Renee Cox

Renee Cox (born October 16, 1960) is a Jamaican-American artist, photographer, lecturer, political activist and curator.

Her work is considered part of the feminist art movement in the United States.

Among the best known of her provocative works are Queen Nanny of the Maroons, Raje and Yo Mama's Last Supper, which exemplify her Black Feminist politics.

In addition, her work has provoked conversations at the intersections of cultural work, activism, gender, and African Studies.

As a specialist in film and digital portraiture, Cox uses light, form, digital technology, and her own signature style to capture the identities and beauty within her subjects and herself.

Cox has "dedicated her career to deconstructing stereotypes and to reconfiguring the black woman's body, using her nude form as a subject."

She uses herself as a primary model in order to promote an idea of "self-love" as articulated by Bell hooks in her book Sisters of the Yam, because as Cox writes in an artist's statement, "slavery stripped black men and women of their dignity and identity and that history continues to have an adverse affect [sic] on the African American psyche."

One of Cox's main motivations has always been to create new, positive visual representations of African Americans.

In her article, "A Gynocentric Aesthetic", Cox argues that a shift to matriarchal art will transform aesthetic expressions to interact with daily life and society, rather than compartmentalized artistic discussions that emphasize beauty over process and expression.

Greg Tate, writer for The Village Voice, wrote: "(Renee's) her own heroine. She's very much about using the work as a platform for self-love. And she's clearly having fun in her role playing. It's a very New York attitude: 'Yeah, so what? I'm Jesus. I'm Wonder Woman."

In addition to making art, Cox has curated and acted.

She has done projects for Rush Art Gallery from its inception.

She also worked with Spike Lee, producing the poster for his 1988 film School Daze.

In the early 1990s, inspired by the birth of her first son, Cox decided to focus primarily on fine art photography.

She received her Master of Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York and subsequently spent a year working with Mary Kelly and Ron Clark in the Whitney Independent Study Program.

In 1994, Cox exhibited her piece It Shall Be Named in the show Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, curated by Thelma Golden at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

In 1995, Cox, Fo Wilson, and Tony Cokes created the Negro Art Collective (NAC) to fight cultural misrepresentations about Black Americans.

The collective, working with Creative Time and Gee Street Records, created a poster campaign to challenge and provoke preconceived notions about race, crime and poverty.

"As far as representation, we have to take it back," Cox explained to the Daily News. The NAC appropriated a quote from scholar Charles Murray and added their commentary so as to appropriate the quote for their purposes.

The idea was to present viewers with real information, which flies in the face of what Americans are taught to believe.

The 24 by 36 inch posters read: "Surprise, Surprise, 'in raw numbers, European-American whites are the ethnic group with the most people in poverty, most illegitimate children, most people on welfare, most unemployed men, and most arrests for serious crimes.' Surprised."

The posters ran in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Los Angeles.

The project was originally inspired by Cox's five-year-old son who had asked her one day: "Why are all black people bad?"

Soon after, Cox created her Raje alter-ego, a superhero who fights racism and teaches children African-American history.

In 1996 she curated an exhibition entitled No Doubt at the Aldrich Museum of Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut and she co-starred in Bridgett Davis' independent film Naked Acts, where she portrayed a photographer.

As a student at Syracuse University, Cox majored in film studies.

After graduating, she decided to devote her energy to the realm of still photography.

She began as an assistant fashion editor at Glamour Magazine and then moved to Paris to pursue a career as a fashion photographer.

She spent three years working in Paris, shooting for magazines including Votre Beaute and Vogue Homme and for designers Issey Miyake and Claude Montana, among others.

Cox then returned to New York City, where she continued to work as a fashion photographer for ten years.

Among her clients were editorial magazines such as Essence, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle, and Seventeen.

In 1998 the body of work was featured in a Fin de Siècle art festival in Nantes, France.

Nantes was historically the last stop on the slave trade, before the ships were to return to Africa to pick up their human cargo.

The photographs were installed on billboards all over the city.

In 1999, Cox's work was shown in the Venice Biennale, in the Oratorio di S. Ludovico, a 17th-century Catholic church, where her piece Yo Mama's Last Supper a contemporary re-imagining of Leonardo da Vinci's classic, was first shown.

A review of the show published in Art in America described the work as referring "back to traditional art forms—in this case, the shaped crucifixes of 13th and 14th century Italy—with deep solemnity. The modern "distortions" and elisions of Cox's representation interact with the reference to iconic martyrdom to evoke the terrible history of lynchings, beatings and emasculation visited on the bodies of black men in this country."

That same year, Cox's seven-foot nude self-portrait Yo Mama was included in the Bad Girls show curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum.

Cox was the first woman ever to be pregnant during the Whitney Independent Study Program, pregnant at the time with her second son, which motivated her to create the Yo Mama character and series of photographs.

In the photograph Cox stands nude, wearing black high heels, brandishing her older son as if he were a weapon.

In Yo Mama and the Statue, Cox critiques race and gender issues, whilst attempting to "reconcile her persona as a pregnant black woman artist with the white male convention of museum study and classical statuary."