Lorraine O'Grady
United States, born 1934
Rivers, First Draft:
The Woman in Red starts painting the stove her own color, 1982/2015
Digital chromogenic print from Kodachrome 35mm slide
16 x 20 in.
Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York

O’Grady’s first performance, Rivers, First Draft, or The Woman in Red, was presented in New York’s Central Park on August 18, 1982, in front of a small audience of friends and the occasional passerby. Interweaving three narratives, the performance is an animated and dreamlike exploration of O’Grady’s life, including her upbringing in Boston’s Caribbean diaspora, her emergent feminism, her creative coming-of-age, and her traumatic encounters with art world politics. Key to the performance is the metaphor of the Crossroads, as it is understood in African diasporic religions such as Haitian Vodun.

The performance’s multiple storylines speak of the artist’s path from childhood to adulthood and artistic independence. The narrative follows the Woman in Red (O’Grady as an adult) as she navigates the New York art world of the 1970s, where her gender and her Blackness exclude her from both Black and White artists’ circles. Art Snobs, Black Male Artists, and the Debauchees act as choirs framing her fraught social encounters, which include a symbolic assault. The artist’s moment of self-actualization occurs when she spray paints a white stove red, signaling her feminist political transformation and her release from her mother’s oppressive cultural dictates. The story culminates as O’Grady’s childhood, adolescent, and adult selves unite to walk down the stream together.

© Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 


Visitors to the gallery can view a hand-written playlist that O'Grady created for this performance. Thanks to the Weatherspoon's student group, CoWAM, this selection of songs has been assembled on Spotify with the artist's permission. Click below to listen.

Lorraine O'Grady
United States, born 1934
Mlle Bourgeoise Noire celebrates with her friends
From Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Goes to the New Museum, 1980-83/2009
Silver gelatin fiber photograph
7 x 9.31 in.
Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York

In her early public performances, O’Grady appeared as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middleclass), most famously at a predominantly Black gallery called Just Above Midtown (JAM) in 1980 and at the New Museum, a largely White institution, in 1981. Designed to directly confront the racial segregation of the art world, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire was a debutante turned racial-justice revolutionary and equal-opportunity critic, ready to take both the White and Black art worlds to task for their shortcomings. Her JAM appearance, at the opening of the exhibition Outlaw Aesthetics, challenged her Black artist peers to take more risks by demanding their place in the mainstream art world. At the opening of the New Museum’s show Persona—featuring an all-White roster of performance artists who, like O’Grady, created characters in their art—she called out the smugness of the White and privileged gatekeepers of artistic culture. At the same time, wearing a gown composed of the white gloves of the polite Black society of her youth and carrying a cat-o’-nine-tails (the “Whip-That-Made-Plantations-Move”), Mlle Bourgeoise Noire comments on both the internalized rules of “respectability” and the externally imposed acts of violence that have kept Black people from achieving freedom.

© Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 

Lorraine O'Grady
United States, born 1934
Art Is...(Girl Pointing), 1983/2009
Chromogenic photograph
20 x 16 in.
Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York

In 1982, while working on a special issue of the feminist journal Heresies, a Black collaborator who was not an artist asserted that “avant-garde art doesn’t have anything to do with Black people.” O’Grady’s response was to create a performance for one of the largest and most vibrant Black spaces she could find in New York—the September 1983 Afro-American Day Parade in Harlem.

As Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, marked by the pair of white gloves pinned to her T-shirt, O’Grady fashioned a 9 × 10–foot antique-style gilt frame on a gold-skirted parade float, with the assistance of artists George Mingo and Richard DeGussi. As the giant frame moved slowly up Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, the frame captured neighborhood views to make striking vignettes of the urban landscape while performers holding smaller frames transformed spectators into living works of art. The celebratory gesture—people along the parade route called out, “Frame me, make me art!”—captured the spirit of the moment, spreading joy and making art relevant as both an avant-garde concept and a meaningful form of expression for the Black community.

© Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 

Lorraine O'Grady
United States, born 1934
Announcement Card 1 (Banana-Palm with Lane), 2020
Fujiflex print
60 x 40 in.
Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York

O’Grady has long been fascinated with hybridity—the mixing of things together and the crossing of boundaries. A persistent theme in her work is the way that Blackness has always been part of thinking about “the West,” even if we tend to characterize it as White. This idea propels her engagement with art history in Announcement of a New Persona (Performances to Come!), which blends geographic and cultural forms including the European royal court, history painting, and Caribbean carnival—with its origins in the melding of Black and Indigenous cultures.

In these large, staged photographs (which she terms “performances for the camera”), O’Grady is dressed from head to toe in custom-made armor, which she designed to include direct references to both medieval knights and sixteenth-century conquistadors. Whereas those European colonizing figures would have worn feathered plumes in their helmets, O’Grady’s costume is adorned with palm trees—a signifier of the Caribbean and a reminder that the history of colonization in the Global South is not complete without the stories of the Indigeous people who inhabited it before the Europeans, nor the enslaved people of Africa who were brought there.


© Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 

Lorraine O'Grady
United States, born 1934
Miscegenated Family Album (Sisters I)
L: Nerfnefruaten Nefertiti, R: Devonia Evangeline O’Grady, 1980/1994
Cibachrome photograph
26 x 37 in.
Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York

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.

© Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York