Black Arts Initiative Conference
Northwestern University, June 2015
This paper examines The Black and White Show, a provocative yet mostly forgotten exhibition curated by writer, critic and performance artist Lorraine O’Grady (b.1934) in 1983. It was provocative in that it integrated the participating artists, half of whom were black and half of whom were white, under a loose thematic of a black and white color palette at a time when all white shows and all-black shows were the norm. Although it received little recognition by the art press and, thus, few visitors, it presciently combined both established and emerging artists of a variety of ethnicities together in a way that would not occur again for nearly a decade. O’Grady proposed and staged the exhibition as her persona Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire, a mixed-race debutante of Guyanese descent. Having made her name in alternative art circles through her series of guerilla interventions as Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire, O’Grady became a vocal critic of both art world racism and what she saw as the conservatism of most black art. Claiming that ‘black art needs to take more risks!’ O’Grady established a practice of black institutional critique aimed at cultivating a black avant-garde, not a black aesthetic or a sensibility. Engaging directly with a public sphere that shaped her experience as a mixed-race, middle-class woman, O’Grady has become something of an institution in black performance for her radical interventions. Drawing on the artist’s archives at Wellesley College, the papers of art historian Judith Wilson, and the Downtown Archives at New York University, this paper examines The Black and White Show as the uncanny product of O’Grady’s experimentalism, a project that was so important to her that she re-presented it in the pages of Artforum in 2009.
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