Meleko Mokgosi (born in Francistown, Botswana; lives and works in Wellesley, MA) is an artist, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the Yale School of Art, and the co-founder and director of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program (https://www.artandtheoryprogram.org). Mokgosi received his BA from Williams College in 2007 and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study program that same year. He then received his MFA from the Interdisciplinary Studio Program at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2011. He participated in the Rauschenberg Residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva, FL in 2015 and the Artist in Residence Program at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY in 2012.
His large-scale, figurative, and often text-based works engage history painting and cinematic tropes to investigate historiography, democracy, and liberation movements across Africa and the diaspora. His most recent body of work, Spaces of Subjection, examines subjection and subjectivity as they pertain to perspectives on African, African American, and Black life.
His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, recently with solo exhibitions at the St. Louis Art Museum, York University Art Gallery, The Pérez Art Museum Miami, Williams College Museum of Art, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, and the University of Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery, The Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA; California African American Museum; Raleigh Contemporary Art Museum; Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Sweden and the 12th Biennale de Lyon; other venues include the Botswana National Gallery, Gaborone, Botswana; The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art Museum, Peekskill, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center, Los Angeles, CA; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. His work is included in public collections such as The St. Louis Art Museum, The Pérez Art Museum Miami; The Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art for Rollins College, Winter Park, FL; the Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris.