Chase Quinn, “How Lorraine O’Grady Has Challenged A Segregated Art World.” Hyperallergic, Dec 2, 2018.
SAVANNAH, Georgia — From the moment I first saw Lorraine O’Grady’s art, at an exhibition of her photography Art Is … at the Studio Museum in Harlem, I felt she was interested not simply in realizing her own artistic vision, but in confronting the art world.
Art Is … stemmed from a performance the artist staged at the African American Day Parade in September 1983. O’Grady captured jubilant black children, men, and women, dancing and bearing broad smiles, along Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. Amid the revelers, O’Grady’s float, fitted with a 9-by-15-foot antique-style gold frame, transformed everything it passed into a work of art. A troupe of dancers O’Grady hired for the piece also carried gold frames, placing them over parade-goers, who themselves instantly became art. O’Grady has said that the piece was a response to an acquaintance’s remark that “avant-garde art doesn’t have anything to do with black people”; it successfully argues
the contrary. Along the parade route the artist recalled hearing countless black people shout: “That’s right, that’s what art is, we’re the art!”
Over her three-decade-plus career, O’Grady has persistently raised questions about the lack of black representation in art and in the art world, and who gets to define what art is, which we continue to struggle with today. Just this year, the Brooklyn Museum’s appointment of a white woman to oversee its African Art Collection caused a furor, and T Magazine’s article, “Why Have There Been No Great Black Art Dealers,” from earlier in the year, caused an even bigger backlash. But O’Grady’s latest exhibition, From Me to Them to Me Again, currently on view at the SCAD Museum of Art, represents a shift for the artist. In a recent talk commemorating the opening she said that, as the title suggests, the show represents a return to herself. (…)