Those interested in art and its power to raise political awareness will want to be part of the audience Saturday when the University of Michigan Penny Stamps Speaker Series presents: “Meleko Mokgosi, Pan-African Pulp.

The lecture and presentation are Saturday, Sept. 21, in the Helmut Stern Auditorium in the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The program begins at 7:30 p.m. and features a presentation by artist Meleko Mokgosi, a Botswana-born artist and Yale School of Art associate professor.

The program is in conjunction with the current UMMA exhibiton, Pan-African Pulp: A Commission by Meleko Mokgosi.

Details from University of Michigan Museum of Art:

For his UMMA commission, Botswana-born artist Meleko Mokgosi explores the history of Pan-Africanism, the global movement to unite ethnic groups of sub-Saharan African descent. Entitled Pan-African Pulp, the exhibition features large-scale panels inspired by African photo novels of the 1960s and ’70s, a mural examining the complexity of blackness, posters from Pan-African movements founded in Detroit and Africa in the 1960s, and stories from Setswana literature.

Meleko Mokgosi is an artist, and an associate professor in painting and printmaking at The Yale School of Art. By working across history painting, cinematic tropes, psychoanalysis, and post-colonial theory, Mokgosi creates large-scale project-based installations that interrogate narrative tropes and the fundamental models for the inscription and transmission of history. His artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Botswana National Gallery, The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, The University of Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery, Williams College Museum of Art, The Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Lead support is provided by Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch. Additional generous support is provided by the University of Michigan African Studies Center.

The images are courtesy of the artist via UMMA.