Zachary Small, “Biden Video Uses Artist’s Vision to Project a Unified Country.” The New York Times, Nov 9, 2020.
The Biden campaign approached the artist Lorraine O’Grady in August. Ms. O’Grady had used empty, golden frames to capture the joys of community togetherness at the 1983 African-American Day Parade in Harlem, framing the people as art. The performance was preserved in photographs.
Inspired by the kind of unity Ms. O’Grady’s project conveyed, the Democratic candidate’s campaign sought to borrow her concept for a similar message, intended to ease a divided nation. This is how, two months before the election, with Ms. O’Grady’s blessing, the campaign created a two-minute film. It landed on the internet on Saturday, shortly after the networks projected a victory for Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Kamala Harris.
The Biden film opens with a rendition of “America the Beautiful” by Ray Charles as the camera pans countryside vistas and the Philadelphia skyline. Person after person is captured inside the shiny frames as Americans celebrate the diversity of a country that includes musicians and fishermen, hairdressers and surfers.
“The translation of my ideas is almost direct,” Ms. O’Grady said in an interview.
“Biden is saying the same thing to the country that I was saying to the art world,” she said. “We are a very large and diverse community and we all need to be included.” Ms. Grady, who is 86, and the descendant of Jamaican immigrants, taught Dadaism and Futurism at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and became known for her avant-garde Conceptual work.
She said on her website that she created “Art Is …” in answer to an acquaintance who noted “avant-garde art doesn’t have anything to do with Black people.” O’Grady decided to bring avant-garde art into the largest Black space she could think of, the one million or more people at the parade. “The concept was that, as people were being framed, they were being acknowledged as art in themselves,” she said. (…)