Renee Cox

Later that year Cox undertook another series of photographs, this one named for the Jamaican national heroine Queen Nanny of the Maroons. In the series, Cox took on the persona of Queen Nanny, who in the 18th century led a rebellion against the British for the freedom of slaves. Queen Nanny of the Maroons was originally shown at the Robert Miller Gallery in 2005. Cox then exhibited the body of work in the Jamaican Biennial in 2007 where it won the Aaron Matalon Award.

In 2001, Cox opened a show at the Robert Miller Gallery called American Family. The series featured family snap shots, as well as older family photographs juxtaposed with erotic self-portraits, and new re-creations of art historical classics. "Olympia's Boyz" is featured in this show, which first appeared at the Brooklyn Museum in 2001. Cox has written that "The body of work was a rebellion against all of the pre-ordained roles I am supposed to embrace as a woman: dutiful daughter, diminutive wife, and doting mother."

In 2001, Yo Mama's Last Supper sparked an enormous controversy when Rudy Giuliani, then mayor of New York City, saw the work and proceeded to accuse Cox of being anti-Catholic. Giuliani gained national attention when he subsequently called for the creation of a panel to create decency standards for all art shown in publicly funded museums in the city. Giuliani told the Daily News that he did "not believe that it is right for public money to be used to desecrate religion, to attack people's ethnicity."

In 1999, Cox's work was shown in the Venice Biennale, in the Oratorio di S. Ludovico, a 17th-century Catholic church. Cox's piece "Yo Mama's Last Supper" a contemporary re-imagining of Leonardo da Vinci's classic, was first shown there. In Cox's reimagining of this historically iconic scene, she stood nude in the place of Jesus Christ and is surrounded by all black apostles, except for Judas who is white. In 2001, the piece was included in a Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibition Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers, curated by Barbara Millstein.

Soon after, Cox created her Raje alter-ego, a superhero who fights racism and teaches children African American history. In 1998 the body of work was featured in a Fin de Siècle art festival in Nantes, France. Nantes was historically the last stop on the slave trade, before the ships were to return to Africa to pick up their human cargo. The photographs were installed on billboards all over the city.

In addition to making art, Renee Cox has curated and acted. She has done projects for Rush Art Gallery from its inception. In 1996 she curated an exhibition entitled No Doubt at the Aldrich Museum of Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut and she co-starred in Bridgett Davis' award-winning independent film Naked Acts, where she portrayed a photographer.

In 1995, Renee Cox, Fo Wilson and Tony Cokes created the Negro Art Collective to fight cultural misrepresentations about Black Americans. The collective, working with Creative Time and Gee Street Records, created a poster campaign to challenge and provoke preconceived notions about race, crime and poverty. "As far as representation, we have to take it back," Cox explained to the Daily News. The NAC appropriated a quote from scholar Charles Murray and added their commentary so as to appropriate the quote for their purposes. The idea was to present viewers with real information, which flies in the face of what Americans are taught to believe. The 24 by 36 inch posters read: "Surprise, Surprise, 'in raw numbers, European-American whites are the ethnic group with the most people in poverty, most illegitimate children, most people on welfare, most unemployed men, and most arrests for serious crimes.' Surprised." The posters ran in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Los Angeles. The project was originally inspired by Cox's five-year-old son who had asked her one day: "Why are all black people bad?"

In 1994, Renee Cox exhibited her piece "It Shall Be Named" in the show Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, a show curated by Thelma Golden at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. A review of the show published in Art in America described the work as referring "back to traditional art forms—in this case, the shaped crucifixes of 13th and 14th century Italy—with deep solemnity. The modern "distortions" and elisions of Cox's representation interact with the reference to iconic martyrdom to evoke the terrible history of lynchings, beatings and emasculation visited on the bodies of black men in this country."

In the early 1990s, inspired by the birth of her first son, Cox decided to focus primarily on fine art photography. She received her Master of Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York and subsequently spent a year working with Mary Kelly and Ron Clark in the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Cox then returned to New York City, where she continued to work as a fashion photographer for ten years. Among her clients were editorial magazines such as Essence, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle, Seventeen Magazine, and Sportswear International. She also worked with Spike Lee, producing the poster for his 1988 film School Daze.

Renee Cox (born October 16, 1960) is a Jamaican-American artist, photographer, lecturer, political activist and curator. Her work is considered part of the feminist art movement in the United States. Some of the best known of her provocative works are Queen Nanny of the Maroons, Raje and Yo Mama's Last Supper, which exemplify her Black Feminist politic. In addition, her work has provoked conversations at the intersections of cultural work, activism, gender, and African Studies. As a specialist in film and digital portraiture, Cox uses light, form, digital technology, and her own signature style to capture the identities and beauty within her subjects and herself.