Ulysses Jenkins, Los Angeles artist and pioneer of Black experimental video, dies at 79

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Ulysses Jenkins, the pioneering Los Angeles-born video artist whose avant-garde compositions embodied Black experimentalism, has died.He was 79.Jenkins’ death was confirmed by his alma mater Otis College, where he studied under renowned painter and printmaker Charles White in the late 1970s and returned as an instructor years later.

The Los Angeles art and design school shared a statement from the Charles White Archive, which said, “Jenkins had a profound impact on contemporary art and media practices.” “A trailblazing figure in Black experimental video, he was widely recognized for works that used image, sound, and cultural iconography to examine representation, race, gender, ritual, history, and power,” the statement said.Entertainment & Arts ‘Without Your Interpretation’ is the first major retrospective of the L.A.-born Jenkins, whose prescient videos touch on race and other the issues of our age.A self-proclaimed “griot,” Jenkins throughout his decades-spanning career maintained an art practice grounded in the tradition of those West African oral historians who came before him.

Through archival documentaries like “The Nomadics” and surrealist murals like “1848: Bandaide,” he leveraged alternative media to challenge Eurocentric representations of Black Americans in popular culture.He was both an artist and a storyteller who sought to “reassert the history and the culture,” he told The Times in 2022.

That year, the Hammer Museum presented Jenkins’ first major retrospective, “Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation.”“Early video art was about the problems with the media that we are still having today: the notions of truth,” Jenkins said.“To that extent, early video art was a construct that was anti-media ...

a critical analysis of the media that we were viewing every night.” Entertainment & Arts Sarah Sze, known for u...