Renée Green (born October 25, 1959) is an American artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her pluralistic practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, architecture, photography, prints, video, film, websites, and sound, which normally converge in highly layered and complex installations. She works to draw on cultural anthropology as well as social history, making her works well-researched and many times involving collaborators. Some of the topics she has covered include Sarah Baartman, the African slave trade, and hip hop in Germany.
In 2014, Green published Other Planes of There: Selected Writings with Duke University Press, a work that compiles a substantial collection of her work written between 1981 and 2010.
Early life and education
Green studied art at Wesleyan University, with an intermediary year at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Green also attended the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1989 she was a participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (ISP).
Green wrote Discourse on Afro-American Art as her graduating thesis from Wesleyan University, a "textual analysis of criticisms, which were written by both Black and White critics from the 1920s and the 1960s." A seminal influence was Green's participation in cataloging Sol LeWitt's donated collection to Wadsworth Atheneum. Green wrote the catalog entries for Adrian Piper, and Lawrence Weiner.
Her brother is Derrick Green, frontman of the Brazilian heavy metal band Sepultura.
Work
Green's work adopts the form of complex and highly formalized installations in which ideas, historical events and narratives, as well as cultural artifacts, are examined from myriad perspectives. Green's work investigates the shifts and gaps in what lives in private and public impressions as well as what has been envisioned and formulated. Her videos, exhibitions, and films have been presented and viewed in biennales, museums, and festivals across the world. As scholar Alexander Alberro notes, Green's attempt is not a didactic one, rather an invitation to participate in the construction of knowledge, as well as shifting perception: "Green consistently gives the spectator a central role in the process of deconstructing genealogical discourses and assuming subject positions. Indeed, a feature that recurs in her installations is the production of interactive environments that galvanize the viewer into the role of an equal participant in the construction of meaning."
Green explains in her own words the impetus behind this activity of collecting and exhibiting different data and materials: "I wanted to begin by examining an artifact, a text, a painting or a group of paintings, a decorative object, an image, a novel, a poem, a garden, a palace, a house. By beginning with these objects or places, and the contexts in which they appeared, it was possible to detect the intricate working of certain ideologies which were being put forth [...] and to attempt to decipher the contradictory pleasure which might accompany them."
In 1992, Green collaborated with the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia to create Mise-en-Scene: Commemorative Toile. This work encapsulates her use of appropriation to reevaluate history and claim attention to its type of presentation. In order to produce this work, Green incorporated “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.”
A lot of the materials collected for her projects come from the immense repository already in existence in our culture, but her work can not be considered as a mere assemblage of cultural artifacts, nor an appropriationist practice. In each of her projects, Green produces works of art in different mediums like photography [Secret (1994–2006)], prints [Code: Survey], films [Some Chance Operations (1999); Wavelinks (2002), Elsewhere? (2002], and sound [Vanished Gardens (2004), Muriel's Words (2004)], which are integrated in highly designed installations or environments. Due to the selective accumulation of materials Green's work has been labeled in some instances as archival.