Tony Cokes (born 1956) is an American visual artist and educator.

Early life and education

Cokes was born in

Richmond, Virginia (Thus do we reach the stars) , image_map = , mapsize = 250 px , map_caption = Location within Virginia , pushpin_map = Virginia#USA , pushpin_label = Richmond , pushpin_m ...

. He studied photography and creative writing at

Goddard College Goddard College is a progressive education private liberal arts low-residency college with three locations in the United States: Plainfield, Vermont; Port Townsend, Washington; and Seattle, Washington. The college offers undergraduate and gra ...

, and received an MFA degree (1985) in sculpture from

Virginia Commonwealth University Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) is a public research university in Richmond, Virginia. VCU was founded in 1838 as the medical department of Hampden–Sydney College, becoming the Medical College of Virginia in 1854. In 1968, the Virgini ...

Art career

In 1995,

Renee Cox Renee Cox (born October 16, 1960) is a Jamaican-American artist, photographer, lecturer, political activist and curator. Her work is considered part of the feminist art movement in the United States. Among the best known of her provocative works ...

Fo Wilson Folayemi "Fo" Debra Wilson is an American Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary artist, designer, and academic administrator. Her practice includes work as a furniture designer and maker, installation artist, muralist, and graphic designer. Wils ...

, and Tony Cokes created the Negro Art Collective (NAC) to fight cultural misrepresentations about Black Americans.

Artwork

Cokes's artwork concerns popular culture and mass entertainment. In the 1990s, he was part of the band X-PRZ. His videos often take the form of essays in which Cokes displays fragments of found texts on brightly-colored backgrounds, set to popular music. They are essays with musical accompaniment. He is known to combine quotes from a range of texts from critical theory, cultural studies, art criticism, and news reports. His sources include

Louis Althusser Louis Pierre Althusser (, ; ; 16 October 1918 – 22 October 1990) was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy. Althusser ...

Malcolm X Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little, later Malik el-Shabazz; May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965) was an American Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a prominent figure during the civil rights movement. A spokesman for the Nation of Is ...

Public Enemy "Public enemy" is a term which was first widely used in the United States in the 1930s to describe individuals whose activities were seen as criminal and extremely damaging to society, though the phrase had been used for centuries to describe p ...

, and

William Burroughs William Seward Burroughs II (; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist, widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular cultu ...

. In 1988 Cokes used newsreel footage of the riots in urban black neighborhoods in the 1960s along with 80s

industrial music Industrial music is a genre of music that draws on harsh, mechanical, transgressive or provocative sounds and themes. AllMusic defines industrial music as the "most abrasive and aggressive fusion of rock and electronic music" that was "initiall ...

and text commentary to create ''Black Celebration; a rebellion against the commodity''. Cokes wrote that the intent of the piece was to introduce a reading that will contradict received ideas which characterize those riots as criminal or irrational. He has said he is fascinated by the problem of how violence is represented when people not the state enact it. In this work Cokes juxtaposes the old news reel footage with written commentary from Morrisey,

Guy Debord Guy-Ernest Debord (; ; 28 December 1931 – 30 November 1994) was a French Marxist theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, critic of work, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationis ...

Barbara Kruger Barbara Kruger (born January 26, 1945) is an American conceptual artist and collagist associated with the Pictures Generation. She is most known for her collage style that consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captio ...

, and

Martin Gore Martin Lee Gore (born 23 July 1961) is an English songwriter, musician, singer, record producer and DJ. He is one of the founding members of the electronic rock band Depeche Mode and is the band's main songwriter. He is the band's guitarist an ...

. Cokes’ use of text alludes to the constructs of race in America and the economic challenges created by those constructs. One slide features a

quote, “The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity or with their electricity cut off is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into truth in play”. Soon after in the piece the

Skinny Puppy Skinny Puppy is a Canadian industrial music group formed in Vancouver in 1982. The group is among the founders of the industrial rock and electro-industrial genres. Initially envisioned as an experimental side-project by cEvin Key (Kevin Crompton ...

soundtrack has echoing voices that mirror the empty shells of burned-out buildings. Cokes’ art is disturbing, haunting and capable of getting the viewer to question what they think they know. William S. Smith says in Art In America, “Cokes’ working method enables him to respond to current events while continuing his longstanding investigation of race in popular culture”. Created in 1988 this video maintains a timelessness when viewed in the light of the Black Live Matter movement and the most recent rounds of police perpetrated violence against the Black community. Cokes’ work highlights the dissonance of the media coverage of the ongoing movement for racial justice where protests remain framed as violent flare-ups, despite incidents being statistically few and far between. His work asks the viewer what is valid protest and to show that the line between protest and rioting is not a line at all but a continuum.

Teaching

Cokes teaches at

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

and lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. Cokes offered a virtual artist lecture at his alma mater, Virginia Commonwealth University on March 4, 2021.

Exhibitions

Cokes work has been exhibited at the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

, the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

, the

Studio Museum in Harlem The Studio Museum in Harlem is an American art museum devoted to the work of artists of African descent. The museum's galleries are currently closed in preparation for a building project that will replace the current building, located at 144 W ...

, the

Long Beach Museum of Art The Long Beach Museum of Art is a museum located on Ocean Boulevard in the Bluff Park neighborhood of Long Beach, California, United States. The museum's permanent collection includes over 4,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, works on paper, a ...

, the Kitchen, and Artists Space. He was included in the 10th Berlin Biennale, and has shown at the Hessel Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, ZKM Karlsruhe, and Goldsmiths Center for Contemporary Art. Cokes is represented by Greene Naftali Gallery in New York. Cokes was included in a 2019 exhibition at The Shed. Recent solo exhibitions include CIRCA, London (2021); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona (2020); ARGOS center for audiovisual arts, Brussels (2020), Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester (2021).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cokes, Tony 1956 births Living people Virginia Commonwealth University alumni Brown University faculty People from Richmond, Virginia Goddard College alumni African-American artists American video artists