Ulysses Jenkins, a muralist, performer, and trailblazer of video art, has died at 80. His death was confirmed by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, his hometown and first collaborator in a lifelong examination of the connective and destructive potential of mass media.
The museum mounted a retrospective of Jenkins’s work in 2022, titled “Without Your Interpretation,” and wrote in a remembrance shared on social media that he was “a true video griot whose work and spirit touched many.” It added that members of the Los Angeles community are organizing a memorial, with details forthcoming.
Jenkins was born in 1946 in Los Angeles and came of age in a technological epoch: When he was a boy, television became a household commodity—“my video jones had begun,” he once said—and years later, he rode LA’s new subway. Speaking to the Hammer on the occasion of his retrospective, he described his childhood fixation on television as fueled by the miracle of seeing Black people onscreen: “It was a major event.”
Television, however, was not always a friend. Through this new access to mass media, Jenkins realized how his home was being packaged and broadcast to the wider world—as a combustible laboratory of class, race, and gender, segregated in the name of safety. A 1961 Los Angeles Times article was infamously headlined, “Marauders From Inner City Prey on L.A.’s Suburbs”—a framing that the paper would apologize for decades later.
He also witnessed the popularization of the term “the ghetto” to describe Los Angeles’s predominantly Black neighborhoods. So thoroughly has the word been absorbed into American culture that it can be jarring to watch archival footage of his neighbors reacting with confused hurt to what felt like a sudden and unilateral degradation.
Speaking in 2022, Jenkins recalled bringing a video camera to the 1972 Watts Festival, one of the nation’s earliest and longest-running public celebrations of Black culture and unity, with the “main objective” of “presenting an opposite view” of its prevailing portrayal as a place to be “harassed by gangs.” The festival commemorates what’s variably known as the Watts Riots or the Watts Uprising, the 1965 eruption of violence in Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhood sparked by police brutality and systemic racism. In advance, media coverage had warned fairgoers to brace for more unrest.
Jenkins instead memorialized a peaceful celebration. In one clip, a resident of a predominantly Hispanic Los Angeles neighborhood proclaims, “We have people of all races [here]. This can be America if we stick together.” Through his lens, Black and Brown neighbors—long the targets of government surveillance—became surveyors, envisioning a future of their own making.
His travels took him to Hawaii and San Francisco, but Los Angeles remained the sun of his orbit. After graduating from Hamilton High School in 1961, he enrolled at Southern University in Baton Rouge, majoring in painting and drawing. He returned to Los Angeles in 1969 and began exhibiting his work at Saint Paul’s Catholic Church. From 1970 to 1972, he worked for the Los Angeles County Probation Department, leading art therapy programs for psychiatric non-delinquent youth.
Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation, installation view. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, February 6–May 15, 2022. Photo: Jeff McLane
In 1972, Jenkins moved to Venice Beach, where he embarked on one of his great life works: muralism. Inspired by the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad, he painted his first mural on the boardwalk at the corner of Rose Avenue and Ocean Front Walk. He would go on to create works including The Rat Trap and Transportation Brought Art to the People.
In 1977, he joined Judy Baca, along with dozens of scholars, artists, and community members, to paint the Great Wall of Los Angeles. Stretching roughly half a mile along the Tujunga Wash—from Burbank Boulevard to Oxnard Street—it is the longest mural in the United States and seeks to tell a counter-history of the millennia of inhabitants of the land now known as Southern California.
Also in Venice, he discovered another—and ultimately his most formidable—tool: the portable video camera. “I was already interested in video,” he recalled, as independent filmmaking exploded around him. Soon after, he founded the media collective Video Venice News and began producing documentaries across Southern California.
Jenkins’s turn toward performance art was deliberate: “I needed to do something that’s more performative to give them an indication that I can move in that direction.” In 1977, he enrolled at Otis Art Institute to study video, earning his MFA in 1979. He recalled one workshop as particularly illuminating: he presented a video featuring at one point only his own image, saying nothing, simply existing—and his classmates erupted in laughter.
“And I’m thinking, I didn’t do anything funny,” he said. “That’s when I realized there was something endemic to the notion of seeing African Americans on video that had to do with comedy.” He tore into that notion in his art “intermittently to make people question, ‘Why are you laughing?’”
In his first complete video, the seminal Mass of Images (1977), Jenkins properly split the question open, exposing its rotten bones. The viewer hears his labored breathing before seeing him rise from behind three dead televisions, a scarf patterned with the American flag snug around his throat. Images of the Klan, lynching, and blackface flash across the screen, returning to him as he exhales in time to the strike of a sledgehammer.
Creeping around the televisions, he recites: “Years and years of TV shows… you’re just a mass of images you’ve gotten to know.” Speaking of audience, performer, “The hurting thing… the hidden pain… was written and bitten into your vein…” His voice grows desperate: “I won’t and I don’t relate… but to some… I think it’s too late.”
Aware of its deadly potential, Jenkins aimed to release his community from the distortions of interpretation. Vulnerable, accompanied by his own musical score, follows a young Black man riding the then-newly opened Los Angeles subway. A gun flashes and distorts on screen as the Black protagonist and another commuter—a suited white man—seem to bleed into one another, exchanging charged impressions of menace.
The video was later dedicated to Trayvon Martin, the Black teenager whose shooting death at the hands of a white man was widely covered in the media as a morality trial, with Martin determined the loser. He described the work in terms that easily apply to oeuvre: “It’s a psychodrama of how people look at each other, and have suspicions of each other.”
Jenkins was a three-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts’s individual artist fellowship and was awarded the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame first place award in the experimental video category in 1990 and 1992. As artistic director of Othervisions Studio, an interdisciplinary media arts production group, he received the California Arts Council’s Multicultural Entry Grant. He was an associate professor of studio art at the University of California, Irvine.
The article will be updated shortly with remembrances.
