ALISA SWINDELL, Associate Curator of Photography
Renee Cox was born in Jamaica before her family relocated to New York when she was a child. Cox received her BA from Syracuse University and MFA from the School of the Visual Arts. After earning her undergraduate degree, she worked as a professional fashion photographer while developing her artistic practice in the 1990s. Cox says she was "always interested in the visual." Her engagement with social issues—particularly those related to gender and race—has also been apparent since early in her career: in her first solo exhibition, in 1998 at Cristinerose Gallery, she presented photographs of herself as a superhero leading a crusade to overturn stereotypes.
In much of her practice, Cox creates photographs that center Black people, and especially Black women, in tableaus often based on Western religious or mythological imagery. Her restaging of this familiar imagery calls into question who has been reified, glamorized, or honored in visual art. Cox also often uses herself as the central figure in these works. The Yo' Mama series, produced throughout the 1990s, moves on to examine areas other than motherhood. This chapter series was conceived in 1992 while Cox was participating in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program and completed in 1994. Cox was the first attendee of the program to be pregnant while attending, and through it she chose to produce work that celebrates the power of motherhood. Yo' Mama at Home (1992) is the first work from this version of the series.
This black-and-white self- portrait draws upon a fashion aesthetic she brought from derogatory her earlier professional photography. Cox sits on a wooden bench in a sparsely decorated room in what the title suggests is her home. She is nude, wearing only a bracelet and a head-wrap around her locs. Her arms are spread across the back of the seat, her hair rising before a dark, abstract painting, and her legs are slightly parted with her feet planted solidly on the floor. Her belly and breast are full and swollen, as she is also heavily pregnant. This fecundity is central to the image. Cox was quoted in Aperture as saying about the photograph, "I decided to give you pregnancy in your face—and that's what I did."
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