Joshua I Cohen | Stanford University (original) (raw)

Papers by Joshua I Cohen

Research paper thumbnail of "On Labels, Colonial Legacies, and the Current Crisis in African Art Studies"

African Arts, 2020

response to Yaëlle Biro & Susan Gagliardi, "Beyond Single Stories: Addressing Dynamism, Specifici... more response to Yaëlle Biro & Susan Gagliardi, "Beyond Single Stories:
Addressing Dynamism, Specificity, and Agency in Arts of Africa," African Arts 52, no. 4 (2019)

Research paper thumbnail of “Interroger le portrait dans la photographie de Mohamed Camara,” trans. Clara Pacquet, in Photographie et oralité. Dialogues à Bamako, Dakar et ailleurs, ed. Bärbel Küster and Clara Pacquet, 2017.

Research paper thumbnail of “The Play: Reassembling African Arts in the West,” in Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions, eds. Shelley Butler and Erica Lehrer, 127-140. Montreal; Kingston, Ont.: McGill-Queens University Press, 2016.

Research paper thumbnail of “Souleymane Keita: Traversées.” In Actes du colloque: Avant que la ‘magie’ n’opère : Modernités artistiques en Afrique, ed. Maureen Murphy and Nora Gréani. Paris: Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art; Histoire Culturelle et Sociale de l’Art (HiCSA), Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2017

http://hicsa.univ-paris1.fr/page.php?r=133&id=898&lang=fr

Research paper thumbnail of “Deux masques ivoiriens et La Guitare (1912) de Picasso.” In Actes du colloque: Picasso. Sculptures. Paris: Musée Picasso, 2017

Research paper thumbnail of Keita, Fodéba (1921-1969)

Research paper thumbnail of Stages in Transition: Les Ballets Africains and Independence, 1959-1960

Articles by Joshua I Cohen

Research paper thumbnail of Iba Ndiaye and Jean Laude, "Art, Signs, and Cultures" (1977)

ARTMargins 12, no. 2, 2023

This document, translated from the original French, is an edited transcript of a conversation bet... more This document, translated from the original French, is an edited transcript of a conversation between the Senegalese painter Iba Ndiaye and the French art historian Jean Laude. The conversation took place on the occasion of the Festival des Arts et Cultures Africaines in Royan, France, in March 1977. It was broadcast several months later, in August of the same year, on the radio channel France Culture. Iba Ndiaye (1928-2008; also written N'Diaye) was born in the cosmopolitan coastal city of Saint-Louis, one of Senegal's colonial-era Quatre Communes, and he therefore held French citizenship. He moved to Paris in 1948 to study architecture, and apart from a relatively short stint in Dakar (1960-67), he would live in France for the rest of his life. 1 During the period in Dakar, Ndiaye emerged as a major fi gure in post-independence Senegalese art, by helping establish Senegal's national art school, the École des Arts du Sénégal, and serving as the curator of Tendances et Confrontations (Trends and Confrontations), a landmark exhibition of contemporary art from Africa and the diaspora that was staged at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, in Dakar in 1966. Jean Laude (1922-83), meanwhile, began his career in 1946 as a 1 For a brief overview of the artist's life and career, see Joshua I.

Research paper thumbnail of Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn

ARTMargins, 2023

When taken as a conglomerate, the postcolonial, the global, and the decolonial might signal a coo... more When taken as a conglomerate, the postcolonial, the global, and the decolonial might signal a coordinated “decolonizing” action—one of breaking with the Eurocentric, patriarchal, and nationalist foundations of art history. Yet from a disaggregating perspective, these three terms and their respective domains cannot be seen as synonymous or entirely harmonious. What particularly demands scrutiny is the tendency to dismiss the postcolonial, or announce its demise, by claiming it has been superseded by other paradigms, namely the global and the decolonial. This introductory essay seeks to trace the postcolonial, global, and decolonial as they have intersected with scholarship in art history over the past five decades, and to challenge postcolonialism’s presumed obsolescence in the wake of the global turn. Postcolonial thought, we argue, has given rise to a generative series of critical interventions in art history at least since the 1970s and 1980s, and has proven to be nuanced and self-reflexive. Postcolonial lines of inquiry not only continue to offer ways of critically exploring colonial-era and subsequent artistic practices, but also allow for interrogations of formations of art and the discipline of art history as colonial forms of knowledge. As such, postcolonialism still vitalizes debates within the discipline regarding the constitution of its own objects, lineaments, and methods.

