 And for those of you that I don't know, and I know many people here tonight, I'm Arnold Lehmann, Director of the Brooklyn, Louisiana, and I am truly delighted to welcome you to the second annual Norma Marshall Memorial Lecture. Many of us here tonight knew and admired Norma and your fond memories and hours of her are echoed certainly by your participation in this lecture series. However, for those of you who did not know Norma, she became an incredibly enthusiastic supporter of the Brooklyn Museum. From almost the moment she and her husband, Jim, became museum members in 1975. And perhaps during that time period, her major role was her very long service as president of the Museum's Community Committee, where she led the active engagement with the museum through certainly the force of her incredibly positive and productive personality. One of Norma's greatest accomplishments was working with the museum on the establishment in 2002 of the Women in the Arts Program and Award, which has now become nationally known and respected. Indeed, Norma was a singular presence both inside and outside the museum, and she was a wonderful friend to us all. Through the generosity of Jim Marshall, who I might add is one of our truly great gallery guides, coming right off of a tour tonight. I was listening, I'm talking. And other friends, this lecture series was established last year, and our first wonderful speaker was Segnet Nguldi. Its purpose is to bring distinguished speakers to the Brooklyn Museum to celebrate Women in the Arts, a topic dear to Norma's heart. And needless to say, we are extremely grateful to Jim and to the Norma Marshall Memorial Fund for making this evening possible. And I'd also like to acknowledge and welcome so many members of Jen and Norma's family who are here with us tonight. Thank you for being here. We are truly delighted to welcome, as our guest speaker this evening, Lorraine O'Grady. And there is, and I'm going to try because there's no better person to introduce Lorraine than Catherine Morris, our Sackler family curator for the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Women in the Arts. Thank you again for coming this evening. Thank you for your support with the Brooklyn Museum. And we all remember you all so well. Thank you very much. Catherine. Good day, and everybody for being here. I'm thrilled to welcome Lorraine O'Grady for our second annual Norma Marshall Memorial Lecture. I'm also honored to be part of this ongoing celebration of Norma's commitment to the Brooklyn Museum and to women artists. I know that many of you here were great partners in the crime with Norma, as was I many an occasion. And I'm thrilled to be part of this ongoing legacy. Thank you, Jim, for devising this perfectly fitting way to contribute to Norma by celebrating what she valued and what she did for her. I have to introduce Lorraine O'Grady now. It's gonna take a little while. So I'm just gonna read you. Since 1980, Lorraine O'Grady has observed, coaxed, prodded, and admonished the art world using performance, installation, photographs, texts, and critical writing to engage with issues of diaspora, hybridity, and black female subjectivity. Born to West Indian parents in Boston, O'Grady attended Boston College, where she majored in economics and literature. After graduating, she worked in the late 1950s as an intelligence analyst for the Department of Labor and State, first on Africa and then on Latin America Affairs. Before becoming an artist, she also worked as a rock critic and dancer, as well as a literary and commercial translator. In her first performance work, Mademoiselle Lejoisey-Guar, O'Grady appeared in a character at Gallery Museum openings to critique our old segregation and timidity. It remains a historical touchstone. Subsequently, O'Grady misused a variety of opinions and strategies for performance, to photography, to video installation, consistently producing work that is unapologetically political, conceptually rigorous, and visually beautiful. All the while pushing herself and other artists and critics to engage in intersections of race, class, and gender. This, long before this had become, has come to be the theoretically popular position that it is today. In addition to the Berkeley Museum, her work has included the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Watts Park at the Dam, and the Walker Arts Center among others. She has had many solo museum gallery shows and her work has appeared in important group shows, including most recently, Radical Presence, Black Performance in Contemporary Art, the Studio Museum, the Gray Art Gallery, Blues for Smoke at the Berkeley Museum. This will have been Art Love and Politics in the 1980s at the ICA Boston, and way back in 2007, in the groundbreaking survey of WAC, Art in the Feminist Revolution. Her criticism and criticism of art in the popular press, as well as the anthologized and books on contemporary art and feminism. From 1974 to 2000, she taught the School of Visual Arts here in New York, and most recently served as visiting faculty at the Scarkeven School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Today, she joins us to share some of her thoughts on the currently talented political ideologies of post-racial and post-feminist, and how these ideas have impacted on her work. Please help me in joining. Please join me. Thank you very much to the Marshalls. And I wasn't privileged to know Norma Marshall, but through everything that I've