Expanding Doggerelism: Ulysses Jenkins’ Artistic and Teaching Experiences
Résumé
During the early 1970s, Ulysses Jenkins (born in 1946, Los Angeles) worked as a muralist in Venice Beach. Enrolled at Otis Art Institute in 1977, he started combining performance, video and sound creating critical and experimental narratives which particularly explore racism, media imagery and the African American experience. After graduating, he taught video at UC San Diego (1979-1981) and performance at California State University Dominguez Hills (1981) before becoming an associate professor at UC Irvine in the 1990s. Meanwhile, he conceived Doggerelism, a concept derived from literature. By hiring artists who faced a lack of support from the mainstream art world, state patronage through its colleges and universities has been essential to develop a multivocal art. This paper will examine Ulysses Jenkins’ production in the late 1970s and the early 1980s by focusing on the effects of his teaching experiences in the California higher education system.