RENEE COX (1960 - )
Hot-En-Tot.

Digital inkjet print, 1994. 552x419 mm; 21¾x16½ inches. Signed, and inscribed "Not for sale for five years as of 03 06 2024" in pencil, verso. Printed in 2023.

Self-photographed in 1994,Hot-En-Tot is one of Renee Cox's best known and most powerful images. The original "Hottentot Venus" was Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa who was enslaved in the late eighteenth century and displayed as a form of public entertainment in Victorian England. In Hot-En-Tot, Cox transforms a tragic, colonial figure into a powerful, modern woman.

Born in 1960, in Colgate, Jamaica, later settling in Scarsdale, New York, Renee Cox received a BA in Film Studies from Syracuse University. She went on to receive her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1992, and also attended the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program in 1992. Cox's celebrated practice in photography has been centered on the representation of the Black body for over thirty years, in particular, through her reinterpretation of art historical subjects including her Yo Mama's Pieta, 1994 and Yo Mama's Last Supper, 1996.

Cox had two solo exhibitions in 2023 with The Ten Commandments of Renee Cox at the Princeton Art Museum, Princeton, NJ and Proof of Being at Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY. Her work was also included in the important 2019 exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, which traveled from the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery, Columbia University to the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Her current exhibition Renee Cox is on view at the UTA Artist Space in Atlanta, GA, through March 24, 2024. Her work is found in many institutional collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Princeton Art Museum.

Consigned to support the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation.