Nomvuyo Horwitz

Vu Horwitz’s research focuses on Central African wooden material culture from the 19th century and earlier. Situating objects within materialist and ecological frameworks, she concentrates upon the ways in which artisanal practices in that context expressed various kinds of interrelations. She is particularly interested in interpreting objects as vital sources for historical knowledge, which has led her toexplore both the physical and metaphysical properties of specific materials, as well as the tools and methods of fabrication they require. Her dissertation project draws from and integrates a range of disciplines, including art history, anthropology, dendrology, and ecology, to reveal the entanglements that palm wine drinking vessels from the Kuba cultural region embody. 

Horwitz holds a Master of Arts (with Distinction) in History of Art from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and a BA (Hons) in the same subject. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Cape Town. She was awarded the Stein-Lessing Scholarship (2015), and the Standard Bank Group African Art Essay Prize (2016). Horwitz curated the Public Programme for the RMB Turbine Art Fair in 2019, and in 2016/2017 she undertook a pre-doctoral research fellowship as part of The Arts of Africa and the Global South Programme at Rhodes University. She was a 2020-2021 fellow of the Yale Centre for Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration (RITM), and she taught a summer term for the Yale Young African Scholars program in 2021.

Horwitz has presented research papers at a number of conferences, including the South African Visual Art Historians (SAVAH), and the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA). Her research has been published in the journal African Arts (2017) and in two books produced by the Wits Art Museum (2016, 2021). Before studying at Yale, Horwitz was a lecturer in History of Art at the University of Johannesburg (2017-2020) where her focus was re-orienting the curriculum towards, and with, an Afro-centric pedagogy.