Installation View of I Dream I Cross the River in One Stride, 2026. Courtesy of the artists and Mariane Ibrahim.
AFTER O’GRADY: AT MARIANE IBRAHIM, THREE ARTISTS DEMONSTRATE THE EXPANSIVENESS OF BLACK WOMEN’S SUBJECTIVITY
Rachel Dukes reviews our current exhibition in Chicago, I Dream I Cross the River in One Stride, which brings together three artists whose works expand on Lorraine O’Grady’s concept of Black female subjectivity as existing beyond reductive binaries. Drawing from her seminal essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” the exhibition frames Black femme identity as both physical and metaphysical, asserting it as a space of autonomy, complexity, and liberation.
Through sculpture, painting, and abstraction, artists Autumn Wallace, Brittney Leeanne Williams, and Clémence Gbononexplore themes of movement, embodiment, and interiority. Wallace’s intertwined figures resist containment through texture and form, while Williams evokes spiritual surrender and transformation through suspended, almost otherworldly bodies. Gbonon’s vivid compositions, meanwhile, reflect the layered realities of Black femme life, balancing intimacy, individuality, and defiance. Together, the works resist passive viewing, instead insisting on a dynamic engagement with identity as something fluid, expansive, and irreducible.
