BY Martine Syms in Influences | 02 OCT 17
Featured in
Issue 6

Artists' Artists: Martine Syms

Renée Green, Import/Export Funk Office, 1992

M
BY Martine Syms in Influences | 02 OCT 17

Renée Green, Import/Export Funk Office, 1992, installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2016

My first encounter with Renée Green’s Import/Export Funk Office was in 2001 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, on a field trip with my eighth-grade class. I appreciated the architecture created by the shelving and walked around it several times before picking up a copy of The Source. I scanned the magazine pages, yelling out the names of the rappers I knew. I recognized many of the books on display. My brother had been reading Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968) and wouldn’t shut up about it. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that this piece had an author. I just liked being in that room.

Martine Syms is an artist. Her solo exhibition ‘Grio College’ is currently on show at the Hessel Museum of Art, New York until 27 November. The fictional ‘Grio College’ will also feature in Syms’s upcoming film The African Desperate (2022).

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