Excerpt: Art Is… The Lorraine O’Grady Exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem
During a visit to Harvard University in 1975 boxing legend Muhammad Ali was asked to give the audience a poem. He responded with the short but sweet phrase “Me, We.” More than 40 years later the phrase stands as an installation at the entrance to the Studio Museum in Harlem. The Studio Museum is located in the heart of east Harlem, right across from the historic Apollo Theater. If the Apollo represents Harlem’s rhythm and voice, the Studio Museum represents its canvas, a visual archive of black art and a hub for black culture. As an institution for black artists the museum showcases how powerful images can be in our understanding of other people and each other. The chief curator Thelma Golden has made it her mission to exhibit the work of artists who create an alternative dialogue in the context of art history, and in doing so become catalysts for social change. Golden states “my overall project is about art, specifically black artists, very generally about the way in which art can change the way we think about culture and ourselves[1].”
An artist who exemplifies this statement is Lorraine O’Grady, and her performance project “Art Is….” In her landmark performance Art Is…, O’Grady entered her own float in the September 1983 African-American Day Parade, riding up Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (Seventh Avenue) with fifteen collaborators dressed in white. Displayed on top of the float was an enormous, ornate gilded frame, with the words “Art Is…” emblazoned on the float’s decorative skirt. At various points along the route, O’Grady and her collaborators jumped off the float and held up empty, gilded picture frames, inviting people to pose in them. The onlookers of the performance immediately became participants, posing joyfully within the confines of the frame. The impetus for the performance sought to challenge the statement that “avant-garde art doesn’t have anything to do with black people.” O’Grady’s response was to put avant-garde art into the largest black space she could think of.
As I viewed the photos of the performance on display on the upper floor of the Studio Museum I could not help but build the connection between O’Grady’s “Art Is…” and Ali’s poem “Me, We.” Both symbolize collective consciousness and the importance of community. O’Grady sought to redefine the boundaries between the art world and the black community. Using the empty frames as the medium, O’Grady’s performance turned the viewer into the viewed and visa versa. Of the 40 images presented in the exhibition, the photos that caught my attention were images in which the subject and the onlooker were both free to express themselves, eliminating the hierarchy of who is the viewer and who is being viewed. As a result, everyone present that day (from the parade onlookers, to the police officers, to the performers) became participants in O’Grady’s essential question “what is Art?”
[1] Golden, Thelma. How Art Gives Shape to Cultural Change. Ted-Ed, Published February 24, 2013.