Video art pioneer dies at 80

Ulysses Jenkins, a muralist, performer and video art pioneer, has died aged 79. The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles confirmed his death. The Hammer Museum was his home and first collaborator in a lifelong study of the connective and destructive potential of mass media.

The museum hosted a retrospective of Jenkins’ work in 2022, titled “Interpretation Without You,” and wrote in a commemorative article shared on social media that he was “a true master of video whose work and spirit touched many.” It added that members of the Los Angeles community were organizing a memorial event and details would be announced soon.

Born in Los Angeles in 1946, Jenkins grew up in an age of technology: Televisions became a household item when he was a child—”I started Video Jones,” he says—and a few years later, he rode L.A.’s first subway. In an interview with the Hammer at his retrospective, he described his childhood fascination with television, fueled by the wonder of seeing black people on screen: “It was a big thing.”

However, television is not always a friend. Through this new access to mass media, Jenkins became aware of how his home was packaged and broadcast to the wider world—as a flammable laboratory of class, race, and gender, segregated in the name of safety. 1961 Los Angeles Times The article was infamously headlined, “Predators from the Inner City Loot in Los Angeles Suburbs,” a framing that the paper apologized for decades later.

He also witnessed the popularity of the term “ghetto” to describe Los Angeles’ predominantly black neighborhoods. The term has become so thoroughly ingrained into American culture that it can be uncomfortable to see archival footage of his neighbors’ confused and hurtful reactions to the sudden, unilateral demotion.

Speaking in 2022, Jenkins recalled bringing a video camera to the 1972 Watts Festival, one of the country’s earliest and longest-running public celebrations of black culture and unity, whose “primary goal” was to “present a counterpoint of view” to its popular description as a place “harassed by gangs.” The holiday commemorates the Watts Riots, or Watts Uprising, the 1965 violent outbreak of police brutality and systemic racism in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Media reports warned showgoers in advance to be prepared for more unrest.

Jenkins held a peaceful celebration. In one video, a resident of a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood in Los Angeles declares, “We have people of all races[here]. If we stick together, this is America.” Through his lens, black and brown neighbors — long targets of government surveillance — become surveyors, looking toward a future of their own making.

His travels took him to Hawaii and San Francisco, but Los Angeles remained the sun in his orbit. After graduating from Hamilton High School in 1961, he enrolled at Southern University in Baton Rouge, where he majored in painting. In 1969 he returned to Los Angeles and began exhibiting his work at St. Paul’s Catholic Church. From 1970 to 1972, he worked for the Los Angeles County Probation Department, where he directed art therapy programs for psychiatric non-criminal youth.

In 1972, Jenkins moved to Venice Beach, where he began one of the greatest works of his life: murals. Inspired by the Los Angeles Art Corps, he painted his first mural on the boardwalk at the corner of Rose Avenue and the Boardwalk. He continued to create works including rat trap and Transportation brings art to people.

In 1977, along with Judy Baca and dozens of scholars, artists, and community members, he painted Los Angeles Great Wall. The mural, which stretches about a half-mile along the Tujunga Wash from Burbank Boulevard to Oxnard Street, is the longest mural in the United States and aims to tell the counter-history of thousands of years of residents of the land now known as Southern California.

Also in Venice, he discovered another—and ultimately his most powerful—tool: the camcorder. “I already had an interest in video,” he recalls, as independent filmmaking was booming around him. Soon after, he founded the media group Venice News Video and began producing documentaries in Southern California.

Jenkins’ move to performance art was deliberate: “I needed to do something more performative to show them that I could go in this direction.” In 1977, he entered Otis Art Institute to study video, earning an MFA in 1979. He recalls a particularly illuminating seminar: He showed a video that at one point showed just an image of himself, saying nothing, just existing—and his classmates burst into laughter.

“I was thinking, I’m not doing anything interesting,” he said. “That’s when I realized that the idea of ​​seeing African Americans in videos had something to do with comedy.” He explores the concept in depth in his art, “intermittently making people question, ‘Why are you laughing?'”

In his first full-length video, the groundbreaking Massive images (1977), Jenkins correctly dissects the problem, exposing its rotten bones. Viewers heard his labored breathing and then saw him rise from behind three dead televisions, a scarf emblazoned with an American flag clinging to his throat. Images of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings and blackface flashed across the screen, returning to his mind as he exhaled in time with the blows of the sledgehammer.

Crawling in front of the television, he recited: “Years and years of television…you’re just a bunch of images you already know.” Speaking of the audience, the performers, “the things that hurt…the hidden pain…that was written down and bit into your veins…” His voice grew desperate: “I don’t and won’t connect…but for some people…I think it’s too late.”

Jenkins, aware of its deadly potential, aimed to liberate his community from the distortions of interpretation. vulnerableAccompanied by his own musical score, a young black man rides the then-new Los Angeles subway. A gun flashes and distorts on the screen as the black protagonist and another commuter (a white man in a suit) appear to bleed each other, exchanging threatening impressions.

The video was later dedicated to Trayvon Martin, a black teenager who was shot and killed by a white man in what was widely reported in the media as a moral trial in which Martin judged the loser. He describes the work in terms that could easily apply to all his works: “It’s a psychological drama about how people see each other, how they doubt each other.”

Jenkins is a three-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship and received the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame First Place Award in the Experimental Video category in 1990 and 1992. As Artistic Director of the interdisciplinary media arts production collective Othervisions Studio, he received a California Arts Council Multicultural Entry Grant. He is an associate professor of studio art at the University of California, Irvine.

This post will be updated soon to commemorate.