In 1980, the conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady created an alter ego and named her Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire. She wore a dress composed of 180 pairs of white gloves and carried a white cat-o-nine tails constructed of sail rope and white chrysanthemums, as she invaded various art museums and galleries around New York City. When O’Grady’s character entered a room, she would throw down her whip and shout out poems with forceful lines such as “Black art must take more risks!” and “Now is the time for an invasion!” Other times, she would beat herself with her delicately constructed whip, a pointed demonstration of her oppression as a black person in America. Her dress of white gloves communicated the inward oppression of middle class black women understandably desperate for respect.

Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire, French for Miss Black Bourgeoisie, was a performance piece located at the intersection of race, class, and gender. “In that era,” O’Grady said, “even though black feminists may have admired the energy, even the delirium, of white feminist rhetoric, not to mention the bravery of many of its actions, they still felt alienated by and even a bit derisive toward it.” She represented an imagined reality, a world filled with women like herself—black, maybe middle class, and bold. Photographs of her 1981 performance, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Goes to the New Museum, show O’Grady strutting down an empty corridor, on her way to infiltrate another exclusive art space. She wears a wide grin, typical of a beauty pageant winner. But her eyes hint at a different, more radical agenda: Every performance reflected her determination to create space and visibility for black women in a movement—and more broadly a world—that, at that point, preferred to remain exclusive and blind.