Coco Fusco

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Coco Fusco
Interview with Coco Fusco, 199 sec (edited).jpg
Born
Juliana Emilia Fusco Miyares

(1960-06-18) June 18, 1960 (age 64)
New York City, New York
NationalityCuban-American
Education Brown University (1982), Stanford University (1985), Middlesex University (2007)
Known forInterdisciplinary art, writing
Awards2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, 2003 Herb Alpert Award
Website http://cocofusco.com

Coco Fusco (born Juliana Emilia Fusco Miyares; June 18, 1960) is a Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work has been widely exhibited and published internationally. Fusco's work explores gender, identity, race, and power through performance, video, interactive installations, and critical writing. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Fusco was born in 1960 in New York City. Her mother was a Cuban exile who had fled the Cuban revolution that year. [2]

Fusco received a B.A in Semiotics from Brown University in 1982, an M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 1985 and a Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University in 2007. [3]

Career

After finishing graduate school in 1985, Fusco met a group of Cuban artists, including José Bedia, who were visiting the US. She began traveling to Cuba and participating in the visual arts scene there, until in the mid-1990s she withdrew as a result of post-Cold War political and cultural changes in the country. [2]

Fusco has presented performances and videos in arts festivals worldwide, including the 56th Venice Biennale, three Whitney Biennials (2021, 2008, 1993), the Next Wave Festival at BAM, and Performa05. [4] [5] She is the recipient of the 2016 Greenfield Prize in Visual Art, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship, and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, as well as grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the NEA and NYFA. [2] [6]

Much of Fusco's interdisciplinary art practice over the last several decades has been concerned with the themes of colonialism, power, race, gender, and history. Her exploration of these themes has culminated in staged performances that concern the embodied experiences of these phenomena, in an effort to destabilize their meanings. [7] She locates her own body not only as the site of their merging but also as their immediate product. [8] She presents and communicates this through her actual performances themselves. In them, she creates and takes on multiple identities to destabilize those identities that have been historically imposed on bodies along colonial, racial, and gendered lines. [9] Fusco also engages with legacies of Cuban exile in her work, as in some of her earlier performances where she stages Catholic rituals and experiences of dislocation. [10]

Two Undiscovered Amerindians...

In 1992 Fusco created the influential performance piece Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West in collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña. [1] It was first presented at the Plaza Colón in Madrid and Covent Garden in London, then toured to the Australian Museum in Sydney and the Museum of Natural History in New York City. [11] The performance was filmed as part of the documentary The Couple in the Cage, directed by Paula Heredia. [1] During performances of Two Undiscovered Amerindians..., Fusco and Gómez-Peña put themselves on public display in a cage, in a satirical reference to the historical practice of exhibiting human beings as entertainment. They claimed to be natives of an undiscovered island in the Gulf of Mexico, and performed tasks and rituals that were explained by pseudoscientific informational materials posted as part of the performance piece. [1] Audience members were invited to interact with them and could pay to take a photo or see them dance. [12] The work was a critique of colonialism, specifically of the role played by the scientific institutions in which it was performed, and a response to the global quincentenary celebrations of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas. [11]

Selected performances

Writing and Teaching

As a writer, Coco Fusco has focused on gender, race, colonialism, and power structures in Latin America and around the world. Her body of work includes interviews, critical essays, and six published books. Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015) is a history of public space, performance, and identity in Cuba. [21] A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008), a companion volume to her performance A Room of One's Own: Women and Power in the New America (2005), examines the sexualized role of women in US military interrogations. [22] A Field Guide for Female Interrogators was shortlisted for the Index on Censorship T. R. Fyvel Book Award. Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003, edited with Brian Wallis), is the catalogue for a photography exhibition of the same name, curated by Fusco and Wallis at the International Center of Photography, which looked at racial imagery in photography and the representation of racial attitudes in the United States. [23] [24] The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001) is a collection of essays and interviews investigating the legacy of colonialism. [25] Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (2000) is a scholarly work surveying Latinx and Latin American performance art. [26] In it, Fusco centers the aesthetic and cultural value of artistic expression and works against notions of reducing Latin American performance to "the political". [27] English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) was her first collection of interviews and essays, for which she won the 1995 Critics' Choice award. [28] [29]

Fusco has taught on the arts faculties of Temple University, Columbia University, Parsons School of Design, and MIT. In 2014 she received a Fulbright appointment and served as the Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado in São Paulo, Brazil for one year. Fusco currently serves as the Andrew Banks Endowed Chair at the College of the Arts at University of Florida. [30] [31]

Fusco a recipient of a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism. [32]

Selected exhibitions

Awards

Public collections (selection)

Selected videos

Coco Fusco works distributed by the Video Data Bank include:

