Ulysses Jenkins

Ulysses Jenkins (1946–2026) was a trailblazing Los Angeles video and performance artist — a self-described "video griot" — who was among the first artists of his generation to fuse the two forms to confront race, history, and state power. Born in LA, he earned a BA in painting from Southern University in 1969, began as a muralist, and received his MFA in intermedia from Otis Art Institute in 1979, studying with Charles White, Chris Burden, and Betye Saar. His seminal Mass of Images (1978) — in which he faces a pyramid of television sets with a sledgehammer, reciting "You're just a mass of images you've gotten to know, from years and years of TV shows" — remains a landmark critique of the media's stereotyping of Black Americans, and Two-Zone Transfer (1979) featured a young Kerry James Marshall. A relentless community builder, Jenkins founded Video Venice News in 1972 and Othervisions Studio in 1982, and was part of the collective Studio Z alongside David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, and Maren Hassinger. His 2021–22 retrospective Without Your Interpretation at the ICA Philadelphia and the Hammer Museum cemented his legacy, and his work has been shown at the Whitney, the Getty, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Fondation Cartier in Paris. A beloved professor at UC Irvine for decades, Jenkins passed away in February 2026.