Tracey Rose was born in 1974 in Durban, a city on the Eastern coast of South Africa. When she was a child in Johannesburg, apartheid was in full effect. Rose somehow defied categorization, hovering between “Black” and the slightly more favorable classification “colored.” The art world captivated her, but a visit to the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale, where she encountered non-Western artists of color, cemented her resolve to be an artist. She, too, was going to make statements. Outrage permeates Rose’s radical performance, video, and photographic work. In Ciao Bella, a video riff on Leonardo’s Last Supper, she performed 13 different roles and made waves at the 2001 Venice Biennale. In 2005’s The Hope I Hope, Rose filmed herself peeing on the Palestinian–Israeli border in a tutu. In her first major retrospective in New York in decades, these seminal works are on view. —Elena Clavarino