Coco Fusco

Coco Fusco (born Juliana Emilia Fusco Miyares; June 18, 1960) is a Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work has been exhibited and published internationally.

Fusco's work explores gender, identity, race, and power through performance, video, interactive installations, and critical writing.

Fusco was born in 1960 in New York City.

Her mother was a Cuban exile who had fled the Cuban revolution that year.

Fusco received a B.A in Semiotics from Brown University in 1982, an M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 1985 and a Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University in 2007.

After finishing graduate school in 1985, Fusco met a group of Cuban artists, including José Bedia, who were visiting the US.

She began traveling to Cuba and participating in the visual arts scene there, until in the mid-1990s she withdrew as a result of post-Cold War political and cultural changes in the country.

Fusco has presented performances and videos in arts festivals worldwide, including the 56th Venice Biennale, three Whitney Biennials (2021, 2008, 1993), the Next Wave Festival at BAM, and Performa05.

In 1992 Fusco created the influential performance piece Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West in collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

It was first presented at the Plaza Colón in Madrid and Covent Garden in London, then toured to the Australian Museum in Sydney and the Museum of Natural History in New York City.

The performance was filmed as part of the documentary The Couple in the Cage, directed by Paula Heredia.

During performances of Two Undiscovered Amerindians..., Fusco and Gómez-Peña put themselves on public display in a cage, in a satirical reference to the historical practice of exhibiting human beings as entertainment.

They claimed to be natives of an undiscovered island in the Gulf of Mexico, and performed tasks and rituals that were explained by pseudoscientific informational materials posted as part of the performance piece.

Audience members were invited to interact with them and could pay to take a photo or see them dance.

The work was a critique of colonialism, specifically of the role played by the scientific institutions in which it was performed, and a response to the global quincentenary celebrations of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas.

As a writer, Coco Fusco has focused on gender, race, colonialism, and power structures in Latin America and around the world.

Her body of work includes interviews, critical essays, and six published books.

English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) was her first collection of interviews and essays, for which she won the 1995 Critics' Choice award.

Fusco has taught on the arts faculties of Temple University, Columbia University, Parsons School of Design, and MIT.

Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (2000) is a scholarly work surveying Latinx and Latin American performance art.

In it, Fusco centers the aesthetic and cultural value of artistic expression and works against notions of reducing Latin American performance to "the political".

The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001) is a collection of essays and interviews investigating the legacy of colonialism.

Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003, edited with Brian Wallis), is the catalogue for a photography exhibition of the same name, curated by Fusco and Wallis at the International Center of Photography, which looked at racial imagery in photography and the representation of racial attitudes in the United States.

A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008), a companion volume to her performance A Room of One's Own: Women and Power in the New America (2005), examines the sexualized role of women in US military interrogations.

A Field Guide for Female Interrogators was shortlisted for the Index on Censorship T. R. Fyvel Book Award.

In 2014 she received a Fulbright appointment and served as the Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado in São Paulo, Brazil for one year.

Fusco currently serves as the Andrew Banks Endowed Chair at the College of the Arts at University of Florida.

Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015) is a history of public space, performance, and identity in Cuba.

She is the recipient of the 2016 Greenfield Prize in Visual Art, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship, and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, as well as grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the NEA and NYFA.

Much of Fusco's interdisciplinary art practice over the last several decades has been concerned with the themes of colonialism, power, race, gender, and history.

Her exploration of these themes has culminated in staged performances that concern the embodied experiences of these phenomena, in an effort to destabilize their meanings.

She locates her own body not only as the site of their merging but also as their immediate product.

She presents and communicates this through her actual performances themselves.

In them, she creates and takes on multiple identities to destabilize those identities that have been historically imposed on bodies along colonial, racial, and gendered lines.

Fusco also engages with legacies of Cuban exile in her work, as in some of her earlier performances where she stages Catholic rituals and experiences of dislocation.

Fusco a recipient of a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism.

Coco Fusco works distributed by the Video Data Bank include:

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