Lecture: Gerard Sekoto and the International Histories of African Modernism

On April 24, 2023, Joshua Cohen, associate professor of art history at the City University of New York, discussed the life and work of the South African painter Gerard Sekoto (1913-1993), who made vibrant Postimpressionist-style works in the 1940s before relocating permanently to Paris in 1947-a move that allowed him to distance himself geographically from Apartheid, which began the following year. Living as an artist and musician in exile, Sekoto participated in a series of conferences and exhibitions charged with anticolonial ambitions and Cold War tensions. Sekoto’s tumultuous trajectory both reflects and reveals the international histories of African modernism at midcentury.