Stella Nair Co-organizes Conference and Native American Community-Based Workshops

Figure 1. Stella Nair, far right, at a ceremony in Los Angeles on April 22, 2022, during which the FBI returned two paintings, 10 historical documents, and four stone axes to representatives of the Peruvian government. Nair was one of the specialists who evaluated the paintings for the FBI.

sTella naIr, assoCIaTe professor of art history and a core faculty member of the Cotsen Institute, is co-organizer with Paul Niell of Florida State University of The Forgotten Canopy: Ecology, Ephemeral Architecture, and Imperialism in the Circum-Caribbean and TransAtlantic World. This project comprises three conferences at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, which is affiliated with UCLA, and three Native American community–based workshops to be held in Southern California in 2022–2023.

The conferences will draw scholars from across the world to study the intricate relationships between colonialism, ecologies, and building practices in the early modern world. The series is part of the Core Foundation Program of the Clark Library/Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies at UCLA, which also provides research and financial opportunities for graduate students. The program focuses on the topics of ecology (November 4–5, 2022), ephemeral architecture (February 10–11, 2023), and imperialism (April 14–15, 2023) in early modern times (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries). Nair is a Clark Professor at the Clark Library/Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies.

The workshops that accompany the conference received a $25,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art and aim to share and amplify the critical contributions of Native Americans and Black Americans to the architecture of the Americas. The workshops are organized in collaboration with Shannon Speed, associate professor of gender studies and anthropology and director of the American Indian Studies Center at UCLA. Speed is a tribal citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. The Terra Foundation aims to foster intercultural dialogues and encourage transformative practices to expand narratives of American art.