Palmier, saints en extase et Paquebot
"Since the retrospective dedicated to her by the Brooklyn Museum in 2021, it has become clear just how ahead of her time Lorraine O’Grady (1934–2024) was—in her assertion of a Black feminist perspective and her rejection of binary thinking. A Bostonian from a privileged background with Jamaican roots, she said in an interview: “I make incisions into culture, and I put as much of myself as possible into each incision so that no one can think I do only one kind of thing or that I’m only one kind of person.” The exhibition retraces her entire journey through photographs from four major series.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is the 48 photographs documenting Rivers, First Draft (1982). During this wild performance, staged at various points in Central Park, Lorraine O’Grady told part of her story. The photos beautifully captured an event that seems to straddle a happening and a children's party. In the black-and-white photomontage series titled Body is the Ground of My Experience, she reveals the acknowledged influence of Surrealism. The Fir-Palm, inspired by a poem by Heinrich Heine, shows a hybrid of a palm tree and a fir tree emerging from the navel of a Black woman. Finally, in the series Announcement of A New Persona (2020), she introduces a new avatar of herself, armored and crowned with a palm tree, for a final battle."
Excerpted words written by Patrick Javault for The Art Newspaper.
