Visiting Artists Lecture: Diedrick Brackens and Meleko Mokgosi

May 31, 2022 5PM-6PM

Join us for a conversation with Visiting Artists Meleko Mokgosi and Diedrick Brackens.

Visiting Artist Lectures are free and open to the public. Register for the event and receive a link to live-stream the lecture virtually.

Diedrick Brackens lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received a BFA from University of North Texas, Denton, TX and an MFA in textiles from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. His work is currently on view in Diedrick Brackens: heaven is a muddy riverbed at Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles. Other recent solo exhibitions include the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE; the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Oakville Galleries, Ontario, Canada; New Museum, New York, NY; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS; and the University of North Texas, Denton, TX. Brackens is in the permanent collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AR; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI. He was the 2018 recipient of The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize and the 2019 recipient of the Marciano Artadia Award.

Meleko Mokgosi (born in Francistown, Botswana; lives and works in Wellesley, MA) is an artist, Associate Professor and co-director of graduate studies at the Yale School of Art, 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 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. In 2018 he co-founded the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York City. Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized at venues such as Jack Shainman Gallery, New York City; Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town and Johannesburg; Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles; Perez Art Museum Miami (2020); The Smart Museum of Art (2019); University of Michigan Museum of Art (2019); Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (2018); The Fowler Museum at UCLA (2018); Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown (2017) Rochester Contemporary Art Center (2017); The University of Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery (2017); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2015).