Renee Cox, Yo Mama's Pieta, 1994.
The Jamaican American photographer Renee Cox spent three decades waiting for canonization. But as she sat in the midst of her new show, “Proof of Being,” at Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York, she had already let that all go. It was a personal transformation spurred by a breakdown in Indonesia.
A few years back, Cox, who is based in Manhattan, had visited Bali for vacation, staying at a newly opened villa. She had a butler; the space itself was beautiful. She should’ve been enjoying herself, but she couldn’t.
“I was going crazy. I was like, ‘I’m being written out of the canon, I don’t have a retrospective, a book. Why don’t I have this and why don’t I have that?'” Cox said. “If there was a gun in the room, I probably would have shot myself in that moment. But fortunately, there wasn’t.”
In the midst of her episode, she put on an audiobook, Eckhart Tolle’s Living the Liberated Life and Dealing with the Pain-Body. Listening to the slow-talking German spiritual leader, she gradually calmed down. “He said, ‘Why are you waiting for the world to validate you?’ And I was like, ‘Oh my god, he’s talking directly to me.”
It’s difficult to imagine how a woman like Cox could feel insecure. She spent the ’80s and ’90s in Paris at the center of the fashion world, shooting editorials for the glossy magazines. When she decided to leave fashion and start producing her own photography, she landed her work in exhibitions at the Tate, the Nasher, and the Studio Museum of Harlem.
Her lavishly produced photographs give visual language to previously unseen histories. Cox has described her piece The Signing (2017), which reimagines the signing of the Declaration of Independence with an all-Black cast, an example of Afrofuturism, whereas works like David (1993) function differently, as a means of flipping the script of art history by replacing a white David with a Black one and switching out David’s weapon with a copy of Cheikh Anta Diop’s 1974 book The African Origins of Civilization. Now Cox’s work has taken a different direction, as she stretches and cuts out old photographs to create psychedelic collage pieces, the product of her newfound spiritual awakening.
“Renee is charismatic with a capital C,” said Monique Long, who curated the show at Guild Hall. “She has so many stories and this matter-of-fact approach about motherhood and how it manifests in women artists and their work.”
It’s Cox’s work on Black motherhood that proven particularly enduring, yet her children were often perceived as a roadblock to her career. When she attended the Whitney Independent Study Program after receiving her MFA from SVA in 1992, she was pregnant. It was the first time the program had had a pregnant student, according to Cox.
“The people there were like, ‘You’re pregnant? Oh, my God, what are you going to do?'” said Cox. “And I’m like, ‘Wait, is there like some like 15-year-old here who got knocked up? No, this is my second child, I have a husband, we planned this.'”
Cox had left the world of fashion hoping to tap into a scene she viewed as being more intellectual and political, but she had found that in some ways the art world was more regressive.
“At least in the fashion world, people would joke, ‘Just don’t break your water or my shoes,’ things like that,” said Cox, recalling that when she had her first child, she would bring her nanny to shoots and take breastfeeding breaks without batting an eye. Cox believed that her children were part of her journey, not obstacles along the way.
Accordingly, Long was sure to feature pieces with Cox’s children alongside other key pieces. Out of a gallery full of large-scale works, it’s the 4 by 4 inch piece Yo Mama’s Pieta (1994) that sucks in all the gravity from the room. It’s a tiny photograph of Cox cradling a model in the pose of the Virgin Mary holding her own dead child after the crucifixion. The photo takes on a continuous, depressing relevance each time another Black child is shot by the police.
It was this piece in particular that cinched her show at Guild Hall, which is opening its doors for the first time this Saturday after a year of renovations. Melanie Crader, the newly appointed director of visual arts, said that it was timeless works like Yo Mama’s Pieta that convinced Guild Hall to do a show with Cox.
“Her work, whether it was made 30 years or today, is always resonant,” said Crader. “She was long overdue for a museum show out here.”
