Political Theory Institute Lecture: "America's Greatest Art"

Featured Speakers:

Nika Elder and Andy Holtin

Nika Elder:

Nika Elder is an Associate Professor of Art in the College of Arts & Sciences at American University. Professor Elder specializes in the art of the United States from the colonial period to the present, including African-American art and the history of photography. Her current research and courses examine the mutually constitutive relationships among art, race, and ethnicity throughout modern American history.

Her first book, William Harnett’s Curious Objects: Still-Life Painting after the American Civil War (Fall 2022, University of California Press) attributes the artist’s resurrection and revision of still-life painting to the re-evaluation of the human body initiated by amputation, abolition, and the social sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century. She is currently completing her second book, A Taste for Flesh: John Singleton Copley and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Through the lens of the artist's work, the book argues that the trade in African people accounts for the Royal Academy's elevation of paintings depicting human subjects, specifically history painting and portraiture, in the late eighteenth century. Her third project, which is underway, focuses on the art of the 1960s and defines what it means to refer to this work as "post-war."

In addition to related research articles on these book projects, Prof. Elder has published essays on contemporary artists Lorna Simpson (Art Journal, Spring 2018), Kara Walker, and Fred Wilson (The Routledge Companion to African American Art). Prof. Elder further pursues her commitment to canonizing a comprehensive vision of "American art" by serving as the chair of AU's Feminist Art History Conference and as Acquisitions Editor of the Archives of American Art Journal. Her research has been supported by The Clark Art Institute, The Terra Foundation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Wyeth Foundation, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Before coming to AU, Prof. Elder taught at the University of Florida, Vassar College, and Princeton University. She received her PhD and MA, with a certificate in Media and Modernity, from Princeton University, and BA in art history and studio art from Wellesley College. For more on Prof. Elder's research and teaching, see nikaelder.com.

Andy Holtin:

Andy Holtin is a Professor of Art in the College of Arts & Sciences at American University. Professor Holtin received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University’s Sculpture and Extended Media program. His work uses technological systems to create performative objects and interactive installations, incorporating an exploratory range of materials and processes. Holtin currently works as half of the collaborative duo Causality Labs, pursuing projects that explore mechanism as metaphor for human experience and perception.

His work has been exhibited internationally at locations including Galerie35, Berlin, Germany; Museo Antropologico y de Arte Contemporaneo, Ecuador; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City; Planetario Alfa Science and Culture Museum, Mexico; and nationally at museums, galleries, and universities from New York to Portland to Florida. Holtin teaches all levels of Sculpture, addressing traditional media as well as installation formats, kinetic and interactive systems, and digital audio and video.