Anderson Ranch Editions: Meleko Mokgosi

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. 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, and was an Artist in Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem from 2011 through 2012.

Mokgosi’s 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. Using Foucault’s theory of “subjection” where social, political and historical networks produce subjecthood and subject formation, the focus is not on the subject’s agency but on systems of power. Mokgosi’s series explores how systems of power and political forces affect how people live their daily lives. This work was part of the solo exhibition Currents 122 at the St. Louis Art Museum in 2022, as well as the solo exhibition Imaging Imaginations at the Art Gallery of York University in 2023.

His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Sweden, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, 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 Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, France. His work is included in public collections such as The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College, Winter Park, FL; and the Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME. Within the last half decade, Mokgosi had solo exhibitions at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO; The Current, Stowe, VT; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI; University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, IL; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; Rochester Contemporary Art Center, NY; and University of Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery, NY.

Prints are available for purchase and the proceeds provide ongoing support for all Ranch programming. If you have questions about the Anderson Ranch Editions program, or would like help with a purchase, please email [email protected], or call 970.923.3181.