Adrian Anagnost is a NOMIS–eikones Fellow at eikones – Center for the Theory and History of Images at the University of Basel (Switzerland).

Anagnost is an art historian specializing in forms of spatiality in the modern Americas, especially Brazil and the US. After earning an MA from Columbia University (New York, US) and a PhD from the University of Chicago (IL, US), Anagnost joined the faculty of the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University. She is currently associate professor of modern and contemporary art at Tulane and core faculty of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies. Anagnost’s work has been supported by the ACLS, the Folger Institute, the Mellon Foundation, the Newberry Library, the Stone Center for Latin American Studies and the Terra Foundation. She is the author of Spatial Orders, Social Forms: Art and the City in Modern Brazil (Yale University Press, 2022), and has published essays on modern art, architecture and urbanism in venues such as Design Issues, Global South Studies, Konsthistorisk tidskrift, Modernism/modernity and nonsite.org.

As a NOMIS Fellow, Anagnost is working on a project supported by the Louisiana artists and scholars program, concerning waterscapes of the Gulf South, especially near the Mississippi Delta, from the colonial period into modernity. This region lies at the intersection of ancestral homelands for Choctaw, Houma and other indigenous groups; French, Spanish, British, and US imperial projects; and key sites of transatlantic slavery. It is also an ecologically fraught zone of mutable waterscapes. Looking at maps, paintings, prints, photographs and archaeological evidence, this project considers how the history of depicting landscapes must take into account diverse representational languages, the racialization of space and challenges of depicting terrain in flux.