A Proud Iconoclast

The artist Coco Fusco gets her first U.S. survey after years of creating work that defies political orthodoxy.

- Madeline Leung Coleman

A Room of One's Own: Women and Power in the New America, 2006-8.

ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS Coco Fusco wants to tell me about herself is that she started life as an anchor baby. Before we meet, she sends me a scan of a blackand-white snapshot from the summer of 1960 that shows tiny Coco in the arms of her Cuban mother as they disembark from a plane in Havana. It was a trip that Fusco's mother, a doctor, had been forced to take from her home in New York after she overstayed her U.S. visa, but one she managed to delay until she could bring her newborn American citizen with her. Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba was 18 months old, and Fusco's mother, waiting on line at the U.S. Embassy, was so determined not to get stuck there that she was willing to use her baby's citizenship as a bargaining chip.

Fusco's first role, she says, was as a "pawn in an international Cold War game." The 65-year-old says she wanted me to see this photo right away because she's tired of interviewers and audiences asking her where she's from, as if they need to plot her identity along the Cuban American axis to get why she creates the art she does. When Fusco makes work-confrontational performances, videos, photography, writingshe's not driven by an urge to self-document.

The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey, 2003 (with Paula Heredia).