• Refine Your Search:

Back to All News
1/25/2024

January 31: Visiting Scholar Joshua Cohen Presents “African Modernism in an Opaque Field of Production”

College of Fine Arts

JOSHUA I. COHEN

Associate Professor of Art History at the City College of New York & CUNY Graduate Center

Wednesday, January 31 at 5 pm

WJB 2005


On January 31, the Department of Art History will inaugurate a lecture series in which visiting scholars introduce aspects of their new or forthcoming monographs. The first speaker, Joshua I. Cohen, Associate Professor of Art History at the City College of New York & CUNY Graduate Center, specializes in twentieth-century francophone West Africa, southern Africa, and connections to Europe and the United States. His first monograph, The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents (University of California Press, 2020), examines the role of African art in multiple modernisms.

Cohen’s upcoming lecture at FSU, “African Modernism in an Opaque Field of Production,” derives from his second book project, tentatively titled Art of the Opaque: African Modernisms, Decolonization, and the Cold War. The lecture is open to the public in room 2005 William Johnston Building. The Department of Art History invites any members of the FSU community with interests in Africa’s diasporas, the global Cold War, and decolonization.

Header image: Souleymane Keita (Senegalese, 1947-2014), Voyage au Mali, c 1980-85, oil on canvas, 129 x 160 cm. Image courtesy of Galerie Cécile Fakhoury; photograph by Guillaume Bassinet.