Renee Cox Kicks Off Guild Hall's Summer Reopening with 'A Proof of Being'

Guild Hall in East Hampton is set to reopen following its recent gallery renovations, and this summer, there’s one major art show on the schedule — Renee Cox: A Proof of Being. Organized by curator Monique Long, the exhibition comprises select works from the artist’s extensive career, such as her Yo Mama series and photographs devoted to the only female national hero of Cox’s home country, Jamaica’s Queen Nanny. The show, on view July 2 through September 4, also features the New York premiere of the Soul Culture immersive video installation.

A Proof of Being is the culmination of two years of conversations between Renee Cox and Guild Hall. The initial thought was for Cox to curate a summer 2023 exhibition of Black artists — with the 2021 Ring the Alarm: A Conversation with Renee Cox series highlighting some of the featured artists — but the idea evolved into a solo show for the curator, a highly regarded visual artist and photographer in her own right.

The survey of Cox’s work intends to demonstrate her evolution as an artist through performative self-portraits. “That’s not to say that my evolution — or anybody’s evolution — is really singular and alone,” Cox clarifies. “You are also a reflection of the culture that you’re living in, and you know what’s happening around you, as well. But yes, it’s my evolution as an artist.”

In these large self-portraits, astute viewers will notice that while they’re staring at the Black figures carefully posed in a “poignant, visually seductive” manner, Cox is staring back.

“From the very beginning, with all of my work, it’s always been about flipping the stereotypes, changing how Black people are represented … and also to return the gaze,” she says. “The gaze is extremely important because there’s this whole thing of how bodies can be objectified, and they don’t have any sort of agency, and I wanted to bring that strength into my photographs. You’ll notice that every time I’m always looking directly back at the viewer. I don’t really cut them any slack in terms of like, ‘Oh, you can gaze upon me, but I’m off in space or something.’ I’m always returning it back to them, and for me, that’s a form of power that I can maintain within my photographs.”

Cox owes much of her artistic influences to her time at Syracuse University and studying abroad in Florence. While touring museums there and in Amsterdam, she came across a realization that would shape her vision.

“One thing you begin to notice is the grandeur and the scale that’s used in a lot of those oil paintings of the subjects,” she recalls. “And I said to myself, ‘I don’t see any paintings or photographs of Black folks that large, that imposing. … Wait a minute. I need to do that. I need to fill the void of those sort of images.’ So that’s when I was really interested in scale, and I still am, because we all know that in the world we live in, sometimes the bigger it is, the more people notice it.”

On the inverse of that, sometimes a smaller scale has more power to draw people in. Such is the case for the tiniest piece in A Proof of Being, “Yo Mama’s Pieta” (1994). The 4″ x 4″ print in a big mahogany frame displays a Black mother cradling her dead adult son, mirroring the image of the Bible’s virgin Mary holding the dead body of Jesus. “That image is small because with the horror the action, I wanted people to really have to go up and look at it closely,” Cox says.

One of the most provocative works in A Proof of Being is “The Signing” (2017), which takes the famous painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and reimagines the founding fathers as lavishly dressed men and women of color. The inspiration for this photo was none other than former President Donald Trump. “That came about because Trump was in power,” Cox explains. “I basically saw all the work that folks have been doing over the last 400 years falling apart and giving license to this underbelly of white supremacy. That’s when I decided, ‘Wait, I have to do something to try to turn this over or at least create a discourse that’s different than what’s being propagated at this point in time.’ It’s always a reaction.”

Having excelled in the art of photography for more than 30 years, Cox began to experiment with new technology in her Soul Culture line of work. Digitally manipulated portraits are used to create sculptural kaleidoscopes of the human body, engaging viewers in the mathematics of fractals. Guild Hall’s survey of her evolution would be incomplete without this uniquely immersive experience.

“It speaks to my own personal evolution — being me, understanding how to be happy, how to get out of my head, how to get out of my own way — it definitely took some time to get there,” Cox shares, adding that the enlightening audio books of Eckhart Tolle were instrumental in helping her escape a period of depression when she felt that her lack of an art retrospective or book deal might be a reflection of how the world sees her work.

“He said one thing that basically changed my life, which was: ‘Why are you waiting for the world to validate you?’ He then tells you how to go about getting out of your head and be the witness to those negative thoughts that are coming in through your ego-centric mind,” she continues. “Once you can do that — and you have to do them one at a time — what happens is it begins to create a space of ‘no thought,’ as the Buddhists call it, where all of those negative thoughts, they just sort of stop. They never go away, but they will subside if you treat them like that. And from that place, I swear, all creativity comes out of, because doing Soul Culture, doing fractals, thinking about sacred geometry and all of that stuff, you can’t do that unless you get out of your own way.”

Cox’s current outlook on life as an artist at age 62 is that it’s a “privilege” she greatly enjoys and a career from which she has no intention of retiring. “You just keep going until you drop dead, and that’s kind of a beautiful thing,” she says. “It is a great honor, and I’m very happy that I believed in myself enough to be able to carry it out.”

For more info about Renee Cox: A Proof of Being and associated events at Guild Hall, visit guildhall.org.