Artist interview: Emily Velez Nelms

Artist Emily Velez Nelms is interested in the complexities of the human gaze – what it means to look and to be looked at. And, in some cases, who is doing the looking and why they are doing it.

She examines how the gaze can either reinforce or challenge systems of power, encouraging viewers to reflect on the desires, fantasies, and structures that shape their own ways of seeing and being seen.

“My work is about the mechanics of looking,” Nelms said in a recent interview. 

It’s the subject of her current work in the group show [HYPERTEXT](HYPERLINK] at ISOVIST Gallery at the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, running through January. It was an integral part of her past exhibition at the Peabody, called “Resonance of Things Unseen: Indigenous Sovereignty, Institutional Accession, and Private Correspondence,” which ran from March through December 2024.

To ground this body of work, Nelms delved into the Peabody's collection to source her case study. She explored the papers of former Peabody curator William Sturtevant and transformed them into artist prints. Etched in yellow flypaper and dotted with mosquitos from the Florida wetlands, Sturtevant’s letters were displayed alongside an architectural blueprint from “The Jungle Queen,” the oldest running tourist attraction in Florida and a site where he acquired objects.

Sturtevant’s research focused on the knowledge of the Seminole and Miccosukee people, whose tribal homelands are in southern Florida. He deeply depended on his relationship with elder Josie Bille, the sole Miccosukee Seminole who would engage with him.

Nelms’ work embeds a piece of artwork within what would appear to be a standard pre-renovation Peabody exhibition. By doing this, she makes a powerful statement about the motivations of the person who selects what goes on display -  the often hidden curator - and how institutions have used Indigenous knowledge as content for academic research.

“I appreciate the Peabody’s willingness to have the work in the museum. It’s not an easy exhibit to hold space for,” Nelms said.

Nelms took some time out from her preparations for upcoming residency at the Fountainhead Arts in Miami to talk about her work at the Peabody.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

What inspired you to make this piece in the first place? Where did the idea come from?

My family was involved in the tourism economy in Miami during the 60s and 70s and in Los Angeles before that. My grandmother was a belly dancer and she performed along Collins Avenue and at various hotels.

I had been familiar with our generational involvement in entertainment industries including dance and professional boxing.

I was really interested in the historical context of how my home state of Florida had become a site of international tourism, where people would not only come to enjoy leisure, but sought various and differing “cultural experiences."

I knew the draw to the region was larger than its tropicality. As I started to do research it became evident that there were a proliferation of 20th century attractions where people themselves were on display. Through my research I document and map these sites and how they become part of a community’s actual infrastructure, such as the paving of roads or their adaptation into neighborhoods. The remnants of these locations are legible, some businesses are still open today.

Knowing that Florida had a prevalent history of commodifying an Other (a phrase used by bell hooks in her essay “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance”) by constructing the “primitive” as a business model—a practice deeply connected to the conceptual foundations of ethnographic institutions—I began asking questions: “When did this practice begin in the region?” And “Can I find purchased goods and their receipts within the archives of one of our nation’s oldest university museums?”

These inquiries led me to learn about the relationship between the Euro-American tourists and the Indigenous populations in southern Florida, a dynamic that has existed historically and continues to this day.

How did the initial impulse to explore tourism link together with going back through the Peabody archives?

During Dr. Royce Young Wolf's seminar, “Evoking Ancestral Memory,” we spent the semester reinterpreting select ancestral and contemporary Native American and Indigenous cultural and artist items from the Peabody archives. Over several weeks we conversed with scholars, artists, and museum staff toward developing writings on an object within the collection.

My submission included a wood carved canoe from the southeast collection. Because I had been mapping sites of tourism for my MED research at the Yale School of Architecture, I was curious if any of the items from the southeast collection were purchased from attractions.

I pulled some of the drawers at the archive and I was surprised. Many of the items in the collection actually had price tags on them, showing that they were purchased from roadside attractions or from trading posts. I then asked for the accession file showing how that object came to the Peabody. They were purchased in the mid 1950s by a student named William Sturtevant, an anthropologist who turns out to be an important figure in the discipline of Native Studies. The accession file showed his notes from when he was a student coming down to the wetlands in Florida to have conversations with people in the region to build out his dissertation.

That's how I came to understand the relationship between the objects and his letters. It was interesting to think about how items circulate and the motivation of the researcher, since oftentimes in museum studies we are only concerned with the object.

What do you hope someone would take away from your work?

I think the work is almost in the language of a museum, or maybe within the language of a Peabody exhibition before the renovation. It uses the same visual language of a map, presenting documents, and a portrait of a person in black and white. In some ways, I like that it functions mistakenly as an exhibit rather than an art installation, because it's really an art installation.

I think the powerful thing about this work is that there is no object at all.  All we have are words, rather than there being an object in front of you and then a little piece of paper or a statement that tells you how to read (the object). The viewer gets to imagine that object and the (label) document in relation to the institution. It's probably a dry way to tell a story, but it is presenting you with firsthand information - where the voice of an expert interpreter is removed.

I hope that if some visitors spent time reading the plaque on the exhibition, then maybe it gave them some perspective into considering how collections and many museums came to be.

What I've tried to encourage with my scholarship is not being afraid to tell complicated stories. Those of us who live in the contemporary era are not responsible for occurrences in the past, however we have the opportunity to steward tell sometimes difficult stories to and play a role in communal healing, which is something that I think is very much needed at a space like the Peabody.

There's a lot of work being done (at the Peabody) to restore a legacy of behavior that the institution has had towards multiple Indigenous communities. So, because of that history, it is important, as difficult as it is for me to be the conduit, to tell stories in a way that I think provides spaces for acknowledgment and for moving forward. I want to see the institution continue to serve its entirety of its community, which includes the Native student body.