Charting Renée Green’s Unfolding Art Histories

By the time Renée Green was a senior at Wesleyan University in 1980, she was already keen to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to her creative practice. She understood that she was both an artist and a writer. She also understood that she wanted to write about her artwork and had, in fact, already begun to do so. What she couldn’t understand were those precepts that alienated artists from their desire to write, speak or engage in discourse about their work.

After an art history professor told her that artists didn’t know how to interpret their own work without the input of art historians, she wrote in her journal: ‘Is the artist allowed to speak or must his or her works speak for themselves, which leaves open the possibility of all sorts of conjecture?’ Further, she wondered how this question would diffract when it interacted with politics of race: ‘How is this problem, interpretation, common to artists in general – different or more complex for Black artists.’

It’s an astonishingly clearheaded line of inquiry to flow from the pen of a 21 year old, although quite natural for Green, whose assiduous brilliance is visible in the earliest of her art and writing. For instance, her 1981 undergraduate thesis ‘Discourse on Afro-American Art’ – which traversed critical theory from Alain Locke to Roland Barthes – argued against the unity of the term ‘Black’ or ‘Afro-American artist’. That same year, her writing – insightful entries on the work of Adrian Piper and Lawrence Weiner – was published for the first time in the exhibition catalogue No Title: The Collection of Sol LeWitt.

In the intervening years, Green has continued to rigorously pursue questions on the interaction between art and discourse. Her work – which traverses film, sculpture, sound and installation – sits in a lineage of conceptual art broadly interested in critiques of public memory, linguistic and ideological structure, and trans-cultural/trans-national exchange. Green’s probing acumen is visible from the outset, where one already finds dense layers of references to philosophy, literature and art history. Her installation Sites of Geneology (1990), which was exhibited at PS1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), was conceived in response to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). ‘Each of them evoke narratives that can be reiterated in different ways, different forms, even in different generations’, Green stated in a 2021 interview for Artforum. The site-specific work sees lines of twine strung across the space, from the rafters to the staircase. The piece also included a typewriter and reams of paper, where Green would eventually create a personal journal of her experience of installing the piece: a lofty reflection on the mundane (lower and higher) and social (Black and white) binaries of life.

In recent years, Green has become best known for her series ‘Space Poems’ (2007–ongoing), colourful banners emblazoned with phrases borrowed from artists and thinkers important to Green, as well as from her own writings and interviews. The ‘Space Poems’ elaborate a kind of choral citational ethic, wherein voices from different generations, movements and disciplines can share discursive space. Green has also continued to make films and video works, many of which engage the problematics of globalization, migration and displacement.

I was never not going to be an artist. Renée Green

In October of last year, I took a trip to Somerville, Massachusetts, where Green has been primarily based since 2011. (She also has an apartment in Washington Heights, New York.) When I arrived at Green’s home – which is also her studio and the headquarters of her production company Free Agent Media (FAM) – she had just finished an intense stretch of travel: Brazil in mid-September for the opening of her show ‘Come Closer: Percepts’ at auroras, São Paulo; the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City for a lecture hosted by the Holt/Smithson Foundation in late September; and Bellingham, Washington, to visit her art installation at Western Washington University.

Next to the table where we sat and drank tea – made with fresh lemon verbena from Green’s garden – stood a mock-up of the entry hall at Dia Beacon, where the artist will open a solo show in March. The exhibition, Green’s first solo museum presentation in New York, will dovetail old and newly commissioned work. Pieces from the 1990s, including her series ‘Color’ (1990) – which undertakes a critique of colour as a social-racial category and artistic device – will appear alongside her series ‘Media Bichos’ (2012–ongoing), modular sculptures made to house moving-image or sound installations. Dia has also commissioned several new ‘Space Poems’.

The Beacon show marks a kind of full-circle moment for Green, a chance to share space with many of the conceptual and minimalist artists who influenced her early practice, such as Weiner, On Kawara and Robert Smithson. ‘She was steeped in these conceptualist discourses from a very young age,’ Dia curator Jordan Carter, who has organized Green’s exhibition, tells me. ‘And now that her work will be in contact/context with other Dia artists and with our institutional history, I think those textures will really be animated.’

Before she knew of conceptual art vanguards like those in the Dia collection, Green learned from those around her growing up in Cleveland. She was raised in a household full of creatives: her mother was a vocalist and pianist, her grandfather a tenor singer. Frances Cole – daughter of Nat King Cole and a gifted harpsichordist – was a frequent guest at her childhood home. Her youngest brother grew up to become a vocalist for the Brazilian heavy metal band Sepultura. In this environment, she tells me, becoming an artist felt preordained: ‘I was never not going to be an artist.’

This musical upbringing sounds itself in her artwork. In Import/Export Funk Office (1992), energized by a collaboration with German cultural theorist and music writer Diedrich Diederichsen, Green traced hip hop’s wayward path from New York to Los Angeles to Germany.  For her 2002 video project Wavelinks, she filmed interviews with artists and critics – including Diederichsen and Christian Marclay – who shared their musings on electronic music.

Other forms of creativity also featured prominently in her childhood. As a toddler, she attended Karamu Nursery, an affiliate of Karamu House Theater, which was founded in 1915 and is one of the longest running Black theatre companies in the country. ‘Since nursery school, I’ve been in this experimental mode,’ Green tells me. ‘It seems really radical. I mean, these are people of African descent who have made a theatre, they’ve made their nursery school, and it’s meant to be about imagination, and the freedom to create and not to be oppressed.’

Green’s probing acumen is visible from the outset, where one already finds dense layers of references to philosophy, literature and art history.

