Catalogue essay written for O’Grady’s first gallery solo exhibition,
“Lorraine O’Grady,” INTAR Gallery, 420 W 42nd Street, New York City,
January 21 – February 22, 1991. ****. . . . Cultural CriticismAs an unpublished letter from O’Grady to the . . . editor of Art in America pointed out, [John Fekner’s Toxic Junkie
mural] had been created, at her request, for the show as a means of
“connecting the art inside the gallery with what was happening on the
street.” The latter preoccupation would be central to
O’Grady’s next Mlle Bourgeoise Noire event. While working on an issue
of the feminist art journal Heresies
devoted to the question of racism she had been piqued by a Black woman
poet’s assertion that “Black people don’t relate to avant-garde art.”
With funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, O’Grady
collaborated with artists George Mingo and Richard DeGussi in the
creation of a float and accompanying performance for Harlem’s fall 1983
Afro-American Day Parade (illus. 6, 7). Entitled Art Is . .
., the float consisted of a giant gilt frame mounted upright on a gold
fabric-covered float bed, pulled by a pickup truck. The float’s title
was inscribed on the side of this bed. Flanking the float, as it
advanced, were teams of white garbed assistants who held smaller, empty
frames up to the faces of some of the estimated half million or so
on-lookers lining 125th Street. The piece was enthusiastically received
by its audience, who offered spontaneous shouts of approval (“That’s
right, that’s what art is! WE’re the art”) and competing pleas (“Frame
me! Make ME art!”). As O’Grady has noted, the parade format
— with its ties to the rich array of Afro/Latino carnival traditions —
is one that has particular cultural resonance for her as an
African-American of West Indian descent. In exploiting this pop
cultural mode, she “is one of the few artworld artists to have availed
herself of such festive opportunities to escape ‘cultural confinement’
in the [artworld’s] ivory-walled towers,” critic Lucy Lippard has
written. Here, for the first time, O’Grady extended her role as
cultural critic to embrace the larger Black community, normally
abandoned by both White and Black artists in their pursuit of esoteric
aesthetic discourses. The sense of triumphant generosity conveyed by the social breadth and exuberance of Art Is
. . . (illus. 6, 7) probably reflects O’Grady’s having won two
prestigious grants that year — a National Endowment for the Arts
fellowship and a CAPS fellowship award. Despite these important
affirmations of her talent, 1983 closed on a grim note for the artist,
who learned in December that her mother was afflicted with Alzheimer’s
Disease. Her artistic career came to a halt while she devoted the next
four and a half years to her mother’s care.
© 2009 Lorraine O'Grady | All rights reserved.