This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Coco Fusco.
Born: 18 June 1960, Cuba
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Juliana Emilia Fusco Miyares
Indigenous people on display in a large golden cage, the artist lying in a coffin, an abusive drill sergeant commanding prisoners in orange jumpsuits, and recreations of union-busting activities on CCTV, are just some of the striking and intensely political images that make up Coco Fusco’s intertwined practice of art and activism. Across all the varied mediums in which she works her art interrogates the systems of contemporary power that impact and restrict the lives of people ‘othered’ by the society they live in, whether because of their race or ethnicity, nationality, class position, gender, or the intersections between them.
Working as an academic and writer as well as an artist, Fusco’s work is both playful and funny and critically rigorous. It foregrounds the ridiculousness and absurdity of racism and colonialism whilst making serious challenges to the way that modern Western societies (particularly America) might wish to see themselves on the global stage. This is part of an overarching commitment to interrogations of identity and notions of the self, urgent concerns in the modern world.
Childhood
The artist known as Coco Fusco was born Juliana Emilia Fusco Miyares in 1960. Her mother, a Cuban exile, had fled the Cuban revolution earlier that same year, with the specific goal of giving birth in the United States so that she could more easily obtain immigration documents herself. Fusco had two brothers, one of whom died in the 1980s while serving in the military.
Fusco’s father, who was Italian, passed away when she was young, leaving her mother to raise three children on her own. She says of her mother, “She really put a lot of emphasis on stability, respectability, and financial security.” During summers, her mother sent her to Miami to spend time with female family members, which she considered important as Fusco had no sisters. During High School, Fusco was interested in dance and theatre, but her mother pushed her towards a profession such a medicine or law and didn’t support her interest in the arts, warning her that she was “gonna end up unemployed, drinking cappuccinos on the Lower East Side.”
Through her mother’s efforts Fusco grew up with several strong female role models, particularly her maternal grandmother. Her grandmother was born in Oriente Province, Cuba, in 1902, and orphaned at a young age. She learned to sew and began to do it professionally at the age of thirteen in order to support herself and her younger siblings. She married at the age of twenty and had five children. Fusco’s grandmother continued to work tirelessly as a seamstress whilst also putting up with constant abuse from her husband. When her second daughter (Fusco’s mother) turned seventeen, she encouraged her to leave town and make a life for herself elsewhere.
Fusco’s mother went to Havana where she studied and worked until she was able to pay for her mother and siblings to join her there. Says Fusco, “Eleven years later my mother boarded her first plane and went to the United States with twenty-five dollars and a suitcase of clothing my grandmother made for her. Nine years after that, she sent for my grandmother. In all my childhood I never heard her express regret at having left.”
Education and Early Training
Fusco received a BA in Semiotics from Brown University in 1982. She entered Brown at a time when student activism was on the rise, with her peers protesting on campus against issues like nuclear power and the U.S. involvement in Central America. As a result of her experiences Fusco developed her own strong sense of political engagement and committed to representing it in her academic and artistic endeavors. Fusco’s time at university was also informed by her experience growing up in an educational system that sought to minimize discussion of individual and collective experiences of suffering, in favor of the promulgation of a narrative of a “forward march toward progress”. This often failed to address the nuanced and complex reality of social and political history, particularly in relation to systemic and deeply engrained issues like racism.
Fusco joined Brown’s Semiotics program during its early development. She explains that it “was the channel through which all this new left thinking, poststructuralist thinking, was entering the university and entering academic studies, so it was very exciting, it was like being on the beginning of something, on the cusp of a wave”. Her classmates there included film director, screenwriter, and producer Todd Haynes, novelist Rick Moody, investigative journalist Kate Doyle, and film producer Christine Vachon. One of Fusco’s most influential professors was Argentinian writer and artist Leandro Katz, for whom she later worked as an assistant.
As a student, Fusco became very interested in the theoretical work of French philosopher Michel Foucault. However, she wasn’t able to engage with postcolonial studies in school as, at the time, there was strict disciplinary policing that marked it as the domain of anthropology. Nevertheless, Fusco joined a reading group after school, studying texts by scholars like French West Indian political philosopher Frantz Fanon, and other postcolonial theorists. At this point she developed an interest in suppressed collective histories, as well as the visual artifacts (such as photographs) that have been used by colonized peoples. She began to write for publications like The Village Voice, The East Village Eye, Afterimage, and Art in America.
After Brown, Fusco received an MA in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 1985. Following Stanford she began to create art in a more serious and sustained manner, particularly exploring performance as a way to “make sense out of the clashes between cultures” that she experienced as a Latinx woman in the United States. During this period she met many collaborators and kindred spirits. This included a group of Cuban artists, which included painters José Bedia and Flavio Garciandía, and curator Gerardo Mosquera, who were visiting the U.S. She developed a relationship with many of these artists and began traveling to Cuba regularly to work with artists there (until about the mid-1990s when she stopped due to the post-Cold War political and cultural climate).
