Meeting Lorraine O'Grady

😎PUCK-INSPIRED!

Meeting Lorraine O’Grady, 2017 — In this short film by Zawe Ashton, the filmmaker and actress visits O’Grady at her home in New York City where they discuss race, gender, and the challenges for black women artists in an often segregated art world. Ashton and O’Grady also visit the site in Central Park where O’Grady performed Rivers First Draft. 

https://lorraineogrady.com/slideshow/about-gallery/

**

Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, O’Grady’s first public performance, remains the artist’s best known work. The persona first appeared in 1980 under the Futurist dictum that art has the power to change the world and was in part created as a critique of the racial apartheid still prevailing in the mainstream art world.

Wearing a costume made of 180 pairs of white gloves from Manhattan thrift shops and carrying a white cat-o-nine-tails made of sail rope from a seaport store and studded with white chrysanthemums, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middle-Class) 1955 was an equal-opportunity critic. She gave timid black artists and thoughtless white institutions each a “piece of her mind.” Her first invasion of an art opening unannounced was of Just Above Midtown, the black avant-garde gallery. Her second was of the recently opened New Museum of Contemporary Art.

But beyond her guerrilla invasions of art spaces, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire was a state of mind. Even when not in costume and when using her own name, the political aspect of O’Grady’s art would be under her inspiration for a four-year period. MBN “events” were surreptitiously indicated when O’Grady pinned white gloves to her clothing.

Though the performances were a “failure” — the art world would not become meaningfully integrated until the Adrian Piper and David Hammons exhibits of 1988-89 — Mlle Bourgeoise Noire had a mythic aftermath. Two images, of her beating herself with the whip and of her shouting the poem, were widely reproduced without an explanatory context, becoming empty signifiers that added to the mystification and misunderstanding surrounding the work. But then in the mid-90s, the costume was purchased by Peter and Eileen Norton. And finally, in 2007, it was positioned as an entry point to WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, the first-ever museum exhibit of the originating period of feminist art.

**

The Space Between” is the title on the wall that greets the viewer. At every turn it is spaces we meet; juxtapositions, rather than entities, are the salient experience. In one room a grown made out of white gloves (one worn by Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire) is laid out under Plexiglass like an Egyptian mummy. Above this case, a shrill poem on the wall reads:

WAIT
wait in your alternate/alternate spaces
spitted on fish hooks of hope
be polite
wait to be discovered
be proud
be independent
tongues cauterized at openings no one attends
stay in your place
after all, art is only for art’s sake
THAT’S ENOUGH!
don’t you know
sleeping beauty needs more than a kiss to awake
now is the time for an INVASION!

A series of 13 documentary photographs wrapping two walls record O’Grady’s actual intrusion as Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire into an exhibition of nine white performance artists at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York In September 1981. Shown here as an intermingling of words, images, and physical memorabilia, there is little of the immediacy and shock that O’Grady must have generated when she swept into the gallery. There she distributed flowers, threw aside her cloak and lashed herself with a cat-o-nine-tails, then after pronouncing her poetic challenge, swept just as suddenly out of the room. Yet, as O’Grady explains it, what the shift from the event of performance to the quiet permanence of installation may have lost in confrontational dynamism, it has gained from the chance to “sit still” and let the ideas come together for the viewer. ( … ) VIA