The Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory is excited to announce that Nuno Porto is joining the department as an Associate Professor with a focus on African Art and Heritage.
He will be teaching the ARTH 410 Seminar in African Art – Key debates in the Arts and the African Diasporas in this 2021-2022 semester.
Nuno Porto has consistently combined his scholarly activity with curatorial practice and has extensively published on issues of visual and material culture, including photography, contemporary art and ethnography, and histories of collections and museology based on his collaborative research in Angola, Cape Verde and Brazil. He holds a PhD from the University of Coimbra, Portugal, where he thought for over 20 years and where he lead a series of curatorial experiments as Director of the university’s Museum of Anthropology. His is a joint position with the UBC Museum of Anthropology, where he is Curator for the African and South American collections.
As a settler living in the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples he sees his research, his curatorial work and his teaching as opportunities to decentre, deconstruct and decolonize, as a means to advance the awareness on the combined legacies of colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism, and explore sustained decolonial methodologies and equitable research ethics and practices, most of which have been core agendas for contemporary African and Black artists and scholars.
At UBC since 2012, he has spearheaded MOA’s exhibits Without Masks – Contemporary Afro Cuban Art, Pigapicha! 100 years of Studio Photography in Nairobi, Amazonia – the Rights of Nature, and, currently, Sankofa – African Routes, Canadian Roots co-curated with Nya Lewis (Black Arts Vancouver and MFA candidate at the University of Toronto) and AHVA PhD candidate Titilope Salami. Sankofa also features an installation by AHVA CCST graduate Oluwasayo Tayo Olowo-Ake.
With David Morton (UBC History) the UBC African Awareness Initiative, the UBC Black Students Union and Hogan’s Alley Society, he was recipient of a PURE (Program for Undergraduate Research Experience) grant for the project Decolonizing the African Collections and Displays at MOA (concluding in 2022) and during 2021 he served in the President’s Task Force on Anti Racism and Inclusive Excellence.
Nuno has taught ARTH 410 Seminar in African Art – Key debates in the Arts and the African Diasporas since 2016, and ARTH 309 Arts of Africa and the African Diasporas in 2020. Both courses are cross listed with the UBC African Studies Minor.
