Ulysses Jenkins, L.A.-born godfather of video art, dies at 79

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.

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.”

Born in 1946 to Los Angeles transplants from the South, Jenkins was ambivalent about the city, which offered his parents some refuge from the blatant systemic racism they encountered in their hometowns, but housed an entertainment industry that had long perpetuated anti-Black sentiment.

“What Hollywood represents, especially in my work, is the classic plantation mentality,” Jenkins told The Times in 1986. “Although people aren’t necessarily enslaved by it, people enslave themselves to it because they’re told how fantastic it is to help manifest these illusions for a corporate sponsor.”

Jenkins, who participated in a group of artists committed to spontaneous action called Studio Z, was naturally drawn to video art over Hollywood filmmaking. “I can address any issue and I don’t have to wait for [the studios’] big OK. I thought this was a land of freedom, and video allows me that freedom and opportunity that I can create for myself and at least feel that part of being an American,” he said.

Jenkins went on to deconstruct Hollywood’s vision of the Black diaspora in 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 in which the dreamer awakens to a visitation of three minstrels who tell the story of the development of African American stereotypes in the American entertainment industry.”

Jenkins’ legacy is not only artistic but institutional, with the luminary having held teaching appointments at UCSD and UCI, where he co-founded the digital filmmaking minor with fellow Southern California-based artists Bruce Yonemoto and Bryan Jackson.

As artist and educator Suzanne Lacy penned in her social media tribute to Jenkins, which showed him speaking to students at REDCAT in L.A., “he has been an important part of our histories here in Southern California as video and performance artists evolved their practices.”