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Lorraine O’Grady’s Art Is … (1983/2009) was a joyful performance in Harlem’s 1983 African-American Day Parade. O’Grady created the work as a rebuttal to an acquaintance’s assertion that “avant-garde art doesn’t have anything to do with Black people.” Putting avant-garde art into the largest Black space she could think of—the million-plus viewers of the parade—she sought to prove her friend wrong.
As a Black Boston Brahman cum Greenwich Village bohemian with roots in West Indian carnival, for O’Grady, the Harlem marching-band parade was alien territory, but her performance was undertaken in a spirit of elation which carried over on the day. Reflecting on the experience in a 2015 interview with then Assistant Curator Amanda Hunt at The Studio Museum in Harlem, O’Grady explained, “I didn’t live in Harlem … I did not know how this piece was going to work. … It could have been something or it could have been nothing, and I had no idea which, so it was scary for me. But then when I heard people calling the photographers over to them, it was like 'Wow!' … You can see how the people on the parade route liked being in photographs, and you can see how these performers liked framing them for the photos. It was wonderful, just wonderful.”
Although O'Grady had received a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts to make Art Is …, she decided not to broadcast it to the art world. She wanted to it to be a pure gesture, she told her friends, in the style of Duchamp (whose work she had been teaching at the School of Visual Arts for several years). Writing about Art is... more than two decades later, she recalled, “It’s funny. The organizers of the parade were totally mystified by me and by the performance. The announcer made fun of the float as it passed the reviewing stand: ‘They tell me this is art, but you know the Studio Museum? I don’t understand that stuff.’ But the people on the parade route got it.”
As the nine by fifteen foot antique-styled gold frame mounted on a float moved slowly up Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, framing everything it passed as art, O’Grady knew she had resoundingly proved her acquaintance wrong. She watched the fifteen young actors and dancers dressed in white frame viewers with empty gold picture frames to shouts of “Frame me, make me art!” and “That’s right, that’s what art is, We’re the art!” She would later conclude, “[Art Is …] was to be about art, not about the art world … rather than an invasion, it was more a crashing of the party.”
Alexander Gray Associates offers these groupings of available prints from Lorraine O’Grady’s Art Is … as representative of the artist’s celebrated series.
Please note, prices are subject to edition availability.
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A Black female social worker told me that she didn’t think avant-garde art had anything to do with Black people. So I decided to prove that she was wrong—to make the point that avant-garde art, contemporary art, was something that everyone had a connection to.
–Lorraine O'Grady
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The Crowd Framed by Performers
Selection from Lorraine O'Grady, Art is... (1983/2009)
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Initially concerned by how parade-goers would react to Art Is …, Lorraine O’Grady was quickly reassured by how eager the crowd was to be framed and photographed. As she recounts, “They wanted to be on camera! Everybody wanted to be on camera, you know.”
Lorraine O'Grady
Selection of 3 prints from Art Is ..., 1983/2009
C-prints
16 x 20 in (40.64h x 50.8w cm)
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Lorraine O'Grady, Art is... (1983/2009), installation view, Soul of a Nation, de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA (2019)
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What I learned in the process of the parade is that a parade is not a continuous motion. In a parade there are moments when you are just standing still and not getting anywhere, and then there are moments you are rushing to catch up. To me, a film was going on behind that big frame, like a moving proscenium on the float. But as if it were in an old Moviola editing machine . . . it started and stopped . . . started and stopped . . . .
–Lorraine O'Grady
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Art is... Proceeds Through Harlem
Selection from Lorraine O'Grady, Art is... (1983/2009)
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Lorraine O’Grady’s Art Is … featured fifteen dancers who framed the crowd with handheld golden frames. Explaining where she found her performers, the artist recalls, “I advertised in the back pages of some dailies or weeklies. I can’t remember, but I think they were called Stage Door and Billboard. They had ads for actresses and dancers, that sort of thing. I got a mix of people, of dancers and actors. They were beautiful and they were up for it—really, really up for it.”
Lorraine O'Grady
Selection of 6 prints from Art Is ..., 1983/2009
C-prints
16 x 20 in (40.64h x 50.8w cm)$35,000 (ex. framing)
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As an advantaged member of a disadvantaged group, I've lived my life on the rim — a dialectically privileged location that's helped keep my political awareness acute. But the main reason my art is "political" is probably that anger is my most productive emotion.
–Lorraine O'Grady
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The Performers and the Crowd
Selection from Lorraine O'Grady, Art is... (1983/2009)
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Writing about Art Is … in 2012, Lorraine O’Grady highlights the compelling nature of so many of the performance’s images. She explains, “Although it had been a joyous occasion, it wasn’t the joy that attracted me. It was the complexity, the mystery, the images that no matter how hard I looked would never become clear, would always remain out of reach.”
Lorraine O'Grady
Selection of 4 prints from Art Is ..., 1983/2009
C-prints
16 x 20 in (40.64h x 50.8w cm)$22,500 (ex. framing)
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Lorraine O'Grady, Art is... (1983/2009), installation view, Soul of a Nation, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2018)
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At the time, I was saying to myself, “Okay, Lorraine, if there’s just one young person who sees this piece and wants to go to art school, then it will have succeeded.” It was community outreach at that level. I was trying to show these people, “This is what you can do, this is who you can be.” It was more role-modeling than community outreach.
–Lorraine O'Grady
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The Parade Float
Selection from Lorraine O'Grady, Art is... (1983/2009)
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“I’ve never had a more exhilarating and completely undigested experience in my life,” Lorraine O’Grady writes. “The float was stop-and-stall, sometimes for fifteen minutes at a time. At other times, it would be moving so fast that in order to stay in line, you had to run like crazy, or just jump on and ride.” At the same time, the float functioned cinematically—its immense gold frame capturing Harlem’s facades and streetscapes. The artist expands, “To me, a film was going on behind that big frame, like a moving proscenium on the float.”
Lorraine O'Grady
Selection of 6 prints from Art Is ..., 1983/2009
C-prints
16 x 20 in (40.64h x 50.8w cm)$33,750 (ex. framing)
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There’s always been surveillance, and policing of minority neighborhoods, but I think the methodologies of policing changed substantially. As a result, you could not do that piece now. You really couldn’t.
–Lorraine O'Grady
Lorraine O'Grady: Art is...
Past viewing_room
