Renee Cox – Sacred Geometry

National Gallery West is featuring a new series of photographs and a video by Renee Cox, titled Sacred Geometry, and shown as part of the 2014 Jamaica Biennial. Renee Cox is a New York-based photographer and mixed media artist who is known for her seminal and at times controversial presentation of Afrofuturistic photography to the art world. She has also worked as a fashion photographer in Paris and New York. Cox was born in Jamaica and moved to New York where she received a degree in Film Studies at Syracuse University. She has been featured in many museum exhibitions including the Spelman Museum of Fine Art (2013), the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art (2008), the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke (2006), the Brooklyn Museum (2001), the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Boston (1996), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1993), to name a few. Cox’s work was recently featured in the book and exhibition Pictures from Paradise: A Survey of Contemporary Carribean Photography, the exhibition as part of the Contact Photography Festival 2014 in Toronto, Canada.

Renee Cox – from the Sacred Geometry series

Finding the inspiration for her work from her own life experiences, Renee Cox has used her own body in her photographs to represent her criticisms of society and to celebrate and empower women. Arguably her best known work is Yo Mama’s Last Supper, in which she recreated Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper by featuring her nude self, sitting in for Jesus Christ and surrounded by all black disciples. When shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 2001, Yo Mama’s Last Supper incurred the wrath of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and religious leaders in New York City but the work is now regarded as a classic example of contemporary photography and it has been referenced in scholarly publications and lectures around the world.

Renee Cox at the opening of Sacred Geometry, December 12, 2014, National Gallery West