Anoka Faruqee and Meleko Mokgosi to be Co-directors of Graduate Studies in Painting/Printmaking

JUNE 29, 2020

The Yale School of Art is pleased to announce Professor Anoka Faruqee and Associate Professor Meleko Mokgosi as Co-directors of Graduate Studies in Painting/Printmaking. Dean and Professor Marta Kuzma, in making the appointment, recognizes that “this co-directorship will further build on the values extolled by Professor Faruqee as the Director of Graduate Studies in Painting/Printmaking for the past five years, and generate an even deeper inquiry around art production within the wider social, political, and economic landscape.” Dean Kuzma added, “Professor Faruqee and Associate Professor Mokgosi will collaborate in their vision that recognizes art, and painting specifically, amid ongoing social transformations while recognizing it within a broader structure of reconfigurations and histories.”

Professor Faruqee and Associate Professor Mokgosi are excited to reimagine the leadership of the Painting/Printmaking department as a collaborative endeavor that embraces shared governance including faculty members and students. In their leadership they aim to support the view of the field of painting as both a medium and a discourse, and encourage artists to explore its relation to other media including textile, performance, and sculpture. They believe the integration of form and content, and practice and theory, are crucial. Together they will work to ensure the formats of critiques, town halls, as well as decision-making processes within Painting/Printmaking are intentional, aiming for the free exchange of differing ideas.

Anoka Faruqee was first appointed Associate Professor in Painting/Printmaking at the Yale School of Art in 2011 and has served as Director of Graduate Studies in Painting/Printmaking since 2015. Negotiating the space between digital and analog, Faruqee’s practice concerns vision, engaging the history of Op Art in the creation of textural, cerebral canvases that undulate rhythmically and contemporize color theory for the twenty-first century. Prior to her appointment at Yale School of Art, Faruqee taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and California Institute of the Arts, where she was co-director of the art program. Faruqee earned her Master of Fine Arts from the Tyler School of Art in 1997 and her Bachelor of Arts in Painting from Yale University in 1994. She is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program and residencies at the Skowhegan School of Art and the PS1 National Studio Program. Her grants include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Artadia. In 2016, she curated the major exhibition Search Versus Re-Search: Josef Albers, Artist and Educator, and directed a short film about Albers’ art and teaching for 32 Edgewood Gallery at the Yale School of Art. Faruqee’s work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad at venues including, Secession, Vienna, Austria; Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY; Schloss Derneburg Museum, Derneburg, Germany; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR; Björkholmen Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden; The Suburban, Milwaukee, WI; The DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; and Koenig and Clinton Gallery, Brooklyn NY, among others.

Meleko Mokgosi was appointed Associate Professor in Painting/Printmaking in 2019. Mokgosi is engaged in a project-based practice positioned between cinema studies, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and post-colonial studies. Prior to his appointment at the Yale School of Art, Mokgosi was Assistant Professor of Practice at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU where he joined in 2012. He holds a BA in Studio Art from Williams College, an MFA from UCLA where he studied under Mary Kelly in the interdisciplinary studio program and attended the Whitney Independent Study program. His past exhibition history includes solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Williams College Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, and the Perez Art Museum in Miami, among others. Mokgosi has also been awarded various grants and awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the Vilcek Award for Creative Promise, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters Grant, and the Jarl and Pamela Mohn Award. In addition to his engagement as a practicing artist and full-time educator, Mokgosi initiated the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program based in New York City. Grounded in the global tradition of critical theory, the tuition-free program is designed to facilitate the examination of both dominant and under-recognized epistemological frameworks that inform the system of art, including its production, consumption, distribution, and exhibition.