Bibliography

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Carlson, Marvin (2013-12-16). Performance: A Critical Introduction. Routledge. ISBN   9781136498725.
  2. 1 2 3 "BOMB Magazine — Coco Fusco by Elia Alba". bombmagazine.org. Retrieved 2017-03-11.
  3. ↑ "Coco Fusco", Alexander Gray Associates. Retrieved 2014-11-23.
  4. ↑ "Cuban Artists at the Venice Biennale". www.cubanartnews.org. Retrieved 2017-03-12.
  5. ↑ "2008 WHITNEY BIENNIAL". whitney.org. Retrieved 2017-03-12.
  6. ↑ "Yale University School of Art: Coco Fusco". art.yale.edu. Retrieved 2017-03-12.
  7. ↑ Unmaking race, remaking soul : transformative aesthetics and the practice of freedom. Acampora, Christa Davis, 1967-, Cotten, Trystan T., 1968-. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2007. pp.  143. ISBN   9780791471616. OCLC   72699085.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  8. ↑ Unmaking race, remaking soul : transformative aesthetics and the practice of freedom. Acampora, Christa Davis, 1967-, Cotten, Trystan T., 1968-. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2007. pp.  148. ISBN   9780791471616. OCLC   72699085.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  9. ↑ Unmaking race, remaking soul : transformative aesthetics and the practice of freedom. Acampora, Christa Davis, 1967-, Cotten, Trystan T., 1968-. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2007. pp.  158. ISBN   9780791471616. OCLC   72699085.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 Amich, Candice (October 2009). "Playing Dead in Cuba: Coco Fusco's Stagings of Dissensus". Theatre Research International. 34 (3): 267–277. doi:10.1017/S030788330999006X. ISSN   0307-8833. S2CID   154966038.
  11. 1 2 Taylor, Diana (1998-01-01). "A Savage Performance: Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco's "Couple in the Cage"". TDR. 42 (2): 160–175. doi:10.1162/dram.1998.42.2.160. JSTOR   1146705. S2CID   57571304.
  12. ↑ "BOMB Magazine — Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña by Anna Johnson". bombmagazine.org. Retrieved 2017-03-12.
  13. 1 2 Schultz, Stacy (Spring–Summer 2008). "Latina Identity: Reconciling Ritual, Culture, and Belonging". Woman's Art Journal. 29 (1): 13–20 – via JSTOR.
  14. ↑ Fusco, Coco; Bustamante, Nao (1997-01-01). "STUFF". TDR. 41 (4): 63–82. doi:10.2307/1146661. JSTOR   1146661.
  15. ↑ Allatson, Paul, "Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and 'American' Cannibal Reveries". In Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2002, pp. 253–306.
  16. ↑ Weatherstone, Rosemary. "Stuff review", Project MUSE. Retrieved 2014-11-23.
  17. ↑ "Coco Fusco". www.moma.org. Retrieved 2017-03-12.
  18. ↑ Beckman, Karen (2009). "Gender, Power, and Pedagogy in Coco Fusco's "Bare Life Study" #1 (2005), "A Room of One's Own" (2005), and "Operation Atropos" (2006)". Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media. 50 (1/2): 125–138. doi:10.1353/frm.0.0053. JSTOR   41552543. S2CID   144480631.
  19. ↑ Expósito, As told to Frank. "Coco Fusco talks about her latest performance". artforum.com. Retrieved 2017-03-11.
  20. ↑ Alba, Elia (2014-08-05). "Uncaged: Coco Fusco and Planet of the Apes". Art21 Magazine. Retrieved 2017-03-12.
  21. ↑ Banks, Grace. "Artist Coco Fusco On Her New Book About Politics in Cuba". Forbes. Retrieved 2017-03-12.
  22. ↑ Dolan, Jill (2009-01-01). Fusco, Coco (ed.). "The Art of Interrogation". The Women's Review of Books. 26 (2): 3–4. JSTOR   20476818.
  23. ↑ Veneciano, Jorge Daniel (2005-01-01). Fusco, Coco; Wallis, Brian (eds.). "Tinting the American Subject". Art Journal. 64 (1): 113–115. doi:10.2307/20068372. JSTOR   20068372.
  24. ↑ "Skin Games". NYMag.com. 22 January 2004. Retrieved 2017-03-12.
  25. ↑ Heiferman, Marvin; Bolt, Tom; Juarez, Roberto; Hunt, David; Anglesey, Zoë; Krasnow, David; Turner, Grady T.; Rosler, Martha; Harvey, Matthea (2002-01-01). "Editor's Choice". BOMB (80): 16–22. JSTOR   40426700.
  26. ↑ Rivera-Servera, Ramón H. (2001-01-01). "Review of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas". Theatre Journal. 53 (1): 172–173. doi:10.1353/tj.2001.0020. JSTOR   25068896. S2CID   191319404.
  27. ↑ Della Gatta, Carla (2023). Latinx Shakespeares: Staging US Intracultural Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p. 174. ISBN   9780472055777.
  28. ↑ Kranz, Rachel (1995-01-01). Fusco, Coco (ed.). "Culture Crosser". The Women's Review of Books. 12 (12): 11. doi:10.2307/4022231. JSTOR   4022231.
  29. ↑ Baugh, Scott L. (2012-04-13). Latino American Cinema: An Encyclopedia of Movies, Stars, Concepts, and Trends: An Encyclopedia of Movies, Stars, Concepts, and Trends. ABC-CLIO. ISBN   9780313380372.
  30. ↑ "cocofusco.com". cocofusco.com. Retrieved 2017-03-12.
  31. ↑ "Coco Fusco | College of the Arts | University of Florida". arts.ufl.edu. Retrieved 2017-03-12.
  32. ↑ "Artist Talk: Coco Fusco on The Art of Intervention". Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
  33. ↑ "Anonymous Was A Woman Award" (PDF). Anonymous Was A Woman. November 9, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2021.
  34. ↑ "Pérez Art Museum Miami Announces New Acquisitions by Thirteen Artists for Permanent Collection • Pérez Art Museum Miami". Pérez Art Museum Miami. Retrieved 2023-03-07.
  35. ↑ Valentine, Victoria L. (2021-08-21). "New Acquisitions: Pérez Art Museum Miami Adds 13 Works to Collection, Diverse Slate of Artists Includes Kenturah Davis, Bisa Butler, Karon Davis, Coco Fusco, and Sonia Gomes". Culture Type. Retrieved 2023-03-07.

35. https://www.cocofusco.com/bio#:~:text=She%20is%20a%20recipient%20of,Writing%20Award%2C%20a%202013%20Fulbright

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