Research paper thumbnail of Exhibition review. VIIes Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie Bamako, Mali November 24

Research paper thumbnail of "Picasso, la Guerra Fría y la descolonización en África"

Picasso e historia, ed. Lebrero & Karmel; trans. María Luisa Balseiro, 2021

Research paper thumbnail of "Ndaanaan, Modou Niang

Africa in the UNESCO Art Collection, 2021

Research paper thumbnail of "African Socialist Cultural Policy: Senegal under Senghor"

Research paper thumbnail of "Harlem and Abroad: Notes to an International 'Renaissance'." Wasafiri 34, no. 3 (Autumn 2019): 37-48.

Research paper thumbnail of "Locating Senghor's École de Dakar: International and Transnational Dimensions to Senegalese Modern Art, c. 1959-1980."

Research paper thumbnail of “Identity and Abstraction: Ernest Mancoba in London and Paris, 1938-1940.” Post: Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe. New York: The Museum of Modern Art

Research paper thumbnail of "Picasso and Primitive Art. Paris, Kansas City and Montreal." The Burlington Magazine CLIX (November 2017): 944-45.

Research paper thumbnail of "Un équiblibre décisif entre l’« éternel » et le moderne", trans. Jean-François Cornu. In André Derain, 1904-1914. La décennie radicale, ed. Cécile Debray, 91-92. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2017.

Research paper thumbnail of "Derain et « l’art primitif » ", trans. Jean-François Cornu. in André Derain, 1904-1914. La décennie radicale, ed. Cécile Debray, 129-33. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2017.

Research paper thumbnail of “Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern 'Primitivist' Uses of African and Oceanic Art, 1905-8.” The Art Bulletin 99, no. 2 (June 2017): 136-65.

Research paper thumbnail of "On Labels, Colonial Legacies, and the Current Crisis in African Art Studies"

African Arts, 2020

response to Yaëlle Biro & Susan Gagliardi, "Beyond Single Stories: Addressing Dynamism, Specifici... more response to Yaëlle Biro & Susan Gagliardi, "Beyond Single Stories:
Addressing Dynamism, Specificity, and Agency in Arts of Africa," African Arts 52, no. 4 (2019)

Research paper thumbnail of “Interroger le portrait dans la photographie de Mohamed Camara,” trans. Clara Pacquet, in Photographie et oralité. Dialogues à Bamako, Dakar et ailleurs, ed. Bärbel Küster and Clara Pacquet, 2017.

Research paper thumbnail of “The Play: Reassembling African Arts in the West,” in Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions, eds. Shelley Butler and Erica Lehrer, 127-140. Montreal; Kingston, Ont.: McGill-Queens University Press, 2016.

Research paper thumbnail of “Souleymane Keita: Traversées.” In Actes du colloque: Avant que la ‘magie’ n’opère : Modernités artistiques en Afrique, ed. Maureen Murphy and Nora Gréani. Paris: Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art; Histoire Culturelle et Sociale de l’Art (HiCSA), Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2017

http://hicsa.univ-paris1.fr/page.php?r=133&id=898&lang=fr

Research paper thumbnail of “Deux masques ivoiriens et La Guitare (1912) de Picasso.” In Actes du colloque: Picasso. Sculptures. Paris: Musée Picasso, 2017

Research paper thumbnail of Keita, Fodéba (1921-1969)

Research paper thumbnail of Stages in Transition: Les Ballets Africains and Independence, 1959-1960

Research paper thumbnail of Iba Ndiaye and Jean Laude, "Art, Signs, and Cultures" (1977)

ARTMargins 12, no. 2, 2023

This document, translated from the original French, is an edited transcript of a conversation bet... more This document, translated from the original French, is an edited transcript of a conversation between the Senegalese painter Iba Ndiaye and the French art historian Jean Laude. The conversation took place on the occasion of the Festival des Arts et Cultures Africaines in Royan, France, in March 1977. It was broadcast several months later, in August of the same year, on the radio channel France Culture. Iba Ndiaye (1928-2008; also written N'Diaye) was born in the cosmopolitan coastal city of Saint-Louis, one of Senegal's colonial-era Quatre Communes, and he therefore held French citizenship. He moved to Paris in 1948 to study architecture, and apart from a relatively short stint in Dakar (1960-67), he would live in France for the rest of his life. 1 During the period in Dakar, Ndiaye emerged as a major fi gure in post-independence Senegalese art, by helping establish Senegal's national art school, the École des Arts du Sénégal, and serving as the curator of Tendances et Confrontations (Trends and Confrontations), a landmark exhibition of contemporary art from Africa and the diaspora that was staged at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, in Dakar in 1966. Jean Laude (1922-83), meanwhile, began his career in 1946 as a 1 For a brief overview of the artist's life and career, see Joshua I.

