Coke Wisdom O'Neal

Brooklyn-based photographer Coke Wisdom O’Neal is best known for sensitive and non-traditional portraits. He describes his subjects as often “secondary to the concepts represented.” Rather than attempting to capture individuals in the environments most familiar to them, O’Neal uses standardized scenes against which his various subjects stand out. For his prolific series The Box, O’Neal created twenty-two foot tall wooden boxes and set them on pedestals in locations including New York, Ohio, and Texas, and photographed people standing inside of them. His subjects appear tiny within the huge box, and entirely stripped of recognizable context—thus bringing the differences between their expressions and outfits and body language to the fore.

O’Neal is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the New York Foundation for the Arts Relief Grant, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, and the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City. His work has been exhibited widely in group exhibitions including at the Northern Illinois University Art Museum.