Renée Cox’s Take A Good Look Puts Self-Representation in the Frame
Renée Cox gives the person inside the photograph the power to reshape the image.
Renée Cox’s Take A Good Look has been extended through November 14 at Ethan Cohen Gallery in Chelsea. The exhibition brings more than three decades of photography and self-representation into conversation.
At 225 West 17th Street, the gallery’s selection moves from work of the early 1990s into Cox’s later practice. Its chronology offers a useful way to look at an artist whose images have often been discussed through controversy: stay with the decisions inside the pictures, and with the different identities she constructs across them.
From making an image to controlling its terms
The Smithsonian Archives of American Art documents Cox’s beginnings in fashion photography and her work for publications including Essence and Seventeen. She earned an MFA at the School of Visual Arts in 1992 and participated in the Whitney’s Independent Study Program. That professional history places her command of photographic presentation alongside the political questions that became central to her fine-art practice.
For photographers, that connection is worth examining. Light, pose, scale and styling can make a subject immediately legible to an audience. They can also repeat assumptions an audience has learned to accept. Cox’s work invites attention to the authority behind those choices: who decides what a body signifies, and whether the subject gets to rewrite the expected role.
The gallery identifies Origin, the American Family series and Queen Nanny of the Maroons among the bodies of work in Take A Good Look. These bring motherhood, family memory and Jamaican history into the frame. They provide several routes into her practice rather than asking a single photograph to explain an entire career.
Looking past the controversy
The Smithsonian records that Yo Mama’s Last Supper appeared in the Brooklyn Museum’s Committed to the Image exhibition in 2001. Cox placed herself in the role of Jesus, prompting then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s call for a commission on museum decency standards. The archival record helps establish that history without turning outrage into the only measure of the work.
The more lasting photographic question concerns recognition. A familiar composition allows a viewer to identify a scene quickly. Changing who occupies its central position can expose how narrow that familiarity has been. Looking closely requires more than deciding whether an image is provocative; it requires considering what a viewer expected to see and why.
A body can become a new visual language
In her statement about Soul Culture, Cox describes digitally manipulated black-and-white portraits organized through repeated, self-similar patterns. She connects this work to her embrace of digital tools and to an interest in fractal structures. The resulting approach moves the figure toward abstraction while keeping the human body central to the process.
That shift matters for anyone thinking about photographic authorship. A photograph can document an appearance, stage a role or supply the material for an entirely different composition. Following Cox across these methods makes the exhibition a useful encounter with the medium’s possibilities, not just a sequence of subjects.
For more context in the artist’s own voice, Princeton University Art Museum offers an archival artist talk dated April 21, 2021, introducing works that entered its collection and a conversation with photography curator Katherine Bussard. It is background material, not a recording from the current Chelsea exhibition.
The gallery lists Tuesday–Saturday hours, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.; confirm arrangements before visiting. This feature draws on the gallery, artist and museum records rather than an on-site visit. The extended run offers an opportunity to approach the images slowly, with attention to both their construction and the person claiming the right to construct them.
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