Paris, shooting for magazines including Votre Beaute and Vogue Homme and for designers Issey Miyake and Claude Montana, among others. Cox then returned to New York City, where she continued to work as a fashion photographer for ten years. Among her clients were editorial magazines such as Essence, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle, and Seventeen. She also worked with Spike Lee, producing the poster for his 1988 film School Daze. In the early 1990s, inspired by the birth of her first son, Cox decided to focus primarily on fine art photography. She received her Master of Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York and subsequently spent a year working with Mary Kelly and Ron Clark in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Fine arts career In 1994, Cox exhibited her piece It Shall Be Named in the show Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, curated by Thelma Golden at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. A review of the show published in Art in America described the work as referring "back to traditional art forms—in this case, the shaped crucifixes of 13th and 14th century Italy—with deep solemnity. The modern "distortions" and elisions of Cox's representation interact with the reference to iconic martyrdom to evoke the terrible history of lynchings, beatings and emasculation visited on the bodies of black men in this country." That same year, Cox's seven-foot nude self-portrait Yo Mama was included in the Bad Girls show curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum. Cox was the first woman ever to be pregnant during the Whitney Independent Study Program, pregnant at the time with her second son, which motivated her to create the Yo Mama character and series of photographs. In the photograph Cox stands nude, wearing black high heels, brandishing her older son as if he were a weapon. In Yo Mama and the Statue, Cox critiques race and gender issues, whilst attempting to "reconcile her persona as a pregnant black woman artist with the white male convention of museum study and classical statuary." In 1995, Cox, Fo Wilson, and Tony Cokes created the Negro Art Collective (NAC) to fight cultural misrepresentations about Black Americans. The collective, working with Creative Time and Gee Street Records, created a poster campaign to challenge and provoke preconceived notions about race, crime and poverty. "As far as representation, we have to take it