Lorraine O"Grady, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, 1980-83
Lorraine O'Grady
Mlle Bourgeoise Noire

Lorraine O’Grady (*1934, USA) is an artist and critic whose installations, performances and texts address issues of Diaspora, hybridity and black female subjectivity. She came to art late, making her first artworks in 1980 after working as a literary translator and rock critic. Ultimately her broad background contributes to a distanced and critical view of the art world and to a broadly interdisciplinary approach to making art.

artist's website: lorraineogrady.com

Mlle Bourgeoise Noire is the persona of a raging beauty queen created by Lorraine O’Grady in 1980 to protest the still largely segregated New York art scene. Her race, class and gender critique not only deconstructs black bourgeois constructs of femininity and high art, but also lays bare the internalized repressions and external oppressions of blacks. Wearing a white gown and cape made of 360 white gloves, she beat herself with the “whip- that-made-plantations-move” and shouted out protest poems written for the occasion, with punch lines such as “BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!” and “NOW IS THE TIME FOR AN INVASION!”
The first time Mlle Bourgeoise Noire invaded an art opening was at Just Above Midtown Gallery, New York, the black avant-garde gallery, in June 1980. The invasion was her response to the Afro-American abstract art that she perceived as tame and well-behaved: “art with white gloves on”. Her next invasion was at the opening of Persona, a 1981 exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. The exhibition featured nine artists using personas in their work. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire called it “The Nine White Personae Show. ” When invited to give the outreach lectures to schoolkids for the show, she replied, “Let’s talk after the opening.” After her performance, she was dis-invited from doing outreach activities.

Courtesy Lorraine O'Grady & Alexander Gray Associates, New York

Document media
photographs

Issue date
1980-83

To be seen in
Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, 7 October 2011 – 15 January 2012

Tags
activism, appropriation, fashion/glamour, his/herstory, roleplay, racism