Tonya Nelson, “From denouncing systems to destabilising systems: the changing focus of Black artists.” Media Diversified, Aug 25, 2017.
At the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement is the question: has anything really changed when it comes to race in America? Reflecting on the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of two current art exhibitions: The Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at the Tate Modern and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 at the Brooklyn Museum – the answer would appear to be no. However, the contemporary work of four artists featured in these exhibitions — Lorraine O’Grady, Maren Hassinger, Adrian Piper and Linda Goode Bryant — provides a more nuanced response to this question. Yes, racism still exists but its roots run deeper than the institutional and legal barriers of the 60s. The art produced by these four artists over the last thirty years recasts racism as the symptom of a larger set of problems – the inability of Western societies to reconcile their fractured identities, a failure of individual and collective compassion and integrity, and an economic system that relies on haves and have-nots. (…)
O’Grady’s work features in both We Wanted a Revolution and Soul of a Nation. As a performance artist, she created the alter ego Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middle Class 1955). In a dress made of 180 pairs of white gloves, O’Grady crashed art museum openings in order to make a statement about the exclusion of black artists from the mainstream art world. The Brooklyn Museum presents the iconic white dress and sash along with a number of photos of O’Grady in role.
The Tate exhibition features photographs from O’Grady’s work Art is… in which she uses the concept of the picture frame to challenge the idea of black exclusion from the arts. At an African American Day parade in Harlem in 1983, O’Grady mounted a gold frame to the front of a float, symbolically framing everything it passed as art. She also hired performers to carry gold frames along the parade route and photograph black attendees within the frames.
In the thirty years since completing these performance pieces, O’Grady’s work has shifted from focusing on racial exclusion to the complexities of race integration. In 1991, O’Grady presented a new work entitled The Fir-Palm, a black-and-white photomontage, depicting a hybrid combination of a New England fir and Caribbean palm tree sprouting from a female torso. As O’Grady was raised in Boston to Jamaican parents, the work represents the idea of physical, psychological and cultural integration. In the subsequent, more controversial, The Clearing, O’Grady creates a diptych presenting a sex scene between an interracial couple – one side showing ecstasy and the other showing tragedy. In an interview, O’Grady explains that the work is not meant to be an ‘either/or’ or ‘before/after’ narrative, but rather the articulation of the complexity of racial integration. In a follow up work, Landscape, Western Hemisphere, O’Grady creates a video that has the look of a lush forest landscape but is actually a close up of her dark wavy hair. According to O’Grady, the work is intended to show that race integration is a foundational part of who we are in the Western world. Of this work, O’Grady stated: “I’m really advocating for the kind of miscegenated thinking that’s needed to deal with what we’ve already created here.”
That 1982 piece had more than a dozen performers in color-coded costumes. There was a Woman in White representing Ms. O’Grady’s mother; three personifications of the artist (as a child in white and pink, as a teenager in magenta, and as an adult in red); and several male characters, including a love interest (the Man in Green, played a young Fred Wilson). The story took Ms. O’Grady from her native New England to a New York City of Art Snobs and Debauchees, and ended with her three very different selves joining hands.(…)