presenters, the moderator, the keynote speaker, and audience members. This year’s symposium will be moderated by Trey Burns, artist and writer, co-founder of Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, and Professor of Art at University of North Texas. Students selected to participate will have their papers published in the annual Nasher Prize Graduate Symposium Compendium, released in April 2025 including a paper delivered by a keynote speaker. 

Suggested topics for the work of Nasher Prize Laureate Otobong Nkanga 
–Interdependency 
–Rootedness 
–Extraction of natural resources 
–Migration 
–Materials and the senses 

Preference will be given to those submissions that focus on the work of Otobong Nkanga.

Complete proposals must include the following 
–Contact information, participant’s field and university affiliation, and CV 
–Paper title and abstract of no more than 200 words, and 3 to 5 keywords 

Proposals are due by Sunday, January 21, 2024. Send submissions and questions to symposium [​at​] nashersculpturecenter.org 

About Otobong Nkanga 
Born in 1974 in Kano, Nigeria, Otobong Nkanga lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville (2023); Sint-Janshospitaal, Bruges (2022); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2021); Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin (2021); Villa Arson, Nice (2021); Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Sandvika (2020);  Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020); Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (2020); Tate St Ives (2019); Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2019); Ar/ge kunst Galleria Museo, Bolzano (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018); Kunsthal Aarhus (2017); Nottingham Contemporary (2016); Beirut Art Center (2016); Tate Modern, London (2015); Museum Folkwang, Essen (2015); Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt (2015), Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (2015); Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2015). Her work has been prominently featured in international biennials, including the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); documenta 14 (2017); and the 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015). 

Nkanga was the recipient of the inaugural Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award Programme (2019); the Special Mention Award at the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Italy (2019); the Belgium Art Prize (2017); and the Yanghyun Prize (2015). Her works are held in institutional collections including Foundation Beyeler, Basel; Museum Brugge, Bruges; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterloo; Art Gallery of Ontario; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Museum Arnhem; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; Queensland Art Gallery; Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Mu.ZEE Oostende; Centre National de Arts Plastiques, Paris; and Museum Folkwang, Essen. 

About Keynote Speaker María Magdalena Campos-Pons 
María Magdalena Campos-Pons combines and crosses diverse artistic practices, including photography, painting, sculpture, film, video, and performance. Her work addresses issues of history, memory, gender, and religion; it investigates how each one of these themes informs identity formation. 

Born in 1959 in La Vega, a town in the province of Matanzas, Cuba, Campos-Pons is a descendant of Nigerians who had been brought to the island and enslaved in the 19th century. She grew up learning firsthand about the legacy of slavery along with the beliefs of Santeria, a Yoruba-derived religion. Directly informed by the traditions, rituals, and practices of her ancestors, her work is deeply autobiographical. Often using herself and her Afro-Cuban realities as subjects, she creates historical narratives that illuminate the spirit of people and places, past and present, thereby rendering universal relevance from personal history. Recalling dark narratives of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, her imagery and performances honor the labor of black bodies on indigo and sugar plantations, renew Catholic and Santeria religious practices, and celebrate revolutionary uprisings in the Americas. As she writes, “I… collect and tell stories of forgotten people in order to foster a dialogue to better understand and propose a poetic, compassionate reading of our time.” 

Campos-Pons has from the beginning of her career created multi-media installations, drawings, paintings, and performances. In the 1990s she began making large format polaroid photography as a means to elaborate the relationships among photography, painting, performance, and sculpture. In spite of the diversity of her practice, the sea as a repository of memory and site of identity formation has remained a major facet of her work, allowing her to address issues that range from the Middle Passage to contemporary migrant crises. 

Campos-Pons’s performance works tend to unfold as processionals, ritualistic spectacles that physically and spiritually embody the spaces in which they take place while asserting themselves outward and beyond the boundaries of those spaces. 

Behold, a survey of Campos-Pons’s work spanning four decades, is currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum and will go on to tour nationally at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, and the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada, among other distinguished institutions. She has presented over thirty solo performances commissioned by institutions that include the Guggenheim Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (both in collaboration with sound artist and composer Neil Leonard). She has participated in the Dakar Biennale, the Johannesburg Biennial, the Guangzhou Triennial, the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, and Prospect 4 Triennial, as well as the Venice Biennale, documenta 14, and the Havana Biennial (in collaboration with Leonard). Her works are held in more than thirty museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Perez Art Museum, Miami; and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. 

In 1980, Campos-Pons graduated from the National School of Art, La Havana, Cuba. She went on to study painting at La Havana’s Higher Institute of Art and then gained an MFA in Media Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1988. In the late 1980s, Campos-Pons taught at the prestigious Insituto Superior de Arte in Havana and gained an international reputation as an exponent of the New Cuban Art movement that arose in opposition to Communist repression on the island. In 1991, she immigrated to Boston and taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, where she received numerous prizes and honors for both her teaching and her artistic practice. In 2017, she was awarded the Vanderbilt Chair at Vanderbilt University and moved to Nashville, TN, where she currently resides. In 2023, Campos-Pons was awarded the prestigious MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship for exploring personal and collective histories across the Caribbean with a distinctive and expansive visual style. 

Campos-Pons has founded or co-founded several non-profit arts organizations including the Intermittent Rivers, a Biennial Project in Matanzas, Cuba; the Engine for Art Democracy and Justice at Vanderbilt with Vanderbilt and Frist University; and When We Gather, a multi-faceted art project celebrating the elemental role women have played in the United States. 

About Moderator Trey Burns 
Trey Burns is an artist, writer, and educator currently working in the New Media department at the University of North Texas. Since 2018, he has been co-director of Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, a non-profit arts organization that provides space and support for experimental and large-scale outdoor works by emerging voices. In 2023, Sweet Pass received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the alternative education and exhibition program Sculpture School, which invites artists to look more deeply at place. Burns has shown his work both domestically and internationally, including Pavillion Vendôme (Clichy-la-Garenne, France), Ecole Nationale d’Architecture Paris, Malaquais Gallery (Paris, France), Wassaic Projects (Wassaic, NY), Tarleton State University (Stephenville, TX), Wells College (Aurora, NY), et al Projects (Brooklyn, NY), and upcoming at the Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, TX). His writing has recently been published in Southwest Contemporary, the Holt/Smithson Foundation, Nasher Magazine, and Burnaway.