Renée Cox

1960—

Photographer

American fine art photographer Renée Cox uses herself and other black figures as subjects in works that subvert stereotypes of popular culture, religious symbolism, and classical art. Cox has photographed herself in various guises, including a comic-book-style superhero she calls Raje as well as Jesus Christ and Queen Nanny, the legendary leader of an eighteenth-century Caribbean slave revolt. Her work is often compared to that of another photographic artist, Cindy Sherman, who also re-creates herself via the self-portrait. Critics have not always been kind to Cox, finding her usually nude imagery unsettling and judging her art a vanity project. "It's interesting that Caucasian women like Cindy Sherman are using themselves and no one is calling them narcissistic," Cox commented to Karen Croft in an interview that appeared on the Web site Salon.com. "It's like they have that right. As an African-American woman, somehow it's offensive when I do it."

Cox is a native of Jamaica, where she was born on October 16, 1960. A few months later, her family moved to the United States, settling first in the New York City borough of Queens, where she attended Roman Catholic schools. She was an aspiring film-maker by the time she entered middle school, shooting her own short movies on an 8-millimeter camera. About the time she entered high school, her family moved to the affluent suburban New York City enclave of Scarsdale, where theirs was one of just a few black households in the neighborhood.

Spent Decade in Fashion Industry

At Syracuse University Cox was a film studies major but found herself drawn to photography because of its more immediate results. After graduation she worked at Glamour magazine as an assistant fashion editor, then moved to Paris to begin her career as a fashion photographer. She spent several years working there and eventually established herself in New York City, too, amassing a long list of credits that included Essence and Cosmopolitan magazines as well as the poster for the 1988 film School Daze.

In the early 1990s Cox enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in New York City, from which she earned a graduate degree in photography in 1992. Following that, she won a coveted spot in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. In early 1994 she was one of several up-and-coming artists to show their work at the Artists Space in SoHo, and some of the first photographs of hers to attract critical attention were of herself nude and pregnant with her first son. She also began a series of images she grouped under the heading Flipping the Script, which reworked familiar scenes from classical art, such as Michelangelo's statue of David, but with Cox as the model. It was her nudity in these ironic images that seemed to provoke the most commentary. Cox told Croft, "The thing is, here in America, it still is a very puritanical state of mind going on and when people … see something that is nude, somehow they react that it's obscene. I say you should refer back to Greek antiquities. The Met is full of naked Greek statues and no one is upset about that."

Self-portraiture dominated Cox's first solo gallery exhibition in New York, which was held at the Cristinerose Gallery in 1998. Titled Raje: A Superhero: The Beginning of a Bold New Era, the show featured images of Cox as a larger-than-life superhero figure. One image was titled "The Liberation of UB and Lady J," and featured the Wonder Woman-like Raje character "freeing" Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima. Both brand icons had become emblematic of the racial stereotyping in American advertising before the civil rights era but were still used by food companies.

Defended Controversial Works

In 2001 a group exhibition opened at the Brooklyn Museum called Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers. What would prove to be Cox's most controversial work from her Flipping the Script series, "Yo Mama's Last Supper," was included in the show. It was a fifteen-foot-wide photographic rendering of the The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the most famous works of Christian religious art. Cox herself is at the center, as a nude Christ, and the twelve disciples are black men, with the exception of the one who betrayed Christ, Judas, who is white. The local Roman Catholic community objected strongly to the work, with the watchdog group the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights publicizing the controversy on a national level.

The League secured a powerful ally in New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who stated in the press that he found Cox's work "disgusting" and "outrageous" according to a New York Times report by Elisabeth Bumiller. The mayor asserted that he planned to look into the possibility of establishing a "decency standards" commission. Its panel, he claimed, would pass judgment on any piece of art slated to be shown in a New York City museum that was supported by public funds—which included nearly every museum in the city. Asked for her response, Cox said the mayor needed to "get over it," according to the New York Times article, and the idea of an art-censoring commission was quietly shelved.

At a Glance …

Born October 16, 1960, in Colgate, Jamaica; immigrated to the United States, c. 1961; married; children: two sons. Education: Graduated from Syracuse University with a film studies degree, c. 1982; School of Visual Arts, New York City, MFA, 1992; studied under Mary Kelley and Ron Clark, Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.

