Ulysses Jenkins

Ulysses Jenkins’s video and media work is remarkable for its fusion of forms to conjure vibrant expressions of how image, sound and cultural iconography inform representation. Beginning as a painter and muralist, Jenkins was introduced to video just as the first consumer cameras were made available to individuals, and he quickly seized upon the television technology as a means to broadcast alternative depictions of African and Native American cultures—his own heritage—citing the catalyst of Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and its call to black filmmakers to control their subject-hood by controlling the media depicting them.   full biography

Titles

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1972-73, compiled 1980, 60 min, b&w, sound
 
1978, 17:29 min, b&w, sound
 
1978, 4:15 min, b&w, sound
 
1979, 23:53 min, color, sound
 
1981, 15:13 min, color, sound
 
1983, 5:23 min, color, sound
 
1983-89, 26:28 min, color, sound
 
1984, 13:53 min, color, sound
 
1985, 21:59 min, color, sound
 
1989-91, 36:20 min, color, sound
 
Self Divination
1989, 11:58 min, color, sound
 
Mutual Native Duplex
1990, 11:53 min, color, sound
 
The Nomadics
1991, 12:29 min, color, sound
 
1991, 85 min, color, stereo
 
1994, 8 min, color, sound
 
2006, 6:20 min, color, sound
 
2007, 15:47 min, color, sound
 
2022, 6 min, color, sound, HD video
 
2022, 5:41 min, color, sound, HD video