Renee Cox
American photographer (born 1960)
Renee Cox (born October 16, 1960) is a Jamaican-American artist, photographer, lecturer, political activist and curator. Her work is considered part of the feminist art movement in the United States. Among the best known of her provocative works are Queen Nanny of the Maroons, Raje and Yo Mama's Last Supper, which exemplify her Black Feminist politics. In addition, her work has provoked conversations at the intersections of cultural work, activism, gender, and African Studies. As a specialist in film and digital portraiture, Cox uses light, form, digital technology, and her own signature style to capture the identities and beauty within her subjects and herself.
Background
Cox has "dedicated her career to deconstructing stereotypes and to reconfiguring the black woman's body, using her nude form as a subject." She uses herself as a primary model in order to promote an idea of "self-love" as articulated by bell hooks in her book Sisters of the Yam, because Cox has stated in interviews- like the Annual Rothschild Lecture- that slavery stripped Black men and women of their dignity and identity, and that its legacy continues to affect the African American psyche. One of Cox's main motivations has always been to create new, positive visual representations of African Americans. In her article, "A Gynocentric Aesthetic", Cox argues that a shift to matriarchal art will transform aesthetic expressions to interact with daily life and society, rather than compartmentalized artistic discussions that emphasize beauty over process and expression.
Greg Tate, writer for The Village Voice, wrote: "(Renee's) her own heroine. She's very much about using the work as a platform for self-love.
“Renee Cox” enters the record as american photographer (born 1960). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Renee, American and photographer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7313833. VIAF identifies the subject as 22055070. The Library of Congress control number is nr98016922. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960.
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This entry incorporates text from “Renee Cox” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.