Ulysses Jenkins, a muralist, performer, and trailblazer of video artwork, has died at 80. His demise was confirmed by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, his hometown and first collaborator in a lifelong examination of the connective and harmful potential of mass media.
The museum mounted a retrospective of Jenkins’s work in 2022, titled “With out Your Interpretation,” and wrote in a remembrance shared on social media that he was “a real video griot whose work and spirit touched many.” It added that members of the Los Angeles group are organizing a memorial, with particulars forthcoming.
Jenkins was born in 1946 in Los Angeles and got here of age in a technological epoch: When he was a boy, tv turned a family commodity—“my video jones had begun,” he as soon as mentioned—and years later, he rode LA’s new subway. Talking to the Hammer on the event of his retrospective, he described his childhood fixation on tv as fueled by the miracle of seeing Black folks onscreen: “It was a serious occasion.”
Tv, nevertheless, was not at all times a buddy. By way of this new entry to mass media, Jenkins realized how his house was being packaged and broadcast to the broader world—as a flamable laboratory of sophistication, race, and gender, segregated within the title of security. A 1961 Los Angeles Occasions article was infamously headlined, “Marauders From Inside Metropolis Prey on L.A.’s Suburbs”—a framing that the paper would apologize for many years later.
He additionally witnessed the popularization of the time period “the ghetto” to explain Los Angeles’s predominantly Black neighborhoods. So totally has the phrase been absorbed into American tradition that it may be jarring to observe archival footage of his neighbors reacting with confused damage to what felt like a sudden and unilateral degradation.
Talking in 2022, Jenkins recalled bringing a video digicam to the 1972 Watts Pageant, one of many nation’s earliest and longest-running public celebrations of Black tradition and unity, with the “major goal” of “presenting an reverse view” of its prevailing portrayal as a spot to be “harassed by gangs.” The competition commemorates what’s variably often called the Watts Riots or the Watts Rebellion, the 1965 eruption of violence in Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhood sparked by police brutality and systemic racism. Prematurely, media protection had warned fairgoers to brace for extra unrest.
Jenkins as a substitute memorialized a peaceable celebration. In a single clip, a resident of a predominantly Hispanic Los Angeles neighborhood proclaims, “We have now folks of all races [here]. This may be America if we stick collectively.” By way of his lens, Black and Brown neighbors—lengthy the targets of presidency surveillance—turned surveyors, envisioning a way forward for their very own making.
His travels took him to Hawaii and San Francisco, however Los Angeles remained the solar of his orbit. After graduating from Hamilton Excessive Faculty in 1961, he enrolled at Southern College in Baton Rouge, majoring in portray and drawing. He returned to Los Angeles in 1969 and commenced exhibiting his work at Saint Paul’s Catholic Church. From 1970 to 1972, he labored for the Los Angeles County Probation Division, main artwork remedy applications for psychiatric non-delinquent youth.
Ulysses Jenkins: With out Your Interpretation, set up view. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, February 6–Could 15, 2022. Photograph: Jeff McLane
In 1972, Jenkins moved to Venice Seashore, the place he launched into considered one of his nice life works: muralism. Impressed by the Los Angeles Effective Arts Squad, he painted his first mural on the boardwalk on the nook of Rose Avenue and Ocean Entrance Stroll. He would go on to create works together with The Rat Lure and Transportation Introduced Artwork to the Folks.
In 1977, he joined Judy Baca, together with dozens of students, artists, and group members, to color the Nice Wall of Los Angeles. Stretching roughly half a mile alongside the Tujunga Wash—from Burbank Boulevard to Oxnard Road—it’s the longest mural in the USA and seeks to inform a counter-history of the millennia of inhabitants of the land now often called Southern California.
Additionally in Venice, he found one other—and finally his most formidable—software: the moveable video digicam. “I used to be already all for video,” he recalled, as impartial filmmaking exploded round him. Quickly after, he based the media collective Video Venice Information and commenced producing documentaries throughout Southern California.
Jenkins’s flip towards efficiency artwork was deliberate: “I wanted to do one thing that’s extra performative to present them a sign that I can transfer in that path.” In 1977, he enrolled at Otis Artwork Institute to check video, incomes his MFA in 1979. He recalled one workshop as significantly illuminating: he introduced a video that includes at one level solely his personal picture, saying nothing, merely current—and his classmates erupted in laughter.
“And I’m considering, I didn’t do something humorous,” he mentioned. “That’s once I realized there was one thing endemic to the notion of seeing African People on video that needed to do with comedy.” He tore into that notion in his artwork “intermittently to make folks query, ‘Why are you laughing?’”
In his first full video, the seminal Mass of Photographs (1977), Jenkins correctly cut up the query open, exposing its rotten bones. The viewer hears his labored respiratory earlier than seeing him rise from behind three useless televisions, a shawl patterned with the American flag comfortable round his throat. Photographs of the Klan, lynching, and blackface flash throughout the display screen, returning to him as he exhales in time to the strike of a sledgehammer.
Creeping across the televisions, he recites: “Years and years of TV reveals… you’re only a mass of photos you’ve gotten to know.” Talking of viewers, performer, “The hurting factor… the hidden ache… was written and bitten into your vein…” His voice grows determined: “I received’t and I don’t relate… however to some… I believe it’s too late.”
Conscious of its lethal potential, Jenkins aimed to launch his group from the distortions of interpretation. Susceptible, accompanied by his personal musical rating, follows a younger Black man using the then-newly opened Los Angeles subway. A gun flashes and distorts on display screen because the Black protagonist and one other commuter—a suited white man—appear to bleed into each other, exchanging charged impressions of menace.
The video was later devoted to Trayvon Martin, the Black teenager whose capturing demise by the hands of a white man was broadly lined within the media as a morality trial, with Martin decided the loser. He described the work in phrases that simply apply to oeuvre: “It’s a psychodrama of how folks take a look at one another, and have suspicions of one another.”
Jenkins was a three-time recipient of the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts’s particular person artist fellowship and was awarded the Black Filmmakers Corridor of Fame first place award within the experimental video class in 1990 and 1992. As creative director of Othervisions Studio, an interdisciplinary media arts manufacturing group, he obtained the California Arts Council’s Multicultural Entry Grant. He was an affiliate professor of studio artwork on the College of California, Irvine.
The article will likely be up to date shortly with remembrances.
