Brochure article written for the one-person exhibit “Lorraine O’Grady / MATRIX 127,” The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, May 21 – Aug 20, 1995.****. . . . For O’Grady, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s rambunctious incursions made perfect sense. “Anger is my most productive emotion,” says the artist who is puzzled that the “enabling quality of anger” is so overlooked in our society. O’Grady’s contrastingly quiet installation Miscegenated Family Album is a series of sixteen Cibachrome diptychs, each containing an image of the ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti paired with a corresponding image of the artist’s deceased sister, Devonia Evangeline O’Grady Allen, and/or members of their two families. The physical resemblances between the two are sometimes startling. Both families, in fact, reflect the consequences of generations of cross-cultural exchange and inter-racial marriage. Miscegenation, the procreation between members of different races, was still an illegal practice in fifteen states in 1967, when such laws were finally overturned by the United States Supreme Court. Says O’Grady, “The word ‘miscegenated’ refers both to the album’s aesthetic and to the process of racial hybridization by which each family was founded.” The dramatic contrast between the evolution of Nefertiti’s family, largely the result of advantageous political alliances, and that of Devonia’s forebears, subjugated into slavery and then dominated sexually and otherwise, resonates throughout this installation. In defiant triumph, the artist illuminates the regal bearing of both families. Contemporary scientific research along with the radical shift in demographics over the past several decades combine to challenge the accuracy of our notions of self-contained ethnic, racial, or national groups. These categories, which have long dominated our patterns of social and economic organization, are increasingly understood to be artificial constructs largely contingent on the values and interests of those who hold power. Miscegenated Family Album has its origins in an earlier performance piece, Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline (1980), that represented O’Grady’s attempts to come to terms with the complexity of her feelings about her sister Devonia, who was eleven years her senior and died unexpectedly at the age of 38. As the emblem of success for the O’Grady family’s social aspirations, Devonia had been placed on a pedestal. With her sister’s untimely death, O’Grady had to face the ambivalence of her feelings about Devonia’s acceptance of the family’s bourgeois values. At the same time, the artist struggled to reconcile both her idolization of her sister and a long-standing sibling rivalry with her feelings of loss. Underlying O’Grady’s appropriation of images of this ancient dynasty is an understanding of the shifting placement of Egyptian civilization within the Western canon. O’Grady, an ardent student of history and an amateur Egyptologist, recalls that even as a young grammar school student, the removal of Egypt from the study of Africa left her feeling that something important had been subtracted from her legitimate heritage. Eventually questioning the prevailing, racist interpretations of traditional colonialist Egyptologists, O’Grady learned that the much-admired early Egyptian Dynasties (I–IV) — those whose contributions to world culture (and to Hellenic civilization in particular) are considered most significant — were, in fact, black Africans of southern Egypt. Over centuries of imperial politics, these rulers inter-married, and royal blood lines, as we can see in Miscegenated Family Album, became racially mixed. In the past decade, O’GRADY has moved away from performance, choosing instead formats in which the convergence of such complex ideas “can be held still and studied.” Miscegenated Family Album is not a series of photographs offering a linear narrative. Rather, it is an installation piece in which time is collapsed and, using the diptych format, O’Grady’s personal, historical, and cultural concerns do indeed, intersect.. . . .
© 2009 Lorraine O'Grady | All rights reserved.