"Yo' Mama's Last Supper"

Moreover, unlike the painting "The Last Supper", Cox's photograph is separated into five even pieces, each framed by black wood and spaced evenly across the wall. This presentation suggests two things. The first impression one gets from the broken piece of work is fragmentation. This fragmentation reflects the fragmentation of self the black woman artist experiences when faced with the dominant pictorial tradition, a tradition which denies her existence except in the most marginal of fashions. Each viewer, and especially, each artist, comes to art to find work that resonates with her own experience. If a person's experience is not reflected anywhere, she feels isolation, diminishment and dissolution of self.

The framing of Yo' Mama's Last Supper also refers to the long history of imprisonment and slavery the African American society has endured. The blank spaces of wall between each framed segment suggest prison bars. As an artist, Coxhas been confined and excluded because of the white male pictorial tradition she refers to with her work.

Of course, one of the most important questions that has been raised about this piece is whether or not it should be considered sacrilegious. Although Cox uses the religious image of Christ's Last Supper to make points about the secular world, she takes her subject seriously and appears to be full of respect for it. As for her nudity, the traditional canon rests on images of the female nude. Perhaps what critics find so offensive is not so much the nudity, but the attitude of the nude. Much like Manet's Olympia, who had viewers at the turn of the century attacking her with umbrellas, Renee Cox's nude centerpiece is brazen and confrontational about her nudity. And there's something uneasy-making about an unashamed nude to the establishment.

On many levels, they seek to hide from their own embarrassment when they try to cover her up.

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