Like a Choose Your Own Adventure story or a game of Mad Libs, the elliptical title of Lorraine O’Grady’s 1983 performance piece, “Art Is…,” creates space, playful and inviting, for structured audience participation. You fill in the blank, the title says, in a demotic spirit, Art can be whatever you want it to be. But ellipses do not simply, or even primarily, denote open space, a “to be continued” awaiting information; they also denote omission, something left out, perhaps suppressed. Both functions of the ellipsis — invitation and suppression — are at play throughout the piece, and I don’t mean “at play” metaphorically. O’Grady and her audience had a damned good time making art about something — African-American subjectivity — that is often missing from art. Their joy, thirty years on, is still infectious.

For the performance, O’Grady entered a float into that year’s African-American Day Parade, which ran, and still runs, up Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard in Harlem. On the side of the float, in big letters, were the words “ART IS…”; atop it, running lengthwise, was a massive 9’x15’ gold picture frame. In character as “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire,” a persona she had adopted, in the years prior, as a guise enabling her to crash art world events and draw attention to issues of racial underrepresentation, O’Grady and a troupe of 15 African-American and Latino performers, dressed all in white, walked around the float carrying empty gold picture frames. The empty frames were sometimes handed to onlookers, sometimes held in front of them, Vanna White-style, to encourage the mostly black audience to consider themselves as valid subjects, even makers, of art. Photographs taken by various people who witnessed these framings were then collected by O’Grady to document the performance. Forty of those images are currently on view in an eponymous exhibit of “Art Is…” at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The results are smart and exuberant, a delightful Conceptualist triumph of both head and heart.