Ulysses Jenkins: Video Griot

Ulysses Jenkins: Video Griot

12 Episodes

There has never been another artist like Ulysses Jenkins. For over fifty years, the Los Angeles–born and –based polymath has produced an expansive and unclassifiable body of work that tackles, in idiosyncratic and often wickedly humorous ways, thorny issues of race, gender, national history, and their intersections with pop culture. An early adopter of, and staunch advocate for, video and digital technology, Jenkins minted a jagged, jolting style in confrontational short works like MASS OF IMAGES, INCONSEQUENTIAL DOGGEREAL, and TWO-ZONE TRANSFER, all of which feature him as a performer. Jenkins has never stopped innovating and experimenting in the ensuing years, and recently became the subject of his first major career retrospective—a joint venture between Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art and LA’s Hammer Museum. Jenkins’s work is timeless, blazingly contemporary, and, once experienced, never forgotten.

Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation is on view at the Hammer Museum February 6–May 15, 2022.

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Ulysses Jenkins: Video Griot
  • Mass of Images

    Episode 1

    Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1978 • United States

    Performance artist and video visionary Ulysses Jenkins lays bare the psychic trauma wrought by the media’s stereotyped portrayal of Black Americans.

  • Two-Zone Transfer

    Episode 2

    Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1979 • United States

    Ulysses Jenkins—alongside fellow Otis Art Institute student Kerry James Marshall—stages a surrealist minstrel show in this dream-vision exploration of the history of Black representation.

  • Remnants of the Watts Festival

    Episode 3

    Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1980 • United States

    In 1972 and ’73, Ulysses Jenkins and the collective from Venice, California, known as Video Venice News documented the Watts Summer Festival—a major Black cultural event established in 1966 to commemorate the Watts Rebellion that jolted the Los ...

  • Inconsequential Doggereal

    Episode 4

    Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1981 • United States

    Ulysses Jenkins continues his investigation of mass-media saturation in this kaleidoscope of VHS-recorded TV flotsam, menacing lawnmowers, footballs, and the artist’s own waggling butt.

  • Cake Walk

    Episode 5

    Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1983 • United States

    This video documents “Cake Walk,” an installation and performance piece by artist Houston Conwill, staged in November 1983 at Linda Goode Bryant’s pioneering New York gallery Just Above Midtown. The piece refers to the cakewalk dance that develo...

  • Dream City

    Episode 6

    Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1983 • United States

    A video companion to a twenty-four-hour group performance organized by Ulysses Jenkins, DREAM CITY collages live music, poetry, and dance into a pulsating kaleidoscope of color and sound. Frequent Jenkins collaborators Maren Hassinger, Senga Nen...

  • Without Your Interpretation

    Episode 7

    Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1983 • United States

    Featuring the artist-filmmaker’s regular collaborators Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, this 1983 performance by Ulysses Jenkins issues a forceful condemnation of American indifference to the crises faced by the developing world.

  • Self Divination

    Episode 8

    Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1989 • United States

    The first part of Ulysses Jenkins’s VIDEO GRIOTS TRILOGY—a series of video meditations on history and culture in the which the filmmaker uses archival footage, photographs, image processing, and an elegiac soundtrack to construct an “other” hist...

  • Mutual Native Duplex

    Episode 9

    Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1990 • United States

    The second installment of Ulysses Jenkins’s VIDEO GRIOTS TRILOGY—a series of video meditations on history and culture in the which the filmmaker uses archival footage, photographs, image processing, and an elegiac soundtrack to construct an “oth...

  • The Nomadics

    Episode 10

    Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1991 • United States

    The third work of Ulysses Jenkins’s VIDEO GRIOTS TRILOGY—a series of video meditations on history and culture in the which the filmmaker uses archival footage, photographs, image processing, and an elegiac soundtrack to construct an “other” hist...

  • Planet X

    Episode 11

    Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 2006 • United States

    Ulysses Jenkins looks at the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans through the lens of the Planet X doomsday myth and a proclamation of coming disaster to African Americans issued by avant-garde jazz prophet Sun Ra.

  • Notions of Freedom

    Episode 12

    Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 2007 • United States

    In NOTIONS OF FREEDOM, Ulysses Jenkins charts the history of jazz—what he calls “the first true American art form”—from its beginnings in New Orleans and the American South to the classic work of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and through th...