Ulysses Jenkins, Los Angeles Artist And Pioneer Of Black Experimental Video, Dies At 79

Ulysses Jenkins, nan 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 he studied nether renowned creator and printmaker Charles White successful nan precocious 1970s and returned arsenic an coach years later. The Los Angeles creation and creation schoolhouse shared a connection from nan Charles White Archive, which said, “Jenkins had a profound effect connected modern creation and media practices.”

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

A self-proclaimed “griot,” Jenkins passim his decades-spanning profession maintained an creation believe grounded successful nan contented of those West African oral historians who came earlier him. Through archival documentaries for illustration “The Nomadics” and surrealist murals for illustration “1848: Bandaide,” he leveraged replacement media to situation Eurocentric representations of Black Americans successful celebrated culture.

He was some an creator and a storyteller who sought to “reassert nan history and nan culture,” he told The Times successful 2022. That year, nan Hammer Museum presented Jenkins’ first awesome retrospective, “Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation.”

“Early video creation was astir nan problems pinch nan media that we are still having today: nan notions of truth,” Jenkins said. “To that extent, early video creation was a conception that was anti-media ... a captious study of nan media that we were viewing each night.”

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

“What Hollywood represents, particularly successful my work, is nan classical plantation mentality,” Jenkins told The Times successful 1986. “Although group aren’t needfully enslaved by it, group enslave themselves to it because they’re told really awesome it is to thief manifest these illusions for a firm sponsor.”

Jenkins, who participated successful a group of artists committed to spontaneous action called Studio Z, was people drawn to video creation complete Hollywood filmmaking. “I tin reside immoderate rumor 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 opportunity that I tin create for myself and astatine slightest consciousness that portion of being an American,” he said.

Jenkins went connected to deconstruct Hollywood’s imagination of nan 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, in Jenkins’ words, a “dreamscape successful which nan illusionist awakens to a visitation of 3 minstrels who show nan communicative of nan improvement of African American stereotypes successful nan American intermezo industry.”

Jenkins’ bequest is not only creator but institutional, pinch nan luminary having held school appointments astatine UCSD and UCI, wherever he co-founded nan digital filmmaking minor pinch chap Southern California-based artists Bruce Yonemoto and Bryan Jackson.

As creator and pedagogue Suzanne Lacy penned successful her social 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 capacity artists evolved their practices.”