Renée Cox: Take A Good Look: 225 W 17th St, New York

Ethan Cohen Gallery is pleased to present Take A Good Look, a solo exhibition of Renée Cox at the gallery’s 225 W 17th Street location in Chelsea. Bringing together works from the early 1990s through the present, the exhibition traces more than three decades of Cox’s uncompromising approach to photography, self-representation, and the politics of the image. The exhibition opens in conjunction with Ethan Cohen Gallery’s solo presentation of Cox at The Armory Show in New York. 

Throughout her career, Cox has returned to a deceptively simple proposition: what changes when a Black woman places herself at the center of images from which she has historically been excluded? Cox has used her own body as both subject and instrument, inhabiting and remaking the visual languages of Western art history, Christianity, colonialism, popular culture, and national mythology. Her photographs are confrontational, but rarely only confrontational. They are also theatrical, formally exacting, humorous, sensual, and deeply invested in the possibility of making new images from inherited ones. 

Among the earliest works in the exhibition is the life-size diptych Origin (1993), in which Cox considers maternity through a Black female body presented at heroic scale. In one image, Cox stands holding her infant son; in the other, a nude male figure assumes the pose of Michelangelo’s marble David, holding a book aloft. Motherhood, masculinity, knowledge, and creation are brought into a visual exchange that already contains many of the questions Cox would pursue throughout her career. Rather than allowing the Black body to remain an object within someone else’s history, Cox gives it scale, authorship, and presence. 
 
Cox’s examination of motherhood continues in the American Family series. Bringing family snapshots and older family photographs into conversation with staged self-portraits, the series considers Cox’s roles as daughter, wife, mother, and artist while resisting the expectations traditionally attached to each. 

This act of repositioning becomes more explicit in works including Baby Back, Yo Mama’s Pietà, and Hottentot Venus. Cox draws upon images whose meanings seem settled and makes them unstable again. The odalisque, the mourning Virgin, and the colonial construction of the so-called “Hottentot Venus” each carry histories of desire, power, race, gender, and spectatorship. Cox enters these familiar compositions, placing her own body at the point where their histories are tested against another experience of beauty, sexuality, motherhood, strength, and self-possession. 

Cox’s landmark reinterpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper began with Black Panther Last Supper (1993), in which she recast the familiar biblical scene with Black figures. She returned to the composition in Yo Mama’s Last Supper (1996), a monumental five-panel work in which eleven Black men sit at the table, a white Judas among them, while Cox stands nude in the position of Christ, arms extended. For Cox, the gesture was grounded in a basic claim: that she possessed the same right to reinterpret a sacred image as the generations of artists who had done so before her. When the work was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 2001, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani publicly denounced it and proposed establishing a “decency panel” for museums receiving city funds. The controversy only sharpened the question already contained within the photograph: who is granted the authority to embody the sacred, and who decides what forms that embodiment may take? 

Cox’s engagement with history is equally personal. Born in Jamaica and raised in the United States, she returned to Jamaican history in her Queen Nanny of the Maroons series, taking as her subject the eighteenth-century leader of the Windward Maroons and one of Jamaica’s national heroes. Because few reliable visual records of Nanny survive, Cox uses her own body to give the historical figure a contemporary presence. Appearing variously as warrior, strategist, matriarch, and woman, Cox resists reducing Nanny to a single heroic archetype. Instead, history becomes something embodied and lived, carried forward through performance, memory, landscape, and the continued presence of the Maroon communities themselves. Cox devoted a 2005 solo exhibition at Robert Miller Gallery in New York to Queen Nanny of the Maroons.  

The exhibition also reaches into Cox’s more recent Soul Culture series, where the body is no longer staged primarily within a recognizable historical tableau. Instead, Cox multiplies, mirrors, and reorganizes the human figure into intricate, self-similar compositions informed by fractal geometry and patterns she connects to ancient African cultures. The body becomes architecture, ornament, symbol, and abstraction. Yet the underlying concerns remain continuous with her earlier work. Who controls the image? How does the body carry cultural memory? And what happens when representation is no longer treated as something received, but as something that can be dismantled and reconstructed? 

Across these bodies of work, Cox’s use of appropriation is never an act of reverence alone, nor is it simply parody. She understands that images acquire power through repetition. Religious paintings become sacred, art-historical compositions become canonical, stereotypes become familiar, and familiarity can begin to look like truth. Cox interrupts that process. Again and again, she takes an image whose hierarchy appears fixed and asks what happens when its positions are reassigned. 

That insistence has made Cox an important voice in contemporary photography and in larger conversations surrounding Black representation, feminism, authorship, and the body. Her work does not ask politely for admission into the canon. It proceeds from the understanding that the canon itself is available for use, argument, pleasure, criticism, and reinvention. What emerges across Take A Good Look is not a single image of Black womanhood, but an artist continually exercising the freedom to represent herself differently: as mother and Christ, odalisque and warrior, historical figure and abstract form, object of the gaze and author of it. 

Renée Cox (b. 1960, Colgate, Jamaica) is a Jamaican-American artist and photographer based in New York. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions including Revolution/Revelation at the Newport Art Museum; Renée Cox by Renée Cox at UTA Artist Space, Atlanta; Soul Culture at Hannah Traore Gallery, New York; and Queen Nanny of the Maroons at Robert Miller Gallery, New York. Her work is represented in numerous institutional collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Smithsonian, Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Princeton University Art Museum, National Gallery of Jamaica, Yale University, Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, and the Nasher Museum of Art.  

Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday from 11 am to 6 pm. 

Press Contacts: Lara Kamhi: lara@ecfa.com | Sacha Cohen: sacha@ecfa.com