A Homecoming For Lorraine O’Grady At Wellesley College
By Chadd Scott, Mar 11, 2024
The smiles.
The faces.
Lorraine O’Grady’s Art Is intervention into Harlem’s 1983 African American Day Parade saw her position a 9 x 15-foot antique-style gold frame on a float moving along the parade route. Performers dressed all in white followed behind with smaller frames, engaging attendees to place themselves in the frames and become art. The subsequent photographs spectacularly captured the joyous celebration.
Twentieth-century art, reflecting the time span it covered, was largely tortured. Think German Expressionism, Guernica, Kara Walker. With Art Is, O’Grady went dramatically
against the grain, capturing irrepressible expressions of Black Joy decades before that term would enter the mainstream.
It was also thoroughly avant-garde and deeply conceptual, attributes many critics at the time felt absent in African American art.
Art Is takes its place alongside other unforgettable projects produced by O’Grady (b. 1934) over the past half century during “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And” at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College through June 2, 2024. “Both/And” marks the first major career survey of the renowned conceptual artist whose work has long challenged prevailing understandings around gender, race, and class. ( … )