Lorraine O’Grady and Simone Leigh
By Alexis Jacquet, Fall 2021/Winter 2022 Curatorial Intern and Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant
“BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS! Black art must take more risks!” In 1980, the artist Lorraine O’Grady interrupted the opening-night benefit of Just Above Midtown—a gallery founded by Linda Goode Bryant in 1974 that championed primarily Black artists and artists of color from New York City and Los Angeles. O’Grady made a scene as her performance persona Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middle Class), a French-Guianese pageant winner dressed in a handmade ball gown made of 180 pairs of white gloves. Announcing her entrance with the exclamation above, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire handed out chrysanthemums from a heavy bouquet to a room full of surprised art patrons, artists and collaborators. Once the flowers were gone, she was left with what she called the “whip-that-made-plantations-move,” and proceeded to take off her cape and whip herself for five minutes while shouting poems protesting the segregated art world at that time. [1] This radical debut as O’Grady’s entrance into the art world has come to be known as one of her most celebrated and widely cited performances.
HERE AT THE KITCHEN, we are overjoyed to celebrate Lorraine O’Grady as one of our 2022 Gala Honorees for her revolutionary contributions and continued investment in experimental creativity. Through performance, video, collage, public art, and criticism, she focuses on the cultural constructions of identities, respectability politics, and her own personal history. For more than four decades, her practice has challenged cultural conventions and made space for multiple feminisms, holding a vital part of our shared New York downtown community. The Kitchen, since its founding in 1971 by artists Steina and Woody Vasulka, has fostered and evolved groundbreaking models for artists across its many chapters. Since the performance Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, O’Grady’s work has continued to bring multidisciplinary aesthetic issues to life—with a liveness and critical orientation—that resonate with artists who have presented at The Kitchen, including Jamal Cyrus, Bill T. Jones, Greg Tate, George Lewis and Simone Leigh. ( … )