Artist and ACT Professor Renée Green was recently featured in Frieze in a profile by Zoë Hopkins.
Below is an excerpt from the article “Charting Renée Green’s Unfolding Art Histories.”
From early critiques at Wesleyan to her upcoming Dia Beacon show, Green’s work explores the complex intersections of race, memory, and global exchange.
I was never not going to be an artist.
By the time Renée Green was a senior at Wesleyan University in 1980, she was already keen to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to her creative practice. She understood that she was both an artist and a writer. She also understood that she wanted to write about her artwork and had, in fact, already begun to do so. What she couldn’t understand were those precepts that alienated artists from their desire to write, speak or engage in discourse about their work.
After an art history professor told her that artists didn’t know how to interpret their own work without the input of art historians, she wrote in her journal: ‘Is the artist allowed to speak or must his or her works speak for themselves, which leaves open the possibility of all sorts of conjecture?’ Further, she wondered how this question would diffract when it interacted with politics of race: ‘How is this problem, interpretation, common to artists in general – different or more complex for Black artists.’
In recent years, Green has become best known for her series ‘Space Poems’ (2007–ongoing), colourful banners emblazoned with phrases borrowed from artists and thinkers important to Green, as well as from her own writings and interviews. The ‘Space Poems’ elaborate a kind of choral citational ethic, wherein voices from different generations, movements and disciplines can share discursive space. Green has also continued to make films and video works, many of which engage the problematics of globalization, migration and displacement.
The full profile can be found here.