heard, she's just like a marvelous person, and extremely foresighted and about being able to pursue supporting the work of women artists, which is a topic dear to all of our hearts. And to have involved the community in the life of the museums in a way that she did. Just so beyond commendable, thank you very much. Actually, I'm really not going to talk about post-racialism and post-feminism. I don't really know how to talk about it, and in fact, I'm sort of hoping to get insight from you as to how these things should be dealt with today. I began working as an artist in New York in an era. My first public art piece was in 1980, and it was an era when I would say that nobody was using those words, post-racial and post-feminist, because those battles were still very much on the plate. We were fighting the battles of those who were anti-feminist and those who were unconsciously anti-racial. So, but now we've come to this moment when presumably those things are no longer problems. And I did a lot of work in the early 80s about these issues, about the racism in the art world, about the problems that women were facing. And I'm now finding myself wanting to re-address these issues, but I'm trying to figure out how one can be heard on these issues in an era which is supposedly post-racial and post-feminist. So, I'm sort of looking for your advice on strategies and ways of approaching this. What I'd like to do is to just quickly, I only have about 20 minutes, okay? So, I would like to just quickly run through these pieces that are very much about this material and that I am sort of going to be now working off of. So, that you can like tell me where to go next because I'm about to try to figure out where to go next. So, oh, the title. A Both and is a kind of generic title that I use for almost any lecture that I give. Because, because it applies to my work. And any way that I talk about my work, it's always about the Both and. Both and is my way of coming out as strongly as I can against Western philosophy, which is based on the Eve of Oran. I don't know how I'll talk about it. You'll see quite a bit of something about the both and. The first piece that I want to talk about is a guerrilla art evasion that I did. I actually began in 1980 and I was a fully formed person. I was 45 years old when I made my first art piece. And I had come from many different experiences. And I have to say that I went to Wellesley when I was 16 in 1951. And I went to the federal government when I was, you know, in 1956. And I've done many things I've been in the art. I've been a rock critic for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone in 1972 to 75 approximately. And none of these worlds, in none of these worlds that I was in had I ever experienced the blatant racism that I encountered in the art world. And I've tried to figure this out. What was this all about? And so my work was very much about that at the time I began. And in 1980, I did this first performance at a gallery which is a gallery called the Justice Love Midtown Gallery. It was a black avant-garde gallery where just about every one that you would have heard of had their start. David Hammond showed there, then Nandini Goudi showed there, of Marin Hattinger, Fred Wilson, Donald Bae, we all showed there. And we were totally segregated. And the 1983 Whitney Biennial which featured the very, very young Jean-Michel Basquiat. I'm sorry, I didn't hear you that around in that case. The 1983 biennial featured Jean-Michel Basquiat. But we have to understand that nobody at Justice Love Midtown had received a studio visit for that biennial. So that was an issue. So I went, first of all, my work is always addressing both the black blacks and the black art world, whites and the white art world. So, and I make enemies where never I go. So this piece is meant. Okay, it's called Madden South, which was warm. Miss Black, middle class. Graduated in 55 from Leslie. And so this was being done in 1980 which was the 25th anniversary of my graduation. And actually when I, I was sewing my costume when my class was having his 25th reunion. And then after that, I did this performance. Late June of these, and she's going to the, in this case, she's going to the new museum to protest in the All White Show there. And she first done it at the Justice Love Midtown gallery to protest some very safe. Now, I didn't know very much about documentations or about having real good pictures or almost any pictures of the performance that I did a year before this at Justice Love Midtown gallery. So that's why I don't have it there, but I can read you the poem that I shouted out at the opening of the new space downtown. Okay. This is an all black gallery and almost everybody at the opening is black. And I shout out this poem. I beat myself with a whip. That's enough. No more bootlicking, no more ass kissing, no more buttering up, no more posturing of super ass eminence. Black art must take more risks. That's why I was shouting out to black artists in 1980. Okay, so in 1981, and we're dealing with a situation where they shouldn't have invited me to be in the show, I thought, but they did it without me. It's called persona, the artist employee persona. So I'm leaving, and that's me in my hallway. I entered with my master's ceremonies. This is still in the museum, it was part of the national, this was important. This location is at 5th Avenue on 14th Street. And I have a bouquet and I start giving out flowers and I say, well, will