Department of Art History

We invite you to join the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago for this upcoming lecture as part of the 2024-25 Smart Lecture series. The lecture is Thursday, February 20th in CWAC 157 at 5:00pm CT with a Q&A session and reception to follow. 

This talk develops from a current book project on African modernism, decolonization, and the global Cold War. It grapples with basic questions of how to define, theorize, narrate, and situate modern art from Sub-Saharan Africa. Answers to these questions remain elusive because modern African art history, which coalesced as a field only recently, has dealt with more urgent priorities, and because the material under consideration poses various challenges to methodological precedent. Whereas existing monographs in the field view work in the transnational sphere as a mere facet of—or prelude to—triumphant nationalist production, many artists traveled extensively across borders and continents, making modernism something other than a nation-building enterprise. Ideas around black identity were drivers of Afro-modernist production both internally and externally, as artists and intellectuals elaborated (critical) responses to Negritude and other pan-Africanist movements even as race became a Cold War preoccupation that prompted competing investments in modern art from the East and West. And while previous scholarship (including my own) has privileged fine-arts production in painting and sculpture, modernism now stands to be conceptualized as a cross-media and cross-genre phenomenon encompassing varying configurations of artistic tradition, popular culture, and state authority and diplomacy. Temporality also constitutes a thorny dimension to the field of study, as African avant-gardes often referenced precursors dating back to the 19th century, and rose to prominence at a moment of late modernism’s institutionalization and instrumentalization. 

Joshua I. Cohen, associate professor in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University, is a historian of modern art specializing in postcolonial, African/diaspora, and global Cold War studies. Cohen is the author of The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents (UC Press, 2020), the first scholarly monograph to track the diverse presence of canonical African sculpture within modernism on a transatlantic scale. With Foad Torshizi and Vazira Zamindar, he co-edited a 2023 issue of ARTMargins devoted to Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn. His current book project, tentatively titled Art of the Opaque: African Modernism, Decolonization, and the Cold War, has received generous support from the Dedalus Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Committee on Globalization & Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center.