Coco Fusco facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Coco Fusco
|
|
|---|---|
.jpg) |
|
| Born |
Juliana Emilia Fusco Miyares
June 18, 1960 New York City, New York, U.S.
|
| Nationality | Cuban-American |
| Education | Brown University (1982), Stanford University (1985), Middlesex University (2007) |
| Known for | Interdisciplinary art, writing |
| Awards | 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, 2003 Herb Alpert Award |
Coco Fusco (born Juliana Emilia Fusco Miyares on June 18, 1960) is a talented Cuban-American artist, writer, and curator. A curator is someone who chooses and organizes art for museums or galleries. Her work has been shown and published all over the world. Coco Fusco's art explores important ideas like gender, identity, race, and power. She uses different ways to show her art, including performance, video, and interactive installations. She also writes critical essays about art and society.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Coco Fusco was born in 1960 in New York City. Her mother was a Cuban exile who had left Cuba that same year during the Cuban Revolution.
Fusco went to college and earned several degrees. She received a Bachelor's degree in Semiotics from Brown University in 1982. Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and how they are used. She then earned a Master's degree from Stanford University in 1985. Later, in 2007, she completed her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University.
Her Art Career
After finishing her studies in 1985, Coco Fusco met a group of artists from Cuba. She started visiting Cuba often and became involved in the art scene there. However, in the mid-1990s, she stopped her work in Cuba due to political changes after the Cold War.
Fusco has shown her performances and videos at many art festivals worldwide. These include the 56th Venice Biennale (a big art exhibition that happens every two years) and three Whitney Biennials in New York City. She has also received many awards for her work. Some of these include the 2016 Greenfield Prize in Visual Art, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. She has also received grants from important organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation.
Much of Coco Fusco's art explores themes like colonialism, power, race, gender, and history. Colonialism is when one country takes control of another country, often exploiting its people and resources. She often creates performances where she uses her own body to show how these ideas affect people. She takes on different identities in her performances. This helps to challenge old ideas about identity that have been forced on people because of their background, race, or gender. Fusco also explores the experiences of Cuban exiles in her art. For example, some of her earlier performances included Catholic rituals and feelings of being away from home.
Two Undiscovered Amerindians...
In 1992, Coco Fusco created a very important performance piece called Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West. She worked on this with another artist named Guillermo Gómez-Peña. This performance was first shown in Madrid and London. It then traveled to the Australian Museum in Sydney and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. A documentary called The Couple in the Cage was made about this performance.
During the performance, Fusco and Gómez-Peña put themselves inside a cage for people to see. This was a way to make fun of the old practice of exhibiting human beings as entertainment. They pretended to be people from an unknown island in the Gulf of Mexico. They performed tasks and rituals that were explained by fake scientific information. People watching could interact with them and even pay to take a photo or see them dance. This artwork was a critique (a way of showing disapproval) of colonialism. It also commented on the role that scientific museums played in the past. The performance was a response to the 500-year anniversary celebrations of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas.
Selected Performances
- Better Yet When Dead (1997), El Ultimo Deseo (The Last Wish, 1997), and El Evento Suspendido (The Suspended Event, 2000) are performances that used images of death and burial. They highlighted the social limits and unfair treatment that women faced in Latin American countries.
- Better Yet When Dead (1997): In this performance, Fusco lay silently in a coffin, surrounded by roses. She controlled her breathing to appear like a real body. She performed this piece in Canada and Colombia. It explored why some cultures seem to be fascinated with female creativity only after women artists have died.
- El Ultimo Deseo (The Last Wish) (1997): This piece was performed in Cuba. Fusco pretended to be dead at a traditional Catholic wake. She lay on the floor, wrapped in a white sheet, surrounded by flowers. She stayed very still to make it seem like she was truly gone. The title refers to her grandmother's wish to return to Cuba to be buried, a wish many Cuban exiles share.
- El Evento Suspendido (The Postponed Event) (2000): This performance continued Fusco's exploration of womanhood and death. It took place outside a gallery in Havana. Fusco was buried vertically up to her chest in the lawn. She stayed like this for three hours, writing the same letter over and over and giving copies to people watching. The letter was from a character who was alive but had been thought dead, showing the feeling of being "half-buried" or stuck between two places, like an exile.
- Stuff (1996): This was a collaboration with Nao Bustamante. It made fun of globalism and cultural stereotypes, especially those about women and food. The performance connected old stories about cannibalism to modern geopolitical relationships. Geopolitics is the study of how geography and politics affect each other.
- Rights of Passage (1997): This performance was created for the Johannesburg Biennale. Fusco dressed as a South African policewoman. She explored ideas about race, identity, and the lasting effects of apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid was a system of racial segregation and discrimination that was enforced in South Africa.
- Bare Life Study #1 (2005) and A Room of One's Own: Women and Power in the New America (2005): These performances were created after the "War on Terror". They looked at the growing role of women in the US military and the use of harsh questioning methods in military operations.
- Observations of Predation In Humans: A Lecture by Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist (2013): In this performance, Fusco acted as Dr. Zira, a chimpanzee character from Planet of the Apes. She used the perspective of a non-human character to comment on human behavior.
Writing and Teaching
As a writer, Coco Fusco focuses on gender, race, colonialism, and power structures in Latin America and around the world. She has written interviews, critical essays, and six books.
- Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015) tells the history of public space, performance, and identity in Cuba.
- A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008) looks at the role of women in US military questioning. This book was nominated for an award.
- Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003) is a book that came from a photography exhibition. It explored how race is shown in photography in the United States.
- The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001) is a collection of essays and interviews about the effects of colonialism.
- Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (2000) is a book about Latin American performance art. It highlights the artistic and cultural value of this art.
- English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) was her first collection of interviews and essays. She won an award for this book.
Coco Fusco has also taught art at several universities, including Columbia University and MIT. In 2014, she received a Fulbright award and taught in São Paulo, Brazil. As of 2025, she is a special professor at the University of Florida College of the Arts.
She also received the 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, which is an award for excellent writing about art.
Awards
- Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2021)
- American Academy of Arts and Letters Arts Award (2021)
- Free Speech Defender Award (2023)
Public Collections
Coco Fusco's work is part of the collections at important museums, including:
Selected Videos
Here are some of Coco Fusco's video works:
- La Botella al Mar de María Elena (The Message in a Bottle from María Elena) (2015)
- La Confesion (2015)
- Operation Atropos (2006)
- a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert (2004)
- Pochonovela: A Chicano Soap Opera (1996)
- The Couple in the Cage: Guatianaui Odyssey (1993)
See also
In Spanish: Coco Fusco para niños
