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

Ulysses Jenkins, the pioneering Los Angeles-born video creator whose avant-garde compositions embodied Black experimentalism, has died. He was 79.

Jenkins’ decease was confirmed by his alma mater Otis College, wherever helium studied nether renowned creator and printmaker Charles White successful the precocious 1970s and returned arsenic an teacher years later. The Los Angeles creation and plan schoolhouse shared a connection from the Charles White Archive, which said, “Jenkins had a profound interaction connected modern creation and media practices.”

“A trailblazing fig successful Black experimental video, helium was wide recognized for works that utilized image, sound, and taste iconography to analyse representation, race, gender, ritual, history, and power,” the connection said.

A self-proclaimed “griot,” Jenkins passim his decades-spanning vocation maintained an creation signifier grounded successful the contented of those West African oral historians who came earlier him. Through archival documentaries similar “The Nomadics” and surrealist murals similar “1848: Bandaide,” helium leveraged alternate media to situation Eurocentric representations of Black Americans successful fashionable culture.

He was some an creator and a storyteller who sought to “reassert the past and the culture,” helium told The Times successful 2022. That year, the Hammer Museum presented Jenkins’ archetypal large retrospective, “Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation.”

“Early video creation was astir the problems with the media that we are inactive having today: the notions of truth,” Jenkins said. “To that extent, aboriginal video creation was a conception that was anti-media ... a captious investigation of the media that we were viewing each night.”

Born successful 1946 to Los Angeles transplants from the South, Jenkins was ambivalent astir the city, which offered his parents immoderate refuge from the blatant systemic racism they encountered successful their hometowns, but housed an amusement manufacture that had agelong perpetuated anti-Black sentiment.

“What Hollywood represents, particularly successful my work, is the classical plantation mentality,” Jenkins told The Times successful 1986. “Although radical aren’t needfully enslaved by it, radical enslave themselves to it due to the fact that they’re told however fantastic it is to assistance manifest these illusions for a firm sponsor.”

Jenkins, who participated successful a radical of artists committed to spontaneous enactment called Studio Z, was people drawn to video creation implicit Hollywood filmmaking. “I tin code immoderate contented and I don’t person to hold for [the studios’] large OK. I thought this was a onshore of freedom, and video allows maine that state and accidental that I tin make for myself and astatine slightest consciousness that portion of being an American,” helium said.

Jenkins went connected to deconstruct Hollywood’s imaginativeness of the Black diaspora successful experimental video compositions including “Mass of Images,” which incorporates clips from D.W. Griffith’s notoriously racist “The Birth of a Nation,” and “Two-Tone Transfer,” which depicts, successful Jenkins’ words, a “dreamscape successful which the dreamer awakens to a visitation of 3 minstrels who archer the communicative of the improvement of African American stereotypes successful the American amusement industry.”

Jenkins’ bequest is not lone creator but institutional, with the luminary having held teaching appointments astatine UCSD and UCI, wherever helium co-founded the integer filmmaking insignificant with chap Southern California-based artists Bruce Yonemoto and Bryan Jackson.

As creator and pedagogue Suzanne Lacy penned successful her societal media tribute to Jenkins, which showed him speaking to students astatine REDCAT successful L.A., “he has been an important portion of our histories present successful Southern California arsenic video and show artists evolved their practices.”