Coco Fusco

Biography

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer and a professor at The Cooper Union School of Art. A transdisciplinary artist of enormous breadth, Coco Fusco confronts systems of thinking that establish accepted power structures and cultural histories with a focus on Latin America and Cuba. In performance, video, critical essays, interviews, and curatorial projects, Fusco keenly examines and destabilizes the enclosures that regulate, divide, and exploit people. In exposing the entanglements of history and the social consequences of colonial power, racism, and gender and class discrimination, Fusco’s work elucidates a nuanced perspective.

Fusco is a recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, Latinx Art Award, a Fulbright fellowship and a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco's performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008 and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou, the Imperial War Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015). She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York.

Fusco is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (Tate, 2015, and a Spanish translation from Turner Libros, 2017); A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (Seven Stories Press, 2008); and The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (Routledge/Iniva, 2001). She co-edited Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (Harry N. Abrams, 2003) and edited Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (Routledge, 1999). She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and several other magazines.

She received a BA in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), an MA in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985) and a PhD in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007).

She was born in 1960 in New York, where she continues to live and work.

SAF participation:
Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023)
March Meeting 2020