As an artist of African, Caribbean, and Irish descent, Lorraine O’Grady has mainly focused on representations of black female subjectivity, often through the lens of family, literary, and art-historical narratives. Her work combats the elimination of difference across a spectrum of social concerns, while championing the positive values of hybridization. Miscegenated Family Album is a series of diptychs, some of which contain an image depicting the ancient Egyptian queen Nefernefruaten Nefertiti paired with a corresponding image of the artist’s deceased sister, Devonia Evangeline O’Grady Allen, while others compare members of their respective families. The physical resemblances between the individuals within any given diptych are sometimes startling.
O’Grady views Ancient Egypt as a “bridge” country, an ethno-cultural amalgamation of Africa and the Middle East which flourished only when its northern and southern kingdoms were united circa 3000 BC after the conquest of the North by the South. O’Grady’s appropriation of the term “miscegenated” in conjunction with the use of ethnographic visual imagery in the work directly addresses the hybridity of race and class as both families, one royal, the other based in slavery, experienced it across time. Through this lens, Miscegenated Family Album functions as a feminist opus whose metaphoric goal is not to bring about a mythic “reconciliation of opposites” but rather to illustrate an ongoing process which “enables or even forces a conversation between dissimilars long enough to induce familiarity.” O’Grady considers this repetitive process of familiarization a form of “miscegenated, both/and thinking,” an analytical tool capable of apprehending and containing the complexities created by the contiguous interactions among differing peoples.
