Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation

Organized closely with the artist—including the digitization of a sprawling archive and conversations with Ulysses Jenkins and his collaborators—the exhibition encompasses a broad range of over fifteen videos and almost sixty works in total that showcase his collaborations, mural paintings, photography, and performances, revealing the scope of Jenkins’s practice.

Among the many video works of the exhibition is Mass of Images (1978), an innovative video art piece that critiques the media’s role in perpetuating racist and harmful images of the African diaspora in the United States. Like other works in the exhibition, it is grounded in issues that remain at the heart of contemporary conversations about inequality and environmental devastation amplified by unchecked capitalism, governmental oppression, and the impact of systemic racism on Black cultural production.