Image courtesy of the artist
Meleko Mokgosi (born in Francistown, Botswana and lives in New York) is an artist and assistant professor of practice at New York University. By working across history painting, cinematic tropes, psychoanalysis, and post-colonial theory, Mokgosi creates large-scale, project-based installations that interrogate narrative tropes and the fundamental models for the inscription and transmission of history alongside established eurocentric notions of representation in order to address questions of nationhood, anti-colonial sentiments, and the perception of historicized events. Mokgosi received a bachelor of fine arts from Williams College, Williamstown, MA in 2004; completed the affiliate independent study program at Slade School of Fine Art, University of London, UK in 2006; attended the Whitney Museum independent study program, New York in 2007; and received his master of fine arts from the interdisciplinary studio program at University of California, Los Angeles in 2011. 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, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.