Name Coco Fusco | Role Writer | |
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Books Dangerous Moves: Politics a, Field Guide for Female Interrogators, The Bodies That Were Not Ours, English is broken here, Young - British - and Black | ||
Coco fusco en i like girls in uniform 2006 1 2
Coco Fusco (born Juliana Emilia Fusco Miyares; June 18, 1960) is a Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work has been exhibited and published internationally. Fusco's work explores gender, identity, race, and power through performance, video, interactive installations, and critical writing.
Contents
- Coco fusco en i like girls in uniform 2006 1 2
- Coco fusco dangerous moves performance and politics in cuba tate talks
- Early life and education
- Career
- Two Undiscovered Amerindians
- Selected performances
- Writing and Teaching
- Selected exhibitions
- Selected videos
- References
Coco fusco dangerous moves performance and politics in cuba tate talks
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.
She 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 2005.
Career
After finishing graduate school in 1985, Fusco got involved with a group of Cuban artists, including Jose Bedia. 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.
Fusco has presented performances and videos in arts festivals worldwide, including the 56th Venice Biennale, two Whitney Biennials (2008, 1993), the Next Wave Festival at BAM, and Performa05. 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.
Two Undiscovered Amerindians...
In 1992 Fusco created the influential performance piece Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West in collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña. It was first presented at the Plaza Colón in Madrid and Covent Garden in London, then toured to the Australian Museum of Natural Science in Sydney and the Museum of Natural History in New York City. The performance was filmed as part of the documentary The Couple in the Cage, directed by Paula Heredia. 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. Audience members were invited to interact with them, and could pay to take a photo or see them dance. 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.
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. 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. 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. The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001) is a collection of essays and interviews investigating the legacy of colonialism. Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (2000) is a scholarly work surveying Latinx performance art. 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.
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.
Selected exhibitions
Selected videos
Coco Fusco works distributed by the Video Data Bank include: