Coco Fusco

How did you become a writer? 

I have always been interested in writing. Once when I was seven or eight years old there was a fire in our neighborhood and my father, who was a physician, ran out to offer help in case there were people injured. I composed a report on the fire and across the top I wrote "for the New York Times." I was very ambitious.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

I am a child of immigrants and many of my relatives did not speak much English when I was growing up. I read voraciously as a child and studied literature in college. I had a creative writing teacher in high school who encouraged me, but in college I began to feel that I needed to know more about the world and about history to be taken seriously as a writer. I did not want to limit my writing to my own experience. I can't say that there was one particular author or book that influenced me. I have often been motivated to write about art by artists that I believe are either not appreciated or misunderstood.

When and where do you write?

I have an office in my house and that is where I do most of my writing. I basically write when I can. I have to teach to make a living and I also make video and performances so I don't write all the time.

What are you working on now?

I am working on two short films.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Sure. Having to meet deadlines helps with that.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

1. Get it done. 2. Revise. 3. Read a lot.

What’s your advice to new writers?

1. Read. 2. Personal stories are often not very interesting, so try to do more than that. I am definitely not one of those writers that spends endless hours navel gazing or spouting opinions about the task of a writer or about style. 

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is a recipient of a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco's performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, two Whitney Biennials (2008 and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York. She is a Professor of Art at Cooper Union. 

Fusco is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015). She is also the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). She contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications. 

Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985) and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007).