you help me lighten my heavy bouquet? And I smile, and I smile some more. And people are getting kinda curious about the gown because it's made of 180 pairs of white gloves. I shot New York out of, I'm from the battery up to 125th Street. I bought all the white gloves I could find. I'm giving away the flowers. I have 36 chrysanthemums, and I'm giving them all away. And if I make all the chrysanthemums, I've been given away, and I'm getting ready for business. So I take off my cape and I have a bare back to start beating myself because I'm beating myself with what I call the main plantations move. And after I beat myself for about five minutes, I start to shout out a poem. Again, this is another poem. And this is sort of addressed, this is sort of addressed to the white art world, but again, in some ways, more directed to the black art world. Wait, wait in your alternate, alternate spaces, spitting on fish hooks of hope. Be polite, wait to be discovered, be proud, be independent, tongues cauterized at openings no one attends. Stay in your place. After all, art is only for art's sake. That's enough. Don't you know? Sleeping beauty needs more than a kiss to awake. Now is the time for an invasion. Okay, well this is 1980, 81, and nobody listened. So as a result, the art world didn't really get effectively at at least a superficial level integrated until seven years later in 1988 when I think I agree, Piper had her first big self retrospective, and David Hammond had a big retrospective in the following year, 1989. It was 89, about eight years, nine years after this. So nobody liked me. There she is shouting at her at home. And there she is celebrating with a friend. So I think that an unfortunate way of these people, the only one that you might know, there's been unsatleyed many deaths at that table, the only one that you might know is the lower right and that David Hammond's. Now, I got termally disappointed, discouraged, because of course nobody was listening. And as I said, in 1983 there was this Whitney by a hill that nobody had seen the studio visit for, but it was featuring a 21 year old drama show by Skye. And so I decided, oh, I'm sorry. There you go, I'm a little ahead of myself. I forgot I was doing this. This piece had a history after it was done and the history was very different. People began to appreciate it, began to like it, began to even love it a little bit. And the first place that it was shown was at the Water of Apanaeum in 1994. And there it is in a little bit true. And then the show that Catherine mentioned, which was in 2007, when it had become loved so much that it became an entry point to the great show serrated by Connie Butler called Black Art and the Feminist Revolution. So it's had trajectory. But in 1983 I was totally discouraged and so I decided, so Madness Upward War became an entrepreneur, I should say, impresario. She put on events. The first event that she did was the Black and White Show which was her answer to the Whitney Biennial and it had a conceit which was that all the work was in black and white and half the artist were black and half the artist were white. And it was about holding something still so that one could see what the differences were if any. This is the front gallery. This is the front gallery of Cankella Gallery. Cankella Gallery had about five small spaces within the space called the front gallery. And if you'll see over on the far right up there that Keith Herring, and I would say that Keith was the person who he'd been a former student and he was the one who most helped make this show a success to be heard at once. It was never reviewed. But at least people knew about it. Some people. The point that I was making got made, I think most effectively, in the back gallery where I put conceptual pieces. This piece is, this is one piece and this is the main gallery. What's this one? And nearly everybody who popped their head into the gallery thought that it was by the same artist. But this piece is by a black just above midtown artist called Randy Williams. And, I'm sorry, this other piece is by a white, a French flexor artist called Jean Dupuy. They were doing different, they were saying very, very different things, but they were using the same techniques. And outside, I had, this was the, East Seconds Peak was the largest drug supermarket in Manhattan at the time. And I tried to bring the outside inside and I commissioned a guy from the Bronx who was very famous for doing these kind of digital led things, John Staxer, to do a mural. And I waited and I waited and I waited and he did it the night before the opening and there it was. And I thought it was great. It was so great that for one year nobody refeeded it. That's how great it was. One year nobody refeeded it. However, you can see there was a piece, maybe a year or so later in Art in America and you can see they photographed it and there were nobody refeeding. And, but the thing was that really pissed me off about this was that this piece which had become sort of like the emblem of the East Village Art Movement and which was shown here in the facing page of the start of an article about the East Village did not mention the black and white show and did not mention King Tell of the Gallery. That was what we were out against. So also, as I say, my work sort of goes, I have an equal opportunity critic. So I criticize the white art world and I also criticize black people and what happened was that I was written on an issue