The Botswana artist Meleko Mokgosi opened two exhibitions in early November of this year, at Jack Shainman’s New York City galleries, The social revolution of our time cannot take its poetry from the past put only from the poetry of the future and Pan-African Pulp. Democratic Intuition another multi-year and multimedia exhibition is on view until Spring 2020 at Jack Shainmen’s The School located in Kinderhook, New York. These shows are impressive for their scale and scope, and come on the heels of exhibitions in Johannesburg, South Africa at the Stevenson Gallery and at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

The opening of Mokgosi’s New York City shows presented an opportunity for me to speak to the artist, who I know from our shared time as art majors at Williams College, about his educational and professional trajectory. Born in Francistown, Botswana, Mokgosi currently teaches painting at the Yale University’s famed School of Art, where luminaries like Kehinde Wiley, Barkley Hendricks, Howardena Pindell, and Wengechi Mutu amongst many other black artists have trained. Ironically, Yale and other top MFA programs had rejected Mokgosi, who after the Whitney Independent Study Program trained with the artist Mary Kelly at the University of California-Los Angeles. Mokgosi’s multimedia works take years to produce and unfold for the public in various iterations and chapters, thereby offering complex views of history and powerful critiques of pan-Africanism and the postcolonial moment we are currently living.