Ulysses Jenkins, the pioneering Los Angeles-born video artist whose avant-garde compositions embodied Black experimentalism, has died. He was 79.<\/p>\n
Jenkins\u2019 death was confirmed by his alma mater Otis College<\/a>, where he studied under renowned painter and printmaker Charles White in the late 1970s and returned as an instructor years later. The Los Angeles art and design school shared a statement <\/a>from the Charles White Archive, which said, \u201cJenkins had a profound impact on contemporary art and media practices.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cA trailblazing figure in Black experimental video, he was widely recognized for works that used image, sound, and cultural iconography to examine representation, race, gender, ritual, history, and power,\u201d the statement said. <\/p>\n A self-proclaimed \u201cgriot,\u201d<\/a> Jenkins throughout his decades-spanning career maintained an art practice grounded in the tradition of those West African oral historians who came before him. Through archival documentaries like \u201cThe Nomadics\u201d and surrealist murals like \u201c1848: Bandaide,\u201d he leveraged alternative media to challenge Eurocentric representations of Black Americans in popular culture. <\/p>\n He was both an artist and a storyteller who sought to \u201creassert the history and the culture,\u201d he told The Times<\/a> in 2022. That year, the Hammer Museum presented Jenkins\u2019 first major retrospective, \u201cUlysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEarly video art was about the problems with the media that we are still having today: the notions of truth,\u201d Jenkins said. \u201cTo that extent, early video art was a construct that was anti-media … a critical analysis of the media that we were viewing every night.\u201d<\/p>\n Born in 1946 to Los Angeles transplants from the South, Jenkins was ambivalent about the city, which offered his parents some refuge from the blatant systemic racism they encountered in their hometowns, but housed an entertainment industry that had long perpetuated anti-Black sentiment. <\/p>\n \u201cWhat Hollywood represents, especially in my work, is the classic plantation mentality,\u201d Jenkins told The Times<\/a> in 1986. \u201cAlthough people aren\u2019t necessarily enslaved by it, people enslave themselves to it because they\u2019re told how fantastic it is to help manifest these illusions for a corporate sponsor.\u201d<\/p>\n Jenkins, who participated in a group of artists committed to spontaneous action called Studio Z, was naturally drawn to video art over Hollywood filmmaking. \u201cI can address any issue and I don\u2019t have to wait for [the studios\u2019] big OK. I thought this was a land of freedom, and video allows me that freedom and opportunity that I can create for myself and at least feel that part of being an American,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Jenkins went on to deconstruct Hollywood\u2019s vision of the Black diaspora in experimental video compositions including \u201cMass of Images,\u201d which incorporates clips from D.W. Griffith\u2019s notoriously racist \u201cThe Birth of a Nation,\u201d and \u201cTwo-Tone Transfer,\u201d which depicts, in Jenkins\u2019 words<\/a>, a \u201cdreamscape in which the dreamer awakens to a visitation of three minstrels who tell the story of the development of African American stereotypes in the American entertainment industry.\u201d<\/p>\n Jenkins\u2019 legacy is not only artistic but institutional, with the luminary having held teaching appointments at UCSD and UCI, where he co-founded the digital filmmaking minor<\/a> with fellow Southern California-based artists Bruce Yonemoto and Bryan Jackson. <\/p>\n