Artist Nnenna Okore will join environmental historian Robert Rouphail for a conversation at the Stanley Museum of Art as part of the Levitt Lecture series.

Okore will reflect on her work as an experience that enmeshes and interconnects bodies, things, and environments. Drawing on indigenous African perspectives, Nnenna Okore will discuss how ‘Spirit Dance’, among others, enlivens socio-material experiences that can interrupt im/material alienations, disembodiments, and dichotomies between art and life. Okore will underscore how, in the face of ecological challenges and devastations, people can become more attuned to the planet and its ecosystems by intermingling with materials, people, and spaces.

Robert Rouphail is an environmental historian of modern Africa and the Indian Ocean World. His research and writing are primarily interested in how the natural world, and natural disasters specifically, are constitutive elements in the construction of political, racial, and gendered identities. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World: Identity and Environment in Modern Mauritius, which is an examination of the social history of tropical cyclones in 20th century Mauritius, a multiethnic and linguistically plural island in the southwest Indian Ocean.