As a young adult, Fusco moved out of her mother’s house to a cheap apartment on Bank Street. In 1987, she then moved to another inexpensive apartment in what is now East Williamsburg, where she worked day jobs to support her artistic pursuits. She recalls that her first desk job as a fact-checker for The American Lawyer magazine was “pretty horrific” due to the “toxic” and “repressive” work environment. She says, “I talked to lawyers all day long and discovered how aggressive and argumentative they can be.”
Mature Period
Fusco’s artistic practice continued to develop in the early 1990s, with a series of projects created in collaboration with friends and peers, often centered around performance or live interaction with an audience. Several of these key pieces, many of which are those that she is now best known for, such as Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (a collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña) toured extensively between 1992 and 1994, providing her with a global profile within the art world. The success of these performance projects led to further collaborations and opportunities to share her work. Fusco’s art began to be presented around the world, including in the 1993, 2008, and 2022 Whitney Biennials, and the 2015 Venice Biennale.
The works that Fusco toured around the world also included a series of projects concerned with death and femininity, such as El Ultimo Deseo (The Last Wish), where Fusco staged a full Catholic wake with herself in the role of the corpse at the 1997 Havana Biennial. In Rights of Passage (also in 1997) Fusco dressed in the uniform of a South African police officer at the Johannesburg Biennale, signing ‘passbooks’ for the audience that admitted them to the work. These suites of works established key themes and strategies that continue to be deployed across Fusco’s work today, including the display of a live body in place of a dead or absent one, and the use of uniform and/or costume to inhabit and subvert roles representative of state authority.
This international success also led to further teaching and publishing opportunities, a parallel and intertwined career Fusco continued to maintain alongside her work as a performer and visual artist. She has published a number of critical essays and books focusing on the relationships between gender, race, colonialism, and power structures in Latin America and across the globe, and has taught at Temple University, Columbia University, Parsons School of Design, and MIT. She received a Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University in 2005.
Fusco has one son, Aurelio, whom she adopted in 2005 when she was forty-five years old. She explains that, “I imagined myself having children at some point in my life from when I was very young, but I also had a very strong desire to finish my education and develop myself professionally. I didn’t want to stop doing that in order to have children.” When she reached her forties, she felt ready, and contacted New York’s Spence-Chapin Adoption Services. The vetting process took about a year. She states that “You really have to look at yourself very carefully and understand what’s involved and what the particular challenges are before you can begin to make yourself available as a candidate.”
During her first year of motherhood, she was able to take a sabbatical and maternity leave in order to travel the world with her baby and bond with him. Once she returned to work, Fusco was concerned about the “psychological damage” her absence could do to her son. As she explains, “I’m a single mother. I can’t always leave him with someone else, because it’s really bad for him. Kids know and feel the difference between being cared for by family or by others and fear of abandonment is a real issue.” Fusco highlights the difficulties of single parenthood (particularly in New York City) and how incompatible parenting can be whilst trying to maintain an academic and artistic career (a career that is itself a political point about burdens of expectation and social pressure to conform). She has called motherhood “the greatest performance” of her life.
Fusco is currently based in New York. In addition to her scholarship and art making endeavors, she is also a vocal advocate for free speech for artists around the world, like American painter Dana Schutz and Cuban rapper Maykel Osorbo, who face censorship and punishment from their governments and communities.
The Legacy of Coco Fusco
Coco Fusco’s Performance art serves as an extension of her academic research and writing, and of her social/political activism. In her performances, she manages to explore the nuanced realities of lived experiences of racism, oppression, postcolonialism, sexism, and violence, in a thoughtful but tongue-in-cheek manner. Her use of her body to reveal these issues through racialized and gendered reactions to it has seen Fusco’s practice have become a central example in the development of Performance and live art as an area of academic study. Of particular note is the way that her use of her own body represents the voices and concerns of marginalized peoples. Writer and curator Wendy Vogel calls her “one of the artworld’s foremost champions of free speech”. Fusco’s critical work has extensively documented performance from Cuba, the Americas, and other countries that have otherwise been ignored or under researched by Western academics, with her book Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (2000) a major text for performance studies at universities across the globe.
Fusco’s direct influence can be seen in the work of fellow Cuban Performance artists Tania Bruguera and Hamlet Lavastida, who also use their own bodies as a tool of artistic activism and explore issues related to colonization, subjugation, oppression, violence, and opposition. Both Bruguera and Lavastida have been arrested and imprisoned by the Cuban government because their art has been viewed as a challenge to the government.