Career: Glamour magazine, assistant fashion editor; worked as a fashion photographer in Paris, France, and in New York City, 1980s; fashion photography credits include designers Issey Miyake and Claude Montana, and magazines Cosmopolitan, Essence, Mademoiselle, Seventeen, Votre Beaute, and Vogue Homme; first group exhibition as fine art photographer was Artists "Select" Part I, Artists Space, 1994; first solo show in New York City, Raje: A Superhero: The Beginning of a Bold New Era, Cristinerose Gallery, 1998; other solo exhibitions include American Family, 2001, and Queen Nanny of the Maroons, 2005, both at the Robert Miller Gallery, New York City; works selected for inclusion in the museum shows Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers, Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2001; Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery, New York Historical Society, 2006; and the Jamaica Biennial, 2006. New York University, adjunct professor of photography, 2001—; also curator of group exhibition No Doubt: African-American Art of the 90s, Aldrich Museum of Art, Ridgefield, CT, 1996.

Awards: Chrysalis Award, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts.

Addresses: Gallery—Robert Miller Gallery, 524 West 26th St., New York, NY 10001.

In 2002 Cox had her second solo exhibit in New York City, this time at the Robert Miller Gallery. The images in American Family included a portrait of her white husband's parents wearing traditional African textiles and titled "Colonization of White People/The In-Laws." Another showed the late Amadou Diallo, a twenty-three-year-old New York City man shot forty- one times by police in 1999 as the Christian martyr St. Sebastian. "A majority of these works are aggressive, technically well executed and correct in the assumption that the subjectivity and sexuality of black women rarely figure in the work of artists who are white, male or otherwise engaged," wrote Roberta Smith in the New York Times of the show.

Turned to Jamaican Subjects

Cox's next major series debuted at the Miller Gallery in 2005. Headlined Queen Nanny of the Maroons, the collection of portraits showed Cox as a famous figure from Jamaican history, the folkloric Queen Nanny, who fomented slave rebellions against British colonial authorities on the island in the 1720s. Some works from this series were included in the 2006 Jamaica Biennial, and Cox spoke to the director of the National Gallery of Jamaica, Jonathan Greenland, about her interest in the subject in an article that appeared in the Jamaica Gleaner. She noted that she returned to Jamaica to attend school briefly as a ten-year-old, and first learned of the mythic Queen Nanny, who headed a community of runaway slaves called the Jamaican Maroons. The Maroons fought a long guerrilla war against the British from their hideout in the Blue Mountains. These and other national heroes, she told Greenland, "left a mark on me even back then…. In about 2001, I started thinking that I wanted to do my next artistic project down in Jamaica. And I wanted to do something on Queen Nanny. She was very appealing to me because of her character, her ingenuity and her stamina."

Cox lives with her family in Chappaqua, New York, not far from the Scarsdale community where she grew up. In the Jamaica Gleaner interview, Greenland asked her if she ever thought about returning to Jamaica permanently, and she revealed that in her research for the Queen Nanny project, she met descendants of the original Maroons, some of whom still live in the Blue Mountains. One of them "told me they would sell me land up there! And this is something that is not offered to everybody. If I had the funds—and a helicopter—I would definitely live up there," she told Greenland. "You feel the spirit in the land—I don't want to sound like a crazy person, but you really do feel it…. It's in the hills—she is no myth, she is real."

Sources

Periodicals

New York Times, February 16, 2001, p. A1; February 17, 2001, p. B3; November 2, 2001, p. E40; June 20, 2006, p. E1.

Online

"Channelling Nanny of the Maroons," Jamaica Gleaner, February 11, 2007, http://www.jamaicagleaner.com/gleaner/20070211/arts/arts2.html (accessed March 5, 2008).

Croft, Karen, "Using Her Body," Salon.com, February 22, 2001, http://archive.salon.com/sex/feature/2001/02/22/renee_cox/index.html?source=search&aim=/sex/feature (accessed March 5, 2008).

Renée Cox,http://www.Reneecox.net/ (accessed February 22, 2008).

—Carol Brennan