Artist: Renee Cox
Title: Derrick Adams
Year created: 2014
Medium: Archival Cotton Digital Print
Signed by the artist
Height (inches): 44. Width (inches): 44
This piece is unframed
Artist bio: One of the most controversial African-American artists working today, Renee Cox has used her own body, both nude and clothed to celebrate black womanhood and criticize a society she often views as racist and sexist. From the very beginning, her work showed a deep concern for social issues and employed disturbing religious imagery. In It Shall be Named (1994), a black man's distorted body made up of eleven separate photographs hangs from a cross, as much resembling a lynched man as the crucified Christ. In her first one-woman show at a New York gallery in 1998, Cox made herself the center of attention. Dressed in the colorful garb of a black superhero named Raje, Cox appeared in a series of large, color photographs. In the most pointed picture, entitled The Liberation of UB and Lady J, Cox's Raje rescued the black stereotyped advertising figures of Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima from their product labels.
In the series Flipping the Script, Cox took a number of European religious masterpieces, including Michelangelo's David and The Pieta, and reinterpreted them with contemporary black figures. "...Christianity is big in the African-American community, but there are no representations of us," she said. "I took it upon myself to include people of color in these classic scenarios." The photograph that created the most controversy when it was shown in a black photography exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City in 2001 was Yo Mama's Last Supper. It was a remake of Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper with a nude Cox siting in for Jesus Christ, surrounded by all black disciples, except for Judas who was white. Cox continues to push the envelope with her work by using new technologies that the digital medium of photography has to offer.
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