Photo credit: Lyan'lex Bernales
Joshua I. Cohen is a historian of modern art specializing in postcolonial, African/diaspora, and global Cold War studies. His research and teaching explore modernist practices and discourses spanning francophone West Africa, southern Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States.
Cohen is the author of The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents (University of California Press; Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize, honorable mention, 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 an issue of ARTMargins devoted to Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn (2023). Other writing has appeared in The Art Bulletin, African Arts, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of Southern African Studies, Burlington Magazine, Wasafiri, Africa Is a Country, Germinal, and various edited volumes (see here for an archive of publications).
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. Taking modernism as a transnational, cross-media, and genre-blurring phenomenon, the project focuses on artists and intellectuals—Gerard Sekoto, Fodéba Keita, Alioune Diop, and Serge Hélénon, among others—whose practices developed between Africa and its diaspora in the fraught political contexts of decolonization and the global Cold War. A related retrospective exhibition, Serge Hélénon: The Black-Caribbean School, opened at Aicon Gallery, New York, in December 2023.
Before coming to Stanford, Prof. Cohen taught for ten years at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center.
