‘ART IS…” BY LORRAINE O GRADY / AFRICAN-AMERICAN DAY PARADE IN HARLEM, 1983
Lorraine O’Grady is an artist and critic whose installations, performances, and texts address issues of diaspora, hybridity, and black female subjectivity. The New York Times in 2006 called her “one of the most interesting American conceptual artists around.” And in 2007 her landmark performance, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, was made one of the entry points to WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, the first major museum exhibition of this groundbreaking art movement. Since then, her career has expanded exponentially with inclusions in such significant group shows as the Whitney Biennial (2010), the Paris Triennale (2012), This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s (MCA Chicago, 2012), Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (CAM Houston, 2012), and En Mas’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean (CAC New Orleans, 2015); and with acquisitions by the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, and the Art institute of Chicago, IL, among many others.
Born in Boston in 1934 to West Indian parents, O’Grady came to art late, not making her first public art work until 1980. After majoring in economics and literature, she had several careers: as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. government, a successful literary and commercial translator, even a rock critic. Ultimately, her broad background contributed to a distanced and critical view of the art world when she entered it and to an unusually eclectic attitude toward art-making. In O’Grady’s work, the idea tends to come first, and then a medium is employed to best execute it. Although its intellectual content is rigorous and political, the work is generally marked by unapologetic beauty and elegance.
Over the course of more than three decades, artist and cultural critic Lorraine O’Grady has won acclaim for her installations, performances and texts addressing the subjects of diaspora, hybridity and black female subjectivity. Born in Boston in 1934 and trained at Wellesley College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as an economist, literary critic and fiction writer, O’Grady had careers as a U.S. government intelligence analyst, a translator and a rock music critic before turning her attention to the art world in 1980.
In her landmark performance Art Is…, O’Grady entered her own float in the September 1983 African-American Day Parade, riding up Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (Seventh Avenue) with fifteen collaborators dressed in white. Displayed on top of the float was an enormous, ornate gilded frame, while the words “Art Is…” were emblazoned on the float’s decorative skirt. At various points along the route, O’Grady and her collaborators jumped off the float and held up empty, gilded picture frames, inviting people to pose in them. The joyful responses turned parade onlookers into participants, affirmed the readiness of Harlem’s residents to see themselves as works of art, and created an irreplaceable record of the people and places of Harlem some thirty years ago. These color slides were taken by various people who witnessed the performance, and were later collected by O’Grady to compose the series. The forty images on view capture the energy and spirit of the original performance.
Lorraine O'Grady: Art Is… is organized by Amanda Hunt, Assistant Curator.