More than 40 years after leaving Cleveland, Green had the opportunity to exhibit in her hometown in 2022, when the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland asked her to take part in the city’s FRONT triennial. For the resulting exhibition, ‘Contact’, Green invited fellow artists – including John Akomfrah, Che Applewhaite, Mika Tajima and her brother Derrick Green – to participate alongside her. Both curator and artist, Green conceived of the exhibition as a practice of friendship, the gallery space an architecture of relation and the art itself a form of gathering. For Green, the exhibition’s titular word exacts the essence of this social and affective bricolage: ‘Contact is really the stimulus for how you can be in the world,’ she insists. ‘It’s something that might exist from beyond, as well as locally or between people. It’s very capacious.’

Teaching has also played a vital role in shaping Green’s conception of contact and relationality. She lives only a mile or so from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she teaches in the Department of Art, Culture and Technology. This semester, she is teaching ‘Cinematic Migrations’, a seminar that deals with the entanglements between film, media and their dissemination within a global context of mass migration and displacement. She has been developing the seminar since 2012 and, in 2014, arranged a conference on the topic at MIT, which engaged thinkers and artists including Manthia Diawara, Arthur Jafa, Laura U. Marks and Fred Moten.

Green’s teaching career has been extensive. Before arriving at MIT, she taught at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts; the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her pedagogical encounters have also energized her own practice. She speaks effusively about her students, who have embellished her art with tendrils of thought and knowledge that have become indispensable to how she approaches creative work. ‘Teaching is a way of being in conversation with people from different backgrounds, ages and forms of knowledge,’ she tells me. Several of her students – among them Nolan Oswald Dennis, Laura Genes and Suneil Sanzgiri – have become her close collaborators.

Like any good teacher, Green is also a perpetual student. When I arrived at her home in Somerville, the first thing my eye took note of were the stacks and stacks of books that attest to her voracious reading habit. Two entire rooms essentially function as libraries. Carts, desks and shelves – some of which stretch from floor to ceiling – are crowded with titles, many of which she collected early in her career, and to which she continually returns. No topic is off-limits for Green: art history, philosophy, anthropology, criticism, novels and poetry commingle on her bookshelves and in the folds of her intellect.

For Green – who attended the Radcliffe Publishing Course after graduating from Wesleyan and spent several years working at publications like Rolling Stone and Interview Magazine – books and printed matter are veined with preciousness. Aware of ‘every part of the book and every part of the magazine’, she is keenly attuned to a publication’s materiality, organization and voice. Her ‘Space Poems’ are evidence of this awareness in their careful use of font and design techniques that speak to the texts cited on the banners.

Naturally, Green’s artistic and writing practices have also soaked up these textual influences on a less material, more metaphysical register. The titles of her artworks and exhibitions are often inflected with theory and philosophy. ‘Come Closer: Percepts’, for instance, is a nod to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s interventions on the relationship between art and percepts in What Is Philosophy? (1991). ‘Inevitable Distances’, her 2022 exhibition at Berlin’s KW Institute and daadgalerie, was titled after a remark Stuart Hall made in a 2004 interview. Literary references abound, from Octavia E. Butler to Muriel Rukeyser. Green has written frequently and fervently about the symbiotic relationship that her work shares with poetry. During our interview, she repeatedly emphasized the kind of expression it makes possible in her work: ‘There are a lot of things that aren’t easily articulated because they’re very complex and multiple. Poetry helps me address things, maybe circuitously or obliquely or with opacity.’

Poetry helps me address things, maybe circuitously or obliquely or with opacity. Renée Green

Our conversation felt like an oral bibliography of sorts: Green moved dexterously between citations of William Carlos Williams and Greg Tate, Ishmael Reed and Sherry Turkle. Many of the people she quoted are her friends. They cite and write about her, too: Moten, for instance, contributed an essay to Green’s 2020 book Pacing, which followed her eponymous exhibition at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in Cambridge in 2016.

While her show at the Carpenter Center was close to home, the artist has spent a good chunk of her career observing the American art world from a distance: she lived in Vienna for nearly a decade from the early 1990s. Berlin has also been a home to her. Many of her close friends and confidants – among them Akomfrah, Harun Farocki and Hall – live or lived outside of the United States. Operating from these international contexts, though, has only made her perceptive faculties all the sharper when it comes to understanding the particular strands of culture and politics that interact in American art.

A lot has changed in art and in America since Green embarked on her career in the 1980s. Many of the people who influenced her art and writing – Farocki, Hall, Tate – have since passed away. The world has kept going, as it does. Her art has witnessed the tech boom and the attendant birth of digitally native art, the acceleration of finance capitalism and the rise of the multi-million dollar artwork, globalization and its aesthetic elaborations. ‘It was a different moment,’ she says about those early days. ‘It was pre-internet, pre-social media – all of these things that people take for granted now.’

Green has her concerns about the contemporary cultural atmosphere. She worries about the increasing constraints which capitalism exerts on art – i.e., the imperative for artists to answer to the ever-rising demands of the market, the overrepresentation of donor interests in art institutions and the limitations on creative expression that follow. She is also anxious about the broader cultural decrease in reading and intellectual engagement, but she refuses to be slowed down by these phenomena. A certain optimism persists over and against it all. ‘Art is ongoing,’ she stresses. ‘I don’t see it being stopped’.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 248 with the headline ‘RENÉE GREEN’

‘Renée Green’ will be on view at Dia Beacon, New York from 7 March

^{Main image: Renée Green, Partially Buried Triptych, 1996. Installation view, moCa Cleveland, FRONT International 2022. Courtesy: the artist, Free Agent Media, and Bortolami, New York; photograph: ©FieldStudio}