Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation Exhibition
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Ulysses Jenkins, Two Zone Transfer, 1979. Still of video transferred to DVD, color, sound, 23:52 min. Photo courtesy of the artist.
The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania presents Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation, the first major retrospective exhibition of the work of pioneering video artist Ulysses Jenkins. The exhibition is co-presented by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA, where it will travel in winter 2022.
Jenkins, who resides in Los Angeles, emerged as a pioneering video artist in the late 1970s and was enormously influential for Black video artists of the 1990s and early 2000s. Through his use of archival footage, photographs, music, sound, and performances, Jenkins expanded upon and explored new expressions of the medium. His work interrogates questions of race and gender and identifies white supremacy as a disruptor of subjectivity.
Co-curated by the ICA’s Meg Onli and the Hammer's Erin Christovale, the exhibition includes Jenkins’ video pieces, collaborative works, mural paintings, photography, and the restaging of two of his major performance works, Bay Window (1991) and Talking Hut (1994).