Renée Green

Renée Green examines cultures, histories, memories, and aesthetics through complex sculptural installations that integrate film, digital media, sound, and writing with photography, textiles, printmaking, and other mediums. Drawing on the organizing principles of cultural anthropology and social history, her artistic practice is research-intensive, theoretically rigorous, and frequently involves multiple collaborators. Since the late 1980s Green has explored a variety of subjects, including sites of the African slave trade such as the French cities of Nantes and Clisson, the figure of Saartjie Baartman (known as the Hottentot Venus), and hip-hop music in Germany. As the art historian Alexander Alberro has noted, a "methodology of citation" underlies Green's expansive artworks, which "construct a new type of history based entirely on the energies located in preexisting fragments."^#

Green's Mise-en-Scène: Commemorative Toile, first made in 1992 in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia, captures her use of appropriation to reexamine history and call attention to its modes of presen­tation. To make her toile, Green combined traditional bucolic scenes typical of eighteenth-century upholstery fabric with violent scenes of enslavement and uprisings. Benign floral gar­lands frame images of the lynching of a French­man during the Haitian revolution and of an enchained and unclothed black man kneeling by the desk of a sumptuously dressed white man. Using this fabric, Green constructs installations reminiscent of museum period rooms, with chairs, settees, drapes, and wallpaper crafted from the pinkish-red toile. She subverts the toile and period room as historical types to tell alternative histories.