“BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS! Black art must take more risks!” In 1980, the artist Lorraine O’Grady interrupted the opening-night benefit of Just Above Midtown—a gallery founded by Linda Goode Bryant in 1974 that championed primarily Black artists and artists of color from New York City and Los Angeles. O’Grady made a scene as her performance persona Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middle Class), a French-Guianese pageant winner dressed in a handmade ball gown made of 180 pairs of white gloves. Announcing her entrance with the exclamation above, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire handed out chrysanthemums from a heavy bouquet to a room full of surprised art patrons, artists and collaborators. Once the flowers were gone, she was left with what she called the “whip-that-made-plantations-move,” and proceeded to take off her cape and whip herself for five minutes while shouting poems protesting the segregated art world at that time. [1] This radical debut as O’Grady’s entrance into the art world has come to be known as one of her most celebrated and widely cited performances.

AS A CONCEPTUAL ARTIST AND CULTURAL CRITIC, O’Grady demonstrates an intention and poetic commitment to process rather than resolution. She is an advocate of hybridity and presents alternatives to the hierarchical: creating images, ideas, and situations in her artwork, writing, and teaching that “allow binaries to be seen as reciprocal, or Both/And.” [2] O’Grady created the persona Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (MBN) in response to the exclusion of Black artists from a mainstream art world. MBN serves as a political character that represents elements of O’Grady’s identity—at an intersection of poetry and autobiography—as a middle-class woman of European and Jamaican descent. Material and sartorial interventions of the work—for example, the white gloves she wore— are symbolic of the internalized oppression of Black women to conform to the set of gendered beliefs established by respectability politics. The whip as an additional prop exemplifies the external oppression from art spaces, both in institutions’ often singular interpretation of Black artists, and in their direct exclusion of these artists’ work. The segregation of the art world in the 1980s prevented Black artists from gaining mainstream attention. O’Grady recalls that select Black artists in the 1980s who were receiving “mainstream” attention were tentative in voicing any frustrations, and this led them to shy away from explicit displays of resistance. [3] MBN was always an “equal-opportunity critic, or castigator,” O’Grady mentions. [4] She had no interest in presenting “safe, polished work”—her focus lay perhaps less on how Black artists fit into an already existing avant-garde, but in embracing a logic of doubleness to show how Black artists and artists of color shift our understandings of the origins of a total avant-garde.

BETWEEN O’GRADY AND LEIGH, a cross-generational dialogue of aesthetic resistance can be connected between works on view in Leigh’s multidisciplinary exhibition at The Kitchen, like Herero Dress 1904 (2011), and O’Grady’s 1980 performance Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. Leigh’s sculpture, a portrait in graphite and epoxy of a Black woman with hair made of white porcelain roses, manifests the “[springing] from the historic script” O’Grady speaks of in her writing. Similar to Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, the Herero people that Leigh is casting, figuratively, within her works call upon notions of respectability related to colonization. Herero Dress 1904 interrogates the cultural construction of identity by signaling the moment of historical significance referenced in the title: the 1904 rebellion of Namibia’s Herero people against the Germans, after which the surviving women adapted Victorian-style dresses, called ohorokova, as a symbol of resilience. The Namibia’s Herero community focused on the cultural significance embedded within a European style of dress and reinterpreted its purpose to illustrate their own personal history bound up within it. Whereas O’Grady utilizes her body in performance to express resistance, Leigh’s material explores Black women’s subjectivity across diasporas. Both artists confront this historic script, perhaps in an effort to “de-haunt” it and establish agency: as O’Grady has stated, “subjectivity for me will always be a social and not merely a spiritual request.” [8] They both spring a vernacular Caribbean image into a variation of new media, emphasizing how living histories form and deform material.