Renee Cox

Renée Cox (born October 16, 1960, in Colgate, Jamaica) is a Jamaican-American artist, photographer, filmmaker, activist, curator, and educator whose work challenges historical representations of Black people, particularly Black women, across Western art, religion, popular culture, and mass media. Working primarily through staged photography, self-portraiture, video, and digital image-making, Cox places the Black female body at the center of narratives from which it has historically been marginalized or excluded. Her images confront racism, sexism, colonialism, beauty standards, motherhood, sexuality, religion, and cultural power while proposing affirmative forms of Black self-representation.  Born in Jamaica and raised in Scarsdale, New York, Cox initially studied film at Syracuse University before establishing herself as a commercial and fashion photographer. She worked in New York and Paris, photographing for publications including Glamour, Essence, Votre Beauté, and Vogue Homme, as well as designers including Issey Miyake and Claude Montana. In the early 1990s, she increasingly turned toward fine-art photography, earning an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1992 and participating in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1992–1993.  Cox frequently uses her own body as both subject and instrument of critique. Her Yo Mama series reimagines motherhood through monumental self-portraiture, while Rajé transforms Cox into a Black female superhero who confronts racist stereotypes. In works such as Yo Mama’s Last Supper, she reconfigures canonical religious imagery by occupying the position traditionally reserved for Christ, and in Queen Nanny of the Maroons she embodies Jamaica’s legendary Maroon leader to engage histories of anti-colonial resistance, Black sovereignty, and diasporic memory. Her 2017 photograph The Signing reimagines Howard Chandler Christy’s painting of the signing of the U.S. Constitution by replacing the white male Founding Fathers with contemporary women and men of color.