Left: Renee Cox, Yo Mama, 1993. Brooklyn Museum, gift of the Carol and Arthur Goldberg Collection, 2009.82.3. © Renee Cox.
Right: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kneeling Mother with Child at Her Breast, 1906. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie Berlin. © Paula-Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung, Bremen
Paula Modersohn-Becker captured the lived bodily experiences of women through her frank portrayals of motherhood, pregnancy, and old age, including the first nude self-portraits known to have been made by a woman. A century later, acclaimed artist Renee Cox’s powerful photographs critique and reframe stereotypical images of the Black female body. Her series Yo Mama features photographs of her own pregnant and nursing body, adopting and subverting biblical and art historical imagery to celebrate motherhood.
Join Cox and curator Jay A. Clarke for a conversation considering motherhood, self-portraiture, and both artists’ place in feminist art history.
About the Speakers
Renee Cox is a Jamaican American artist, photographer, and activist whose work focuses on representations of Black women. Among 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 politics. 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. She has received awards from organizations including the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and Creative Time. Cox’s work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others.
Jay A. Clarke is the Rothman Family Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her recent exhibitions include Picasso: Drawing from Life (2023) and Bridget Riley: Drawings from the Artist’s Studio (2022) at the Art Institute and Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth (2023–24) at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts; the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany; and Munchmuseet, Oslo, Norway. She has written several articles on Käthe Kollwitz, Edvard Munch, and the materials, processes, and markets of prints and drawings circa 1900.
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