Dr. Nancy Dantas is a Research Associate with the NRF/DST SARChI research programme in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa, Fine Art Department, Rhodes University, South Africa. Dr. Dantas is broadly concerned with multiple modernisms, transnational networks, coeval contemporaries, and making history’s silences and omissions speak, and am intentional in my research of under-studied and obscured figures, particularly women, and their role in modernist art history. I have also published on repatriation and monuments and memorials in post-apartheid South Africa.

Most recently, I was in residence at the Giacometti Foundation, where I conducted research into the modernist constellations of Gerard Sekoto and what Laura Karp Lugo has referred to as “exile sociability and artistic networks.” Over the course of 2024, I hope to develop a parallel line of research into radio as a site for the modernist African voice and identity. As a post-doctoral fellow at the Instituto de História de Arte, I will be developing a project titled “Constellation B: Coordinates, mobility and overlapping worlds” on Portuguese-
Mozambican artist Bertina Lopes and the cross-cultural exchanges and connective tissues offered by the observation of her solidarity-driven trajectory.

In lieu of favorite publications, I am currently reading A Arte sem História: Mulheres e Culturas Artísticas (Séculos XVI-XX) by Filipa Lowndes Vicente, Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African America and South African Writing by Stéphane Robolin, Tribuna
Negra: Origens do Movimento Negro em Portugal (1911-1933) by Cristina Roldão, José Augusto Pereira and Pedro Varela, and Ibrahim El-Salahi: At Home in the World, A Memoir.

Last Modified: Thu, 14 Mar 2024 12:40:32 SAST