Renee Cox's 2001 Solo Exhibition at Robert Miller Gallery Explores Identity and Eroticism

Renee Cox's first solo exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York ran from September 22 to November 3, 2001. The show featured a mix of large-scale erotic photographs and smaller family snapshots, including works like "American Family," which displayed vacation photos and mementos on the floor. Cox's imagery incorporated elements of patriotism, Catholic piety, and black and Jamaican identity, complicating the irony in her mock-heroic iconography. A film close-up depicted french kissing with a sense of ambiguous stalemate, while a nearby photograph showed male legs in drag with faintly visible genitalia, scrambling gender expectations. Cox referenced her earlier controversy with Mayor Giuliani over "Yo Mama's Last Supper," a nude appropriation of Leonardo da Vinci's painting. In this exhibition, she reworked Édouard Manet's "Olympia" by replacing the black servant with her sons in tribal garb, softening the original context. Other pieces included fetish gear and juxtapositions of nudes with childhood photos, though gallery visitors often made objectifying comments about Cox's physique. The artist's use of art-historical appropriations sometimes rendered the nudity more vulnerable than shocking. The exhibition suggested a post-erotic zeitgeist in visual art, where Cox's sexual bravado could explore underlying doubts and confusions.