Coco Fusco
(born 1960, New York, New York; lives and works in New York, New York)
Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose practice includes video, photography, and performance. She also serves as Director of Intermedia Initiatives at Parsons The New School for Design and has written widely on gender-based conflict, migration, and colonization. Fusco has staged numerous multi-media productions incorporating large-scale projections, web-based streaming, closed-circuit television, and audience interaction. For her, the question of how a performance is recorded is inextricable from the performance itself.
In her video a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert (2004), Fusco imagines and stages surveillance footage of the FBI search for Angela Davis—in which hundreds of black women were wrongly detained or arrested before Davis herself was brought to trial, then ultimately acquitted. Fusco’s video mimics the look of surveillance footage, presenting mug shots of random black women mistaken for Angela Davis. Yet in its fictional imaginings, a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert also invents documents of a historical event that has left no prior evidence (or, more likely, the evidence for which has been suppressed or destroyed). Fusco’s project asks: What does it take for black women’s bodies to be fully recognized, and how does the artwork complicate the role of the document in shaping that recognition?
Biography
Coco Fusco is a widely recognized performance and video artist, curator, and scholar. She received her BA from Brown University in 1982 and a PhD from Middlesex University in 2007. Her most recent work was featured in the solo exhibition Coco Fusco: The Empty Plaza / La Plaza Vacia, Alexander Gray Associates, New York (2012). Select performance and video works include Buried Pig with Moros, The Project, New York (2008), and Centre d’Art Contemporain la Synagogue de Delme, Delme, France (2010); Operation Atropos, Palais de Tokyo, Paris and Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (2006), and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); A Room of One’s Own, Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008), and Performa 05, New York (2005); Turista Fronterizo, Net.Art, commissioned by InSite 05 (2005); a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2004, traveling); Els Segadors (The Reapers), ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, International Center of Photography, New York (2003), and Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Spain (2001); Dolores from 10 to 10, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2001); Votos, Third International Performance Art Festival, Odense, Denmark (1999); Rights of Passage, Johannesburg Biennale, Johannesburg, South Africa (1997); Stuff, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1996); The Year of the White Bear, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1992); La Chavela Realty Company, Brooklyn Academy of Music (1991); and Norte:Sur, Mexican Museum, San Francisco (1990). Her curatorial projects include Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, International Center of Photography, New York (2003, traveling); Corpus Delecti, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1996); and Black in a White World, Gallery Association of New York State, New York (1989, traveling).
MEDIA RESOURCES
RELATED EVENTS
Thursday, December 12 and Friday, December 13, 2013
Observations of Predation in Humans: A lecture by Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist
Performed at The Studio Museum in Harlem (144 West 125th Street, New York)
Organized by Thomas J. Lax, Assistant Curator; Edwin Ramoran, Manager of Public Programs and Community Engagement; and Monique Long, Curatorial Fellow, The Studio Museum in Harlem