After O’Grady
At Mariane Ibrahim, three artists demonstrate the expansiveness of Black women’s subjectivity.
by Rachel Dukes
March 17, 2026
In her seminal essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” Lorraine O’Grady arrived at an understanding of Black femme subjectivity as existing outside of binaries defined solely by the absence of whiteness and maleness. O’Grady’s groundbreaking words are embodied in this exhibition, which boldly positions Black women’s sense of being, physical and metaphysical, as a proclamation of liberation.
In Autumn Wallace’s sculpture, Fruit Loops, two brown, tangled bodies grab and pull at one another, both dripping in an amalgamation of repurposed fabrics, floral designs imprinted on the bodies of each figure. Their painting, Heartstrung, shows fluid figures, drooling and snotty, engulfed in each other’s trance. In both works, the coiffure, depicting plaits with black sparkly rhinestones each adorned with bright ribbons in Fruit Loops, is confidently
unaware of neat containment, asserting an aesthetic of resistance and infinite freedom.
Freedom through movement is a visual motif throughout the exhibition. Returning to “Olympia’s Maid”’s postscript, O’Grady emphasizes how knowledge flows through movement—“I dance, therefore I think,” she writes. A surrender of the flesh to the ethereal divine is articulated in Brittney Leeanne Williams’s work, where she ponders the embodied response to receiving angelic directives. In Interruption 7, a figure is cloaked in a deep, blue-gray cloth and drowned in a rich red scape. The body appears to be both in free fall and simultaneously puppeteered by something outside of the body, or perhaps so deep within it in a new realm of consciousness. ( … )