ICYMI: Stanford's Joshua I. Cohen on African Modernism

African Modernism Beyond the Nation-State: Decolonization, Pan-Africanism, and the Cold War

This lecture, presented on March 12, 2025, grapples with questions of how to situate and define modernism in African visual art. 

Joshua I. Cohen, an associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford, is a historian of modern art specializing in African/diaspora, postcolonial, and global Cold War studies. His first book, The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents (UC Press, 2020), received honorable mention for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize as the first scholarly monograph to examine African sculpture and modernism on a transatlantic scale. With Foad Torshizi and Vazira Zamindar, he co-edited a special issue of ARTMargins devoted to Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn (2023). His current book project, tentatively titled Art of the Opaque: African Modernism, Decolonization, and the Global Cold War, has received generous support from the Dedalus Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center. Before coming to Stanford, Cohen taught at The City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center.