MELEKO MOKGOSI AT MEMORIAL ART GALLERY

PAX KAFFRARIA 

PAX KAFFRARIA (a series of paintings created between 2007 - 2011) is the title of the installation at Memorial Art Gallery; the artist is Botswana-born Meleko Mokgosi.

As I walked through the exhibit at last night’s opening, I couldn’t help remembering ANOTHER BROOKLYN, a novel written by Jacqueline Woodson.  Her story is loosely tied together through a series of vignettes - a young girl’s biography strained from the soup of memories.  It is poetry as memory - or memory as poetry.

Mokgosi’s paintings felt much the same - snippets of memory loosely placed together on huge canvases.  

Do you remember in elementary school or Sunday School as a kid working on story boards?  Figures - people, objects, animals - would “stick” whoever you placed them on the flannel covered board and could be removed and re-applied endlessly.  This was “storyboarding” long before any of us associated that term with cinema. 

That’s what Mokgosi’s canvases remind me of. Figures  - nearly life-sized - float in negative space over wall-sized canvases with sometimes a hint of scenic content (a veranda, a segment of fencing) but most often stranded in mid-air. Like paper dolls, felt backed costumes could be interchanged to further the time and place on flannel storyboards and just so, costuming is equally important to establish time, place and caste in Mokgosi's art.  

In PAX KAFFRARIA, Mokgosi attempts to tell the story of South Africa,  particularly post-1950 after the Population Registration Act when the country’s population was divided and registered into 4 groups - white, natives, coloreds and Indians.  It’s a history of xenophobic attacks on black foreigners, injustice and struggling national identity.

Is he successful? In whose terms? Is Mokgosi a gifted painter technically? Does that matter if the ideas behind the paintings are strong enough to carry the viewer into the maker’s hemisphere? This is a young painter working at a time when the art world is entranced by political statement work - no subject more so than the politics of African experience.  What does this mean for a life-time career?  Is it important to ask these questions at all or is the only thing that matters this: the gallery looked smashing last night.  The place was crowded with a young, diverse audience. Some were even looking at the art! 

(The exhibition runs a Memorial Art Gallery until May 7, 2017.  Another panel of the same series is on view at Rochester Contemporary Art Center.)