

38 West 86th St.
New York, NY 10024
212.501.3000
admissions@bgc.bard.edu
18 West 86th St.
New York, NY 10024
212.501.3023
gallery@bgc.bard.edu
BGC Gallery is currently closed.
38 West 86th St.
New York, NY 10024
212.501.3000
admissions@bgc.bard.edu
18 West 86th St.
New York, NY 10024
212.501.3023
gallery@bgc.bard.edu
BGC Gallery is currently closed.
Black Art and Activism in Early-20th-Century Paris
May 7, 2020
6:00 – 8:00 pm
Join us for BGC Late: Jazz & Conversation in the Gallery (the series formerly known as First Wednesdays)! Enjoy cool jazz, warm vibes, and a glass of wine; see our fascinating exhibitions and learn from provocative conversations about the objects on view. At 6pm Gene Perla and the fantastic musicians he brings together, Neil Wetzel on the sax, Vaughn Stoffey on the guitar, and Lenny White on drums, start playing. At 6:30 pm, in our lecture hall at 38 West 86th Street, Joshua I. Cohen leads a conversation with Felix Germain, Meleko Mokgosi, and Jennifer M. Wilks titled Black Art and Activism in Early-20th-Century Paris.
Joshua I. Cohen (Ph.D., Columbia University) is an assistant professor of art history at The City College of New York. His first book, The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents, is forthcoming with the University of California Press (July 2020). His writing has additionally appeared in The Art Bulletin, African Arts, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of Southern African Studies, Burlington Magazine, and Wasafiri.
Dr. Felix Germain is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, he specializes in transnational and cultural history, with an emphasis on France, the Caribbean, West Africa, and the United States. I explore topics such as race relations, colonization, decolonization, postcolonial migration and labor relations, and black social movements and gender relations in Africa and the African Diaspora. My first book, Decolonizing the Republic: African and Caribbean Migrants in Postwar Paris (1946-1974), examines the formation of the African Diaspora in France during a period that French historians call “the glorious thirty”. It chronicles the evolution of Paris from a space fertile for black literacy and artistic production to a city where Caribbean and African labor migrants lived in quasi “exile,” often protesting for better working and living conditions.
Meleko Mokgosi (born in Francistown, Botswana) is an artist, assistant professor of practice at New York University, and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program (https://www.artandtheoryprogram.org). He received his BA from Williams College in 2007 and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study program from 2007-2008. Mokgosi 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. 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. 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, 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.
38 West 86th St.
New York, NY 10024
212.501.3000
admissions@bgc.bard.edu
18 West 86th St.
New York, NY 10024
212.501.3023
gallery@bgc.bard.edu
BGC Gallery is currently closed.