Baby Back, from the American Family Series

Label

Renee Cox composes large-scale photographs of her own body to critique stereotypical representations of black women. Baby Back is part of the artist’s purposefully controversial American Family series—in her words, “a veritable minefield of taboo topics.” In this work, Cox poses in an incisive recreation of the iconic Grande Odalisque (below) by neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Ingres’s painting emerged from the French art movement of Orientalism, which addressed 18th- and 19th-century fantasies around “exotic” cultures.

Unlike the sexually available, submissive odalisque, Cox boldly looks away from the viewer in Baby Back. She wears tantalizing red patent-leather high-heeled shoes and holds a whip, a fraught object evoking both eroticism and the historical violence of slavery. The artist also employs the grand scale of history painting, inserting the black female body into the white-dominated cultural imaginary. Cox’s work confronts the hierarchy of representation to claim space and regain control over modes of representation.

From the 2020 exhibition Reconstitution, curated by Jessica Hong, Associate Curator of Global Contemporary Art

Course History

WRIT 5, Memoirs of Family, Ellen Rockmore, Fall 2013

WGST 10, Sex, Gender, and Society, Giavanna Munafo, Fall 2013

WGST 37.2, GEOG 41, Gender, Space and Islam, Jennifer Fluri, Fall 2013

NAS 42, WGST 40, Gender Topics in Native American Life, Vera Palmer, Fall 2013

ANTH 31, WGST 36, Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Lauren Gulbas, Fall 2013

NAS 42, WGST 40, Gender Topics in Native American Life, Vera Palmer, Fall 2013

SART 30, Photography II, Fall 2013

SART 29, Photography I, Fall 2013

WGST 65.7, Queer Popular Culture, Eng-Beng Lim, Summer 2015

AAAS 10, Introduction to African American Studies, Trica Keaton, Winter 2020

WGSS 10.01, Sex, Gender, and Society, Susan Overton, Winter 2020

MUS 3.02, American Music: Covers, Theft, and Musical Borrowing, Richard Beaudoin, Winter 2020

PHIL 22.01, Feminism and Philosophy, Susan Brison, Summer 2020

PORT 8, Brazilian Portraits, Carlos Cortez Minchillo, Winter 2021

COCO 21, What's In Your Shoebox, Prudence Merton and Francine A'Ness, Spring 2021

MUS 3.02, American Music: Covers, Theft, and Musical Borrowing, Richard Beaudoin, Fall 2020

AAAS 88.19, Contemporary African-American Artists, Michael Chaney, Summer 2021

Exhibition History

Reconstitution, Dorothy and Churchill P. Lathrop Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 2, 2020 - June 20, 2021.

Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body, William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. Jaffe Hall Galleries, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, April 1-August 10, 2008; Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, September 10-December 10, 2008; San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, California, January 21-April 26, 2009.

Shadowplay: Transgressive Photography from the Hood Museum of Art, Owen Robertson Cheatham and Friends Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, August 10-December 8, 2013.

Virtual Space for Dialogue: 2017, Vanity: Disrupting The Female Nude, Jessica King Fredel, Class of 2017, Levinson Intern, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. https://www.jkingfredel.vsfd.hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu/

Publication History

Barbara Thompson, Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body, Seattle: University of Washington Press [Hanover: Trustees of Dartmouth College], 2008, p. 329, plate 110.

Brian P. Kennedy and Emily Shubert Burke, Modern and Contemporary Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover: Trustees of Dartmouth College, 2009 p.206, no.264.

John R. Stomberg, The Hood Now: Art and Inquiry at Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2019, p. 196, ill. plate no. 127.

Provenance

The artist, Chappaqua, New York, New York; sold to present collection, 2008.

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