Renee Cox (b. 1960, Colgate, Jamaica; lives in New York) creates photographs, collages, and installations that draw on art history, fashion photography, and popular culture. Her work presents a critical view of female sexuality, beauty, power, and heroism through the use of nudity, religious imagery, and symbolism, which inform her interdisciplinary approach. She is renowned for her larger-than-life photographs of female bodies and her reexamination of the Black female figure within the context of power structures. Inspired by various artistic periods and styles, her works reimagine art history, ranging from the Italian Renaissance, including Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, to Cubism (Picasso), Modernism (Édouard Manet), and traditional West African art (Dogon, Mali, and the Cross River region of Nigeria).

Cox employs a blend of photographic styles reminiscent of fashion photographer Richard Avedon and German portrait photographer August Sander, as well as practices from the Harlem Renaissance, influenced by James Van Der Zee and Gordon Parks. Her work also draws on the ritualistic three-dimensional sculptural collages of Betye Saar. Cox's art celebrates the diversity of the Black female body and challenges perceptions of women concerning time, place, and the nuanced spaces between representation and reality.

Renee Cox received her BA from Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY) and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts (New York, NY). She participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (New York, NY). Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at prominent institutions, including Tate Liverpool (Liverpool, UK), The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, NY), Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), among others. She has received several awards, including the Artists Fellowship Award from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony Fellowship (Petersborough, NY), and the Aaron Matalon Award from The National Gallery of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica).

Cox is an associate professor at Columbia University and has lectured at Yale School of Art (New Haven, CT), New York University (New York, NY), and Parsons School of Design (New York, NY), among others. She lives and works in Manhattan and Amagansett with her husband and their dog, Domino.

‍

‍