collective for heresies. The mother collective would farm out individual issues of the journal to special collectives and this was the racism collective and unfortunately they didn't know many black women or black women artists and so the collective was one of the very few of the heresies issue collectives that had non-artists and one of these non-artists was a black social worker and we were having a meeting and she turned to me and she was sitting inside and she turned to me and she said very contemptuously, black art doesn't have anything to do with black people. And on guard art, and on guard art doesn't have anything to do with black people. And I was furious, I set out to prove her wrong. So I put, I said, okay, I'm gonna put and on guard art into the biggest form that I can think of for black people. So I put it into the after American Day Parade with a million viewers and I made this float and it has a nine by 15 foot empty gold frame and only instruction to the people where art is written on the side and I put about 15 black actors and dancers carrying empty gold frames and I told them what to do. So everything that you see is float through is art and I have about 400 of these images and so I'm just showing you three or four and this is what they were doing and people were composing themselves and then they started showing you, that's right, that's what art is, we are the art and frame me, make me the art. They got it, it looked very closely, we had to rest sometimes on the float as it moved along and as you notice very closely, she's wearing a white karate suit but she had her gloves into her chest and those are the gloves that she herself wore in 1955 when she was doing her job interviews but she didn't have the courage to put them in her costume so she left them out but now she was hit and now she was so angry that she didn't care so she was confessing, these are my gloves and I was that sort of girl too. This is my favorite piece from that because you don't know what that girl, whether she's laughing, whether she's smiling with you or smiling against you. I loved it, it's such an interesting thing to know what we were doing necessarily or she did and maybe she was commenting on it, I don't know. Okay, now, okay that was one body of work and I am going to be doing a performance character that is very much like Mad Reservoirs much more but for 2015 or 16 or 17 or whatever it was together. How was she going to talk in this post-racial age? How was she going to, how was she going to, how different did she have to be than Mad Reservoir Mark was in order to be heard at all? Okay, now, I'm going to talk about piece which I hope some of you have seen, it's a piece which is owned by the Berklee Museum called Mass Aginated Family Album and it started as a piece about my sister and her team because I always thought they looked alike but everything I do, it was multi-over-determined so that it was a very personal piece about two sets of sisters, Nefertiti's younger sister was a management and she was actually somebody who I knew how she felt. In all of the iconography of that curated ancient Egypt management follows Nefertiti and Makhmatin and their six daughters. She comes at the end of the procession and she's always accompanied by two dwarfs. I'm not actually old-school, right? So my sister had died and we had not resolved our relationship so I was sort of trying to talk to my sister through talking about Nefertiti and her sister but I also was extremely incensed with Egyptology and traditional Egyptology that was still saying that Egypt wasn't black, didn't have anything to do with black culture and it was the same story that I heard when I was in the third grade and they pulled down the maps over the chalk blackboard and the teacher pulled down the map of Africa and she said, children, this is Africa, oh, it's a district! And I knew something was being taken away from me so I was talking about me with my blood memory TV and I wanted to get it all back so there's a lot of different things going on. This was a performance in 1988. Three months after, I did this performance, three months after I did the first version of memory seven, we don't know who I am. And this is me trying to talk to Devonian but she's dead trying to bring her back to life in some ways so that I can have a conversation with her so I'm doing something called the opening of the mouth ceremony, except that nothing works. Everything is the opposite of what the instructions are but that's, so there were 65 sets of double images projected behind. Opening of the mouth ceremony is based, is the year after the death, one year after the death there's a ceremony and these images, these sculptural images that have been placed in the tomb or in the pyramid or wherever, the priests come and they strike, they strike the mouth and the ears and the eyes and they say, and it's about allowing the spirit to move out into the universe and they say, hey, little Cyrus, I open your mouth for you. I open your two eyes for you. I open your two ears for you. You are protected and you shall not die. And they do this with all and the ads and because they smooth, they smooth all and they strike with the ads and I am striking pictures of Nefertiti and then of Devonia and it's such a hopeless thing because they will not live and they will not speak and they will not talk back to me and this is one of those things that I had to learn to have with Devonia was dead. We were never going