Earl Sweatshirt, a Trans Writing Workshop, and More: City Lights for Nov. 27–Dec. 3
This week, see visuals from Lorraine O’Grady and Howard Clare, the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, and performances from Earl Sweatshirt and TOLEDO.
By Steve Kiviat, Serena Zets, Brandon Wetherbee, Stephanie Rudig and Louis Jacobson
November 25th, 2025
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Ongoing: Lorraine O’Grady at Spagnuolo Gallery
The artist Lorraine O’Grady, who died last year, explained in her essay “Notes on the Diptych,” that, “When you put two things that are related yet dissimilar in a position of equality on the wall, they set up a ceaseless and unresolvable conversation.” This tension is all over her landmark series Miscegenated Family Album, which depicts prints of photos from her own family archive alongside reference photographs of Egyptian artifacts. The unresolvable conversations that these pairings set off include concepts of racial categorization, who gets to claim ancestral heritage, sibling rivalry, finding one’s plan among their kin, grief, and memorialization. O’Grady was struck by the similarities in facial features between her sister Devonia and busts of Nefertiti, and first juxtaposed these images behind her in a performance piece she put on shortly after Devonia’s death. Side by side, there is an unmistakable echo of the curve of the cheeks, the sly gazes, and especially the slight, knowing smiles. The sisters were estranged for most of their adult lives and didn’t fully reconcile before Devonia passed, and the inability to find closure
seems to echo in the inscrutable expressions both of O’Grady’s family and the Egyptian royalty. The artist casts various family members, including herself, with corresponding supporting members of Nefertiti’s kin. The series’ title adds the spectre of laws banning race mixing, something that the multiracial O’Grady confronted frequently as she tried to find her way in the largely White and segregated art world, and that was suggested in the Egyptology of the era that refused to consider Egypt part of the African continent. O’Grady had a stint in D.C.’s federal government, working first for the Bureau of Labor Statistics and then the State Department, where she ultimately became bored and disillusioned with reading multiple newspapers and reports per day, prompting her to pivot to writing and then her groundbreaking visual art career—perhaps an unintended silver lining of government work. Lorraine O’Grady: Miscegenated Family Album runs through Dec. 7 at Georgetown’s Spagnuolo Gallery, 1221 36th St. NW. guartgalleries.org. Free. —Stephanie Rudig ( … )