Coco Fusco

...feeling that the world is hurtling toward one disaster after another redoubles my senses of commitment to art-making that disrupts complacency. – Coco Fusco

Across three decades of intellectual and artistic research, Coco Fusco’s work has engaged with and interrogated the complexities of race, colonialism, exile, gender, identity, and the shaping of new societies. A remarkably interdisciplinary artist and writer, Fusco has significantly contributed to the disciplines of performance, video, exhibition practice, archival research, and writing. Her practice frequently reflects on conceptual and embodied existence within socio-political frameworks, plumbing the depths of representation and their effects on cultural memory.

Coco Fusco (b. 1960, New York, USA) lives and works in New York.

Her most recent exhibitions include Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word, Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana (2024); Tomorrow I Will Become an Island, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2023); With Others in Mind, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2023); Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word, Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca (2023); Swimming on Dry Land/Nadar en seco, Flaten Art Museum, Northfield (2019). Recent group exhibitions include Collection 1980s – Present, MoMA, New York (2024); Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2024); (Un)Settled, Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia (2024); untranquil now, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2024); Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); Globale Resistance, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); Truth: 24 frames per second, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas (2017); The Natural Order of Things, Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2016); All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennial, Venice (2015).

The artist’s performances and videos have been presented in three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008, and 1993), alongside many other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Institute of Chicago, Chciago; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), Barcelona.

She is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award (2021), a Latinx Artist Fellowship (2021), Anonymous Was a Woman (2021), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2013), an Absolut Art Writing Award (2013), and a Herp Albert Award (2003), among others.

Fusco is a professor at the Cooper Union School of Art and author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015); English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995); The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001); and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999); and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). Fusco is also a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications.