Renée Cox Soul Culture Statue

The idea for the Soul Culture Statue started back in Renée Cox’s residency in Puerto Vallarta in 2015. It was the first time the artist decided to work with terracotta—a complete departure from her 2D photographic works that have been transformed into 3D collages and are now finding their way out fully into the 3D world for the first time at this scale. The 7 feet tall sculpture, placed on 1 feet mirror pedestal, marks the continuation of the artist’s participation in the philosophies of Afrofuturism, using Pan-African and Indigenous imagery that accommodates an idealized and expansive future. She decided it was time for her to create her own world. Where color and gender did not matter. 

 

The sculpture is a mashup of gender fluidity that creates a degree of freedom and safe space. Borrowing inspiration from West African funerary sculptures, Pre-Columbian imagery from Peru, and Dogū figures from Japan, the artist began to shape her people. The sculpture becomes a life lesson in liberating BIPOC by claiming safe space for living.

 

Renée Cox (b. 1960 in Colgate, Jamaica, currently based in New York, NY) works across a range of media using her own body - in different guises and provocative states of dress and undress - to celebrate Black womanhood, occupy multiple identities and realities, and deconstruct historical stereotypes. From her first self-portrait in 1980 to her most recent work, Cox investigates sexism, the racially dehumanizing commodification of the Black body, gender fluidity, and the power of Afrofuturism. 

 

She received her MFA from School of Visual Arts (1992), and was part of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1993). Cox was awarded Gold Rush Awards Honoree at Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation (2015), Aaron Matalon Award at the National Gallery of Jamaica (2007), Chrysalis Award at Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (2007), and Outstanding Achievements in the Art Award Recipient in MOCADA (2006) and was an assistant professor at Columbia University (2019-2020), and photography faculty/critic at Yale (2022-2023). Renée Cox was an artist-in-residence at KODA in 2024, and exhibited The Ten Commandments of Renée Cox with KODA at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2023-2024. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and is part of renowned museum collections.