Meleko Mokgosi

For his UMMA commission, Botswana-born artist Meleko Mokgosi explores the history of Pan-Africanism, the global movement to unite ethnic groups of sub-Saharan African descent. Titled Pan-African Pulp, the exhibition features large-scale panels inspired by African photo novels of the 1960s and ​’70s, a mural examining the complexity of blackness, posters from Pan-African movements founded in Detroit and Africa in the 1960s, and stories from Setswana literature. Mokgosi is an artist and an associate professor in painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art. By working across history painting, cinematic tropes, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial theory, Mokgosi creates large-scale project-based installations that interrogate narrative tropes and the fundamental models for the inscription and transmission of history. His artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Botswana National Gallery, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, the University of Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery, Williams College Museum of Art, The Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Presented in partnership with the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA). Lead support for this commission is provided by Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch. Additional generous support is provided by the University of Michigan African Studies Center.