18 Facts About Renee Cox

Renee Cox's work is considered part of the feminist art movement in the United States.

Renee Cox has done projects for Rush Art Gallery from its inception.

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

Renee Cox 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.

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

Renee Cox worked with Spike Lee, producing the poster for his 1988 film School Daze.

Renee Cox 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, Renee 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.

The modern "distortions" and elisions of Renee 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.

Renee 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 Renee Cox's reimagining of this historically iconic scene, she stood nude in the place of Jesus Christ and is surrounded by all black apostles, except for Judas, who is white.

In 2001, Renee Cox opened a show at the Robert Miller Gallery called American Family.

Later that year Renee Cox undertook another series of photographs, this one named for the Jamaican national heroine, Queen Nanny of the Maroons.

Renee Cox then exhibited the body of work in the Jamaican Biennial in 2007 where it won the Aaron Matalon Award.

Renee Cox continues to show her work as well as develop new projects as she is inspired.

Soul Culture for Renee Cox has marked her embrace of the digital world and her continued exploration of the human body as a site to engage viewers and evoke the practice of healthy and intersectional discourse.

In 2001, Yo Mama's Last Supper sparked an enormous controversy when Rudy Giuliani, then mayor of New York City, saw the work and proceeded to accuse Renee Cox of being anti-Catholic.

Renee Cox publicly responded to Giuliani's accusations by defending her first amendment right to portray herself as Christ.