Just Watch Me
More than four decades into her trailblazing career, Lorraine O’Grady finally has the world’s attention.
By Jillian Steinhauer
On a very hot day in September 1983, the artist Lorraine O’Grady dressed in all white, pinned a pair of white gloves to her shirt, and joined the annual African American Day Parade in Harlem. The other participants were marching bands, Black community groups, and brands; O’Grady had entered her own float, an empty nine-by-15-foot gold-painted wooden picture frame that she’d built with friends and mounted upright on a flatbed. As it made its way along Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, the frame captured the people and sights on both sides of the street within its gilded bounds. O’Grady had hired 15 young Black performers who walked and danced alongside it, carrying smaller golden frames that they held up before members of the crowd. Big black letters on either side of the flatbed proclaimed ART IS …
O’Grady, then 48, had decided to become an artist just six years before, after two marriages, an attempt at a novel, and stints as a translator and rock critic. She was still finding her footing, running up against both a white art world that ignored and dismissed Black artists and a Black one that, she felt, was sometimes too eager to play it safe. The float was a conceptual statement, a rebuttal to a Black social-worker acquaintance who’d told her, “Avant-garde art doesn’t have anything to do with Black people!” As Art Is … rolled by, Black paradegoers smiled and posed and mugged for the frames held up by O’Grady’s performers, shouting, “That’s right! That’s what art is. We’re the art!” “I’ve never had a more exhilarating and completely undigested experience in my life,” she later wrote. ( … )