to have this conversation but this was the best. And at the end I'm trying to straddle these two subs of sand and I can't make it and so the image closes in so that the performance closes in darkness and all you can hear is me safely to make the other type of sand and just like this. Well, I never give up. So, as you notice it's at 1980 that was when Nefertiti devoted her dance to performance with and then 1994 I took the 65 double images that I made behind me. I took 16 and made a two-dimensional installation which you now have here at the Berkeley Museum. The piece starts with a piece called Sibley Rivalry and this is Nefertiti and her sister, Moon Management. The piece is, yes it's about the way it's very much about the way in which Egyptology and Western culture have structured Egypt to not reflect what the truth was in the beginnings but it's very much more about to me the sisters that we're born with and the sisters that we choose. So, instantly they've chosen each other and not us. Well, Devonia and Nefertiti. See, it's got from Sibley Rivalry to sisters. This is sisters number one. This is sisters number two. This is Meritathan and Candace. They're both of their women's oldest daughters and this is Matitathan and Kimberly, the two younger daughters and these are the sisters that are left with each other. This is Lorraine and Moon Management. And here they are. This is called ceremonial occasions. Devonia is made and honored in a wedding and Nefertiti is performing an illustration ceremony. This is ceremonial occasions two. Devonia is at the wedding reception of a cousin of mine who just got married and Nefertiti is performing an art and ceremony and I thought, my God, I saw these gods and these little children behind them and some little kids. And this is called a mother's kiss and it's Devonia and Candace and I don't know which of Nefertiti had six daughters, six children who lived. I don't know which one had the idea for this. And obviously another aspect of this is Prusas Chon's poem that shows you know the one thing's changed and where they did the thing. And we have, this is a picture. Unfortunately, Devonia did have a little boy but he sort of fell out of the piece because Nefertiti only had daughters. So that's what I thought forever. Never have that made it really into the piece except in this one picture. And she's reading to Candace and Edward and she's being sort of guardian angeled by Nefertiti. And of course it's the same way that we look different in every photograph. They look different in every sculpture. And I would say that this is probably much closer to the way Nefertiti actually looked than the very formal portrait. And here they are, the children are growing up. This is Ahtesin Pa'atan, one of the younger of the daughters at Candace. And if Ahtesin Pa'atan had had her wig on because they didn't wear, they'd jade their heads and done more wigs, she would have had the wig of the young girl which would have been the long single beard on the left but she doesn't have had her wig on. I call this one World's Leap Princesses. This is Pa'atan again and Kimberly and I just think of them as some spoiled rich girls but they had it kind of like, I don't even know that name, spoiled rich girls, yeah. And this is their husbands and I'm wondering that their husbands were even going to look alike. That's Ahtesin Pa'atan, the famous Ahtesin Pa'atan who was supposed to be the founder of Mon Theism and that's Edward. That's Edward. And here they are, this is a series of two diptychs called Progressive Queens and this is them and they're both 24 years old, 23, 24, 23 and 24. And this is both 35, you know what that's about. And this is an image that I made that was not in the original performance. I made it for this installation and I made it out of who I was at that moment. I was somebody who would walk down the street and look very longingly at women, at younger women. Not because I wanted to have them but because I wanted to be them. And so I got this idea of the piece and this is actually the last image that we have never seen, her, you know, her stomach is sagging, she's had actually 12 pregnancies when she was only six lived and she's just looking across at Devonia's youngest daughter who's like, you know, a sophomore in college and just at the height of her beauty, that's Kimberly. So it's called, this piece is called Cross Generational but it's about that longing. And the installation of the whole ends with this piece which is called Hero Worship. It starts with sibling rivalry and ends with Hero Worship and it's Devonia and myself, I'm three and she's 14 and the other one, I'm 13 and she's 24. And if the installation is held in my ideal way, it makes a circle so that at the end, the two pieces come together, Hero Worship and sibling rivalry. And I have found that for all of the political things that I have put into this piece and there were many of them, now the piece is much beloved, it's been purchased here, it's also a piece where wherever I go, the strongest responses don't have anything to do with Egyptology or anything like that. The strongest responses wherever I go around the world are from women who have sisters. So that's that and as I said, I'm going to just move on because I have to talk. I was asked to put an image that I could leave with you while we talked and as I said, I'm revisiting things and I want to do something about my mother, Leon and could we not turn it on yet? I want to do