Renée Cox: Take A Good Look: The KuBe Art Center, Beacon, NY

Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KuBe Art Center is pleased to present Take A Good Look a focused solo exhibition of Renée Cox examining the artist's sustained reimagining of canonical images from Western art and American history. Across major works spanning 2001 to 2018, Cox inserts Black subjects into visual traditions from which they have historically been excluded, transforming familiar images into propositions about authorship, power, representation, and belonging.

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.

The presentation is anchored by The Signing (2018), Cox's monumental reimagining of Howard Chandler Christy's depiction of the signing of the United States Constitution, replacing its assembly of white male founders with a multigenerational gathering of Black figures. Similarly confronting the Western canon,  Olympia's Boyz and Cousins at Pussy's Pond (both 2001), engage Édouard Manet and the history of modern painting. Together, these works demonstrate Cox's use of photography not simply to critique inherited images, but to inhabit and reconstruct them, asserting Black presence within the histories those images have helped define.

This exhibition follows Renée Cox’s solo exhibition Ethan Cohen Gallery in New York City and its solo presentation of Cox at The Armory Show in New York.

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.

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