This is a peek into “Miscegenated Family Album” by Lorraine O’Grady. She chose 16 diptychs {7 shown here} from 65 image pairs of slides – comparing her sister Devonia, Nefertiti, and their families – that she had projected behind a performance piece she did in 1980. Lorraine retired the performance in 1988, but luckily she allowed the work to live on through this gorgeous album that she assembled in 1994. Amazing. But wait, I can’t stop there… I have to include her insanely inspiring bio too:
Born in Boston in 1934 to West Indian parents, O’Grady came to art late. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire and Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline in 1980 were her first public art works. After majoring in economics and Spanish literature at Wellesley, she studied in the fiction program of the Iowa Writers Workshop and had several careers: as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. government, a literary and commercial translator with her own agency, and for a time as a rock critic for The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. Ultimately, this broad background contributed to a distanced and critical view of the art world when she entered it and to an unusually eclectic attitude toward art-making. In O’Grady’s work, the idea tends to come first, and then a medium is employed to best execute it. The work’s intellectual content is rigorous and political, but its form is often characterized by heightened beauty and elegance.
