In 1962, following the untimely death of her older sister, Devonia Evangeline, Lorraine O’Grady traveled to Egypt, where she developed an interest in Egyptology and discovered an unmistakable resemblance between her own family and the citizens of Cairo. The artist recalls, “As I was walking from the Embassy to the Hilton across the square, I looked around and I could not believe it—there were so many people who looked like me.” After returning to her home in Boston, she began buying books on ancient Egypt and her research eventually led to a performance titled Nefertiti/Devonia Evangline (1980) and then sixteen photographic diptychs collectively titled Miscegenated Family Album. In the performance of mourning and reconciliation, O’Grady paired slides juxtaposing family snapshots of her sister Devonia and her children with ancient sculptural portraits of the Eighteenth Dynasty queen Nefertiti. Extending that project, the photographic diptychs connect personal and historical family narratives across millennia to enrich and humanize parallel stories of sibling love and strife, and to point to suppressed narratives of Black Egypt in O’Grady’s own Black middle-class upbringing in Boston.
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