something about my mother, Lena, just in the same way that I did something about my sister, Duomen, and I became obsessed with the woman whose name was Jean Duval, who lived with, had a common-law marriage with Charles Baudelaire, the father of modernist literature, the French poet. And her name was Jean Duval and she came from Haiti and so for 20 years they lived together and I adore Charles Baudelaire and I know that he was a, I feel that he was able to make this great leap from romanticism to modernism because he was exposed, not just because of what was happening, but changes in French cultural life with the Industrial Revolution and how it's getting noisy in Palmyne Park, but also because he was living with a woman who I would say was, he may have been the first modernist, but she was the first post-modernist, the woman of color from the company who comes to live in the metro pole and she'd come from Haiti and moved to Paris and he didn't just live with her in a sort of vacant way, he had to live her life with her and so he got his dream job which was as a editor of a prestigious literary journal in a town outside of Paris and he went there to set things up for them, set their cartons up and so on and then she arrived and the people who published the journal said, what's this? And he said, well, she's my partner and they said, well, that's fine, we can't have that and so he lost his job. So you know that throughout their 20 years of marriage, this is what happened a lot and I feel that this is what gave him the distance on his own culture to make this incredible critical leap from romanticism to modernism. So that's what I've been doing. I've been doing work on Jeanne de Valle and talk about the layer, but I stopped it, it wasn't going where I wanted it to go and it didn't start to go where I wanted it to go until I started making Jeanne de Valle talk like my mother. So instead of a Haitian, she started to speak Jamaican Patois, this is Alina, the mother, and this is the two of them. They were born basically 19 years apart and the world didn't change that much, the world was a very slow moving place and so I was able to imagine that what Jeanne had encountered when she went to Paris at the age of 18 or so was exactly what my mother had encountered when she came from Jamaica to Boston in 1917 when she was 18 and I could make them seem similar in the identity. But I have to say that I think I'm learning more about my mother than I am about Jeanne de Valle in this process and so as a result the next, when we work this piece it's going to be more about Alina than about Jeanne but I wanted to leave that with you as the... They asked me to put a picture up that could say that I wanted to but I hope you'll forgive me. Yeah, I'll forgive you. Oh, you couldn't keep speaking. You could just keep going. Yeah, don't do this, don't do this. I just wanted to say the mother was so beautiful. It's such a beautiful image. Oh, thank you. She was, she was unfortunately prettier and smarter than either of her daughters. I'm not going there. And we've spoken about sort of having some questions in relationship to these projects that you're thinking about and some questions that you had that you felt the audience might participate in answering but I have to say I, as a respondent and kind of falling down on the job because I have so many questions and so many different points of entry into the work. Were you able to kind of like look it up online and so forth? I do have a website and all of this is on my website. If you go to LittleRainOnRainy.com and you press the art menu and go into any one of the artworks there, you'll find that there is an image. Underneath that image is a link to the slideshows and also there's a summary. There are two columns of text. One is a summary of the piece and in the left-hand column there are links to articles about the piece but written by me and by others. Yeah, it's a very user-friendly website and it covers all the work that we just talked about and I recommend it to us. So I have to ask what I feel like is the obvious question first before we get into the questions about where you're going and that is are we post-racial and post-feminist? This is what is the big question and I understand how we use these phrases. We use these phrases to pretend as if we are so that we can just move forward. It's a way of just getting out of being stuck. It's not that we're really describing a real situation because the very people who use the phrase post-racial the most are the ones who seem to do the most racial work. I mean, they do their work about black people but what they are doing is doing it from a stance where we are choosing to do this. We are not forced to do this. I think you're being very generous because I think another way of putting it is that they're in denial. They may be. I myself am extremely aware of the theoretical discourse around post-racialism and the kind of work that I'm doing and I see that my work is a way of saying we're not post-racial but I'm not sure about other people and what they're... how they wouldn't just say it I can't speak for anybody but myself but how? So you think they're in denial? Well, I mean, I'm being in slightly decisions. I don't find the terms particularly useful. It is useful. I thought that it was just almost a marketing gimmick but it serves the same sort of purpose that the term post-feminist serves. Post-Golonia. And post-Golonia. Exactly. All of those posts say that