Renée Cox

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The seven-foot tall Soul Culture Statue (2025) was conceived by the artist Renée Cox following a residency in which she participated in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in 2015. There, she worked with terracotta, in a departure from her 30-year practice in photography that was followed by exploration in three-dimensional collages. This work is the artist’s first major public artwork and large-scale sculpture. In a reunion and extension of her full body of work, in particular her Soul Culture series, Cox arrives at full 3D expression with this iconic statue. The figure's placement atop a one-foot tall mirror pedestal is intended to represent the artist's appreciation and application of Afrofuturist philosophies, which are reflected and refracted to continue in an expansive view of the future.

Soul Culture Statue blurs gender, race, ethnicity, and culture as Cox draws from West African funerary sculptures, Pre-Columbian imagery from Peru, and Dogu figures from Japan to shape the piece, in a personal examination of identity politics, sociocultural factors, and self that is constant in her work.

The sculpture was commissioned by KODA and exhibited at KODA House on Governors Island, NY, in 2025.

Renee Cox (b. 1960, Colgate, Jamaica) received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts (1992), and was part of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1993). Cox has been the recipient of several awards, exhibits nationally and internationally and is in the collection of numerous museums and institutions, such as the Brooklyn Museum, NY, LACMA, CA, The Princeton University Art Museum, NJ, The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ, and The Whitney Museum, New Yor

Soul Culture Statue is on view through January 31, 2027