Renée Stout is one of the most compelling contemporary artists working at the intersection of history, spirituality, and the everyday. Born in Junction City, Kansas, and raised in Pittsburgh, Stout trained as a painter at Carnegie Mellon University before moving to Washington, D.C., in 1985. There, she became associated with a dynamic circle of Black artists who were redefining contemporary practice through assemblage, installation, and conceptual strategies.

Stout is best known for her assemblages, altars, and mixed-media constructions that draw on African diasporic traditions, Black vernacular culture, and the syncretic practices of folk medicine and root work. Her alter ego “Fatima Mayfield,” a fictional herbalist and seer, often serves as a vehicle through which she explores themes of healing, survival, desire, and prophecy. Stout’s work combines found objects, glass jars, medical imagery, photographs, and handwritten texts into powerful narrative environments that invite viewers to consider the interplay of memory, myth, and lived experience.

Her practice also reflects a keen awareness of African-American history and survival strategies, what scholar Robert Farris Thompson called the “flash of the spirit.” Stout’s assemblages transform the detritus of everyday life into charged “power objects”, blurring the lines between art, ritual, and storytelling.

Stout’s works are held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Gallery of Art, and many others. She has received major awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and the Janet and Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize.

In Power Object: Homage to Joseph Cornell, Renée Stout acknowledges her artistic kinship with one of the twentieth century’s great assemblage pioneers. Cornell’s shadow boxes, enigmatic reliquaries filled with birds, trinkets, and fragments of memory, find a contemporary echo in Stout’s work, though she reanimates his language with an African diasporic charge.

The sculpture features a child’s doll head atop a cabinet filled with jars, talismans, and a perched bird. Like Cornell, Stout creates a theatrical stage within a box, a site where objects carry symbolic weight beyond their humble origins. Yet, while Cornell’s boxes often evoke nostalgia, Stout’s are steeped in ritual power: shells, beads, and worn materials evoke traditions of Kongo minkisi, Hoodoo, and conjuring practices. The work becomes less a dreamscape than a shrine, simultaneously honoring an artistic predecessor and reclaiming the authority of African-American spiritual aesthetics within modern assemblage.

By naming the piece Power Object, Stout emphasizes the difference between her and Cornell’s approaches. Where Cornell assembled curiosities into poetic tableaux, Stout invests her found objects with spiritual gravitas, suggesting their potential to heal, protect, or foretell. The homage, then, is not imitation but a dialogue, a conversation across time in which a Black woman artist reframes the surreal poetics of a white modernist master through the lens of diaspora, identity, and resilience.

Photo by Grace Roselli; Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, 2023

References & Further Reading

Smithsonian American Art Museum. “Renée Stout.” Artist biography and selected works.

Archives of American Art. Oral History Interview with Renée Stout, 2012.

Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. Renée Stout: Tales of the Conjure Woman, exhibition brochure, 2013.

Hemphill Artworks. “Renée Stout.” Artist profile and exhibition history.

AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions. “Renée Stout.”

MoMA. “Joseph Cornell.” Artist page and selected works.

SFMOMA. “Joseph Cornell.” Artist overview.

Smithsonian American Art Museum. Joseph Cornell Study Center.

Art Institute of Chicago. “Closer Look: Joseph Cornell.”

Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. Vintage, 1984.

Smarthistory / Khan Academy. “Kongo power figures (minkisi nkondi).”

The Art Section. Interview with Renée Stout, 2010 (on influences including Joseph Cornell and Betye Saar).