Research paper thumbnail of Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn

ARTMargins, 2023

When taken as a conglomerate, the postcolonial, the global, and the decolonial might signal a coo... more When taken as a conglomerate, the postcolonial, the global, and the decolonial might signal a coordinated “decolonizing” action—one of breaking with the Eurocentric, patriarchal, and nationalist foundations of art history. Yet from a disaggregating perspective, these three terms and their respective domains cannot be seen as synonymous or entirely harmonious. What particularly demands scrutiny is the tendency to dismiss the postcolonial, or announce its demise, by claiming it has been superseded by other paradigms, namely the global and the decolonial. This introductory essay seeks to trace the postcolonial, global, and decolonial as they have intersected with scholarship in art history over the past five decades, and to challenge postcolonialism’s presumed obsolescence in the wake of the global turn. Postcolonial thought, we argue, has given rise to a generative series of critical interventions in art history at least since the 1970s and 1980s, and has proven to be nuanced and self-reflexive. Postcolonial lines of inquiry not only continue to offer ways of critically exploring colonial-era and subsequent artistic practices, but also allow for interrogations of formations of art and the discipline of art history as colonial forms of knowledge. As such, postcolonialism still vitalizes debates within the discipline regarding the constitution of its own objects, lineaments, and methods.

Research paper thumbnail of Exhibition review. VIIes Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie Bamako, Mali November 24

Research paper thumbnail of "Picasso, la Guerra Fría y la descolonización en África"

Picasso e historia, ed. Lebrero & Karmel; trans. María Luisa Balseiro, 2021

Research paper thumbnail of "Ndaanaan, Modou Niang

Africa in the UNESCO Art Collection, 2021

Research paper thumbnail of "African Socialist Cultural Policy: Senegal under Senghor"

Research paper thumbnail of "Harlem and Abroad: Notes to an International 'Renaissance'." Wasafiri 34, no. 3 (Autumn 2019): 37-48.

Research paper thumbnail of "Locating Senghor's École de Dakar: International and Transnational Dimensions to Senegalese Modern Art, c. 1959-1980."

Research paper thumbnail of “Identity and Abstraction: Ernest Mancoba in London and Paris, 1938-1940.” Post: Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe. New York: The Museum of Modern Art

Research paper thumbnail of "Picasso and Primitive Art. Paris, Kansas City and Montreal." The Burlington Magazine CLIX (November 2017): 944-45.

Research paper thumbnail of "Un équiblibre décisif entre l’« éternel » et le moderne", trans. Jean-François Cornu. In André Derain, 1904-1914. La décennie radicale, ed. Cécile Debray, 91-92. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2017.

Research paper thumbnail of "Derain et « l’art primitif » ", trans. Jean-François Cornu. in André Derain, 1904-1914. La décennie radicale, ed. Cécile Debray, 129-33. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2017.

Research paper thumbnail of “Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern 'Primitivist' Uses of African and Oceanic Art, 1905-8.” The Art Bulletin 99, no. 2 (June 2017): 136-65.

Research paper thumbnail of Introduction: Portraiture Beyond (Self)-Representation

The Expanded Subject: New Perspectives in Photographic Portraiture from Africa

Research paper thumbnail of Déborder la négritude. Arts, société, politique à Dakar. Mamadou Diouf et Maureen Murphy dir.

Une analyse collective de l'émergence du « contemporain » et des logiques transnationales et tran... more Une analyse collective de l'émergence du « contemporain » et des logiques transnationales et transhistoriques à l'œuvre dans les pratiques artistiques à Dakar face aux questions soulevées par la globalisation depuis les Indépendances, ouvrant de nouveaux territoires aux investigations tant sociologiques, économiques, politiques, qu'esthétiques.

Research paper thumbnail of The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020.

Reading African art’s impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The “Black Art” Renaiss... more Reading African art’s impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The “Black Art” Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde “discovery” of African sculpture—known then as art nègre, or “black art”—eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, “black art” evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the École de Dakar, African sculpture’s influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history’s alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The “Black Art” Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.

Research paper thumbnail of "Modern African art and apartheid"

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2020

review of Daniel Magaziner, The Art of Life in South Africa, 2016

Research paper thumbnail of Some Preliminary Responses to “Beyond Single Stories”

African Arts, 2020

First Round of Responses to the First Word "Beyond Single Stories" (Gagliardi and Biro, in Africa... more First Round of Responses to the First Word "Beyond Single Stories" (Gagliardi and Biro, in African Arts, Vol. 52, no. 4, Winter 2019, p. 1-6) by Leslie Wilson, John W. Monroe, Salia Malé and Marguerite de Sabran, Maxime de Formanoir, and Joshua I. Cohen, with a short intro by Gaglardi and Biro.