Renée Green facts for kids

Renée Green (born October 25, 1959) is an American artist, writer, and filmmaker. She uses many different types of art, including sculptures, photos, videos, films, and sound. Her works often come together in detailed installations, which are like art environments you can walk through.

Renée Green often researches history and culture for her projects. She has explored topics like Sarah Baartman (a South African woman who was put on display in the 1800s), the history of the slave trade, and hip hop music in Germany.

In 2014, she published a book called Other Planes of There: Selected Writings. It's a collection of her writings from 1981 to 2010.

Early Life and Education

Renée Green studied art at Wesleyan University. She also spent a year at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Later, she attended a special publishing course at Harvard University. In 1989, she was part of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, which helps young artists.

For her college thesis at Wesleyan, Green wrote about art reviews of African-American art. She looked at what both Black and White critics wrote between the 1920s and 1960s. A big influence on her was helping to organize a collection of art by Sol LeWitt at the Wadsworth Atheneum museum. She wrote descriptions for artworks by Adrian Piper and Lawrence Weiner.

Her brother is Derrick Green, who is the lead singer of the heavy metal band Sepultura.

Renée Green's Art Projects

Color I (1990) at the National Gallery of Art in 2022

Renée Green's art often takes the form of detailed installations. In these, she explores ideas, historical events, and cultural objects from many different angles. Her work looks at how things are seen in private and public, and what has been imagined or created.

Her videos, exhibitions, and films have been shown in museums and festivals all over the world. Art experts say that Green doesn't just tell you what to think. Instead, she invites you to be part of understanding the art and changing your own views. She creates interactive spaces where you, the viewer, become an equal part of figuring out the meaning.

Green explains that she likes to start by looking at an object, a text, a painting, or even a garden. By studying these things and where they came from, she can understand the ideas behind them. She also tries to understand the different feelings these objects might bring up.

In 1992, Green worked with the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia to create Mise-en-Scene: Commemorative Toile. This artwork shows how she uses old images to rethink history. She combined pretty scenes from old French fabric with shocking images of slavery and rebellions. For example, peaceful flower designs frame pictures of violence during the Haitian revolution. Using this fabric, Green made rooms that looked like old museum displays, with chairs, curtains, and wallpaper. She changed these traditional styles to tell different, often hidden, stories from history.

Green collects many materials for her projects from our culture. But her work is not just a collection of old things. In each project, she creates new art in different ways, like photos (Secret, 1994–2006), prints (Code: Survey), films (Some Chance Operations, 1999; Wavelinks, 2002; Elsewhere?, 2002), and sound (Vanished Gardens, 2004; Muriel's Words, 2004). These are all part of her carefully designed installations.

Because her projects are so detailed and connect many ideas, they often happen over a long time and in different places. For example, Import/Export Funk Office (1992) was shown as an installation in Cologne and Los Angeles. It also exists as a CD-Rom (1996). Another example is Code: Survey (2005–2006), which is a permanent public artwork in Downtown Los Angeles and also a website anyone can visit.

Green's projects are very rich with ideas. So, the catalogs published with her exhibitions are also part of her artwork. These books act as exhibition guides, artist's books, and collections of documents. They also include conversations and scripts from her films and videos.

In 1997, Green was chosen to design a book called Artist/Author: Contemporary Artist's Books. She has also written many essays and stories that have been published in magazines and journals in the United States and Europe.

Her video works are often subtle. For example, her video Climates and Paradoxes (2005) looks at the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. It explores the history of a tall apartment building in Berlin where Green once lived. This building was on the site of a peace organization that Einstein was part of. Another video, Walking in NYL (2016), shows her interest in Lisbon and Portuguese culture.

Since 2011, Renée Green has had many solo art shows. These include exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the MAK Center in Los Angeles, and Harvard University. She has also been part of many group exhibitions at places like the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum in New York, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Green has created many books and writings over the years. Some of these include: Other Planes of There: Selected Writings (2014), Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams (2010), and Ongoing Becomings (2009), which covered 20 years of her work.

Selected Art Projects

Here are some of Renée Green's notable projects:

Early Works on Historical Displays

Green's early artworks looked at how Black women's bodies were historically put on display. A key example was Sarah Baartman, a South African woman exhibited in London and Paris in the early 1800s. Three of Green's artworks, Permitted (1989), Sa Main Charmante (1989), and Seen (1990), were shown together in her 1990 exhibition Anatomies of Escape.

• Permitted (1989): This was one of Green's first works to combine text and images. It aimed to show how audiences in the 1800s viewed people put on display. Green made a large image of Sarah Baartman's body and added words from a description by Sir Francis Galton, who measured a "Hottentot" woman. Green used different fonts to show how the text was both scientific and personal. The artwork also had a peephole where viewers could see an image of Baartman on a crate, linking this kind of display to how people were looked at in a degrading way.

• Sa Main Charmante (Her Charming Hand, 1989): This artwork featured a soapbox with footprints and a ladder-like structure on a wall. The ladder had texts describing Sarah Baartman, including one about her performances and another by Georges Cuvier after he studied her body. These texts were mixed together, interrupting each other. Cuvier's text, which also called her hand "charming," gave the artwork its title. A bright light and a peepbox showed an old French print of Europeans staring at Baartman. The light also shined on the viewer looking into the box, showing how they were part of this kind of viewing.

• Seen (1990): This artwork built on Sa Main Charmante. It used mixed texts about Sarah Baartman's performances and also those of the famous dancer Josephine Baker. Baker's voice singing "Voulez-vous de la canne" played in the background. Viewers could look through a peephole to see an image of Baartman on a crate. The texts were on the slats of a wooden platform, like those used to display people for sale. When viewers stepped onto the platform, they were lit up, and their shadow appeared on a screen. Motorized eyes looked at them through a hole in the floor. This made the viewers themselves the ones being watched, rather than just watching others.

Other Key Projects

• Import-Export Funk Office (1992): This project explored how hip hop music and culture traveled between New York City, Los Angeles, and Cologne, Germany. Green acted like an artist-researcher, studying how hip hop culture was shared. She looked at how German magazines understood hip hop in the United States. Green's work questioned ideas about cultural trade and how culture is produced and sold. She displayed different cultural items, making people think about using culture without understanding its history.

• Mise-en-Scène (1992): This project investigated the role of French cities like Clisson and Nantes in the Atlantic slave trade. Green put traditional scenes from old French fabrics next to images of violence against Haitian slaves.

• Secret (1994): Green lived in an apartment in Le Corbusier's Firminy building and documented her stay with photos and video.

• Partially Buried in Three Parts (1995–1997): This work started with Robert Smithson's land art piece Partially Buried Woodshed (1970). Green used it to examine student protest movements in the United States, focusing on the Kent State shootings. She also looked at the student massacre in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1981. The installation showed the year 1970 from different viewpoints.

• Some Chance Operations (1999): This was an essay-film about the Italian filmmaker Elvira Notari.

• Elsewhere? (2002–2004): The film Elsewhere? was made for an installation in a garden in Kassel for an art show called Documenta 11. The film explores the idea of imaginary places and the history of gardens. In 2003, Elsewhere? was shown as an installation in Frankfurt, where 1400 colored names of imaginary places covered the walls.

• Muriel's Words (2004): In this sound installation, Green softly whispered parts of the writings of American poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser. The quiet whispers made it feel like you were secretly listening to someone reading from their journal.

• Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009): For this project, Green created an immersive art space at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Through drawings, sound, banners, and films, she explored ideas about islands, both real and imagined. A film with the same title showed fictional characters writing to each other about historical figures and the histories of places like Mallorca, Manhattan, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

• Begin Again, Begin Again (2015): This exhibition took place at the former home of architect R.M. Schindler in Los Angeles. It featured Green's old and new artworks from ten years, showing how different things move through time and space. The exhibition was designed to be a "circulatory experience," where everything worked together to "perform" the Schindler House. A sound piece called Begin Again, Begin Again (Circulatory Sound) (2015) featured her brother, Derrick Green, saying "begin again, begin again." The main part of the show was a 45-minute video that mixed images of the house with historical footage, ocean scenes, and other buildings.

• Cinematic Migrations Project (2014): In 2014, Green presented this two-year project with John Akomfrah and Lina Gopaul. It was a symposium (a meeting where experts discuss a topic) that explored how "migrations" relate to "the cinematic" (movies and filmmaking).

• Pacing (2019): This two-year project at Harvard University's Carpenter Center for Visual Arts focused on the building's famous design by Le Corbusier. Green explored ideas like moving from one place to another, memories of institutions, personal experiences, modern architecture, and how time passes.

Educator

Teaching has been a very important part of Renée Green's career. She has been a guest teacher at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program since 1991. From 1997 to 2002, she was a Professor at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna, Austria. In 2003, she moved back to the United States to become a Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. From 2005 to 2011, Green was a Professor and Dean of Graduate Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. She has also taught as a guest professor at places like Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is currently a professor.

Awards

In 2010, Renée Green received a United States Artists Fellow award.

In 2021, she won an Anonymous Was A Woman Award. This award is given to female artists. Other artists who received this award that year included Coco Fusco and Dyani White Hawk.

See also

In Spanish: Renée Green para niños