Project Description

Meleko Mokgosi’s platform level station artwork will recognize everyday people who work in Beverly Hills. The artwork will celebrate both the important work of historic labor leaders who fought for worker’s rights, and contemporary workers. In his large scale, cinematic style Mokgosi portrays Beverly Hills workers in their workday attire and uniforms, juxtaposed with images of the same people in a context of their choosing, telling the story of their personal as well as professional life. Riders will be able to relate to different aspects of these portraits of people at work and at leisure.

Artist Statement

“The history of art is such that the images and paintings we see in museums tend to be of people with wealth and privilege, and it is for this reason that I hope my work makes an intervention here.”

About the Artist

MELEKO MOKGOSI (b. 1981, Francistown, Botswana) creates large-scale, figurative, and often text-based works that engage history painting and cinematic tropes to examine colonialism, democracy, and liberation movements across African histories. Mokgosi earned a Bachelor of Arts from Williams College in 2007 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2011. He is currently an associate professor and director of graduate studies at the Yale School of Art, as well as director of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program, New York. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami; Williams College Museum of Art, Massachusetts; Baltimore Museum of Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; Hammer Museum at UCLA; and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, among other institutions.