Emily Velez Nelms, a conceptual sculptor who uses the tools and methods of architecture to conceive and execute her work, grew up in Broward County, “in the last housing development before the Everglades,” she says. Her grandmother was a painter of “robust sky scenes, with lots of clouds and light breaking through—they’re very dramatic,” Nelms remembers. “She would let me paint on top of them.” 

Her grandmother, Juanita, was also a belly dancer who performed  at various venues on Miami Beach in the 1960s and ’70s. Juanita’s father was a Filipino featherweight boxer. This sparked Nelms’s interest in histories of racialized performance, as well as the tourism economies built around them, in South Florida and elsewhere. At the Yale Peabody Museum for her 2024 exhibition Resonance of Things Unseen, Nelms dug into Yale’s collection of papers from William C. Sturtevant, a 20th-century anthropologist and ethnologist who studied Seminole and Miccosukee language and culture. Nelms made prints of Sturtevant’s letters and etched them in yellow flypaper, then applied dead mosquitos to them.  

During her Fountainhead residency, the artist built a steel base and worked on the pumping system for a sculpture shaped like a bed. Filled with liquid, the sculpture is “like a water bed,” except the liquid will include quinine, the alkaloid used in tonic water that also glows when exposed to UV light. Representing the bioluminescence of sea creatures, Nelms is interested in drawing connections between the intimate space of the home and the ocean—that other ecosystem that defines South Florida’s ecosystem. At the moment, she can only get it to glow for about two weeks. “I’m still learning,” she says.