Tony Cokes is a media artist creating video works and installations that recontextualize historical and cultural moments. Since the 1980s, his work has surfaced the latent ideologies of popular culture, confronting issues of structural racism, power, and visibility. His tightly choreographed video essays layer found text over vibrant colors and dissonant soundtracks, exploiting the gaps between sensory regimes to heighten and complicate the reading experience.
Cokes lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he serves as Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Cokes was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2024 and the Rome Prize in 2022–23. In 2022 he was the subject of a major survey jointly organized by the Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein in Munich. Other recent solo exhibitions include those at Dia Bridgehampton etc.

Portrait of Tony Cokes, 2023. Courtesy the artist, Dia Art Foundation, New York, and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Don Stahl.