Curator Geneviève Wallen writes:

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"Renee Cox’s photographic series The Discreet Charm of the Bougies (2009) was inspired by her immediate environment. Living in an upper-class suburban area, Cox is surrounded by privileged Afro-American women who by their social status conceal themselves in an evasive world imbued with alcohol, painkillers, and antidepressants. The artist sheds a new light on the praised and popular iconography of the “desperate housewives” by challenging the negation of an existing Black bourgeois community.

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Through her carefully arranged mise en scène, Cox attempts in an unconventional way to demonstrate how identity is strongly tied to race, material, and class. Her portraits generate a space for critique of the constraining nature of normative representations of Black women. In the media Black women are often victimized or portrayed as insipid loudmouths, unsophisticated, uneducated and poor (especially dark-skinned women). The desire to showcase a different “misery” as of the “welfare queen” or struggling single mother, Cox investigates an alternative narrative of pain that is most often reserved and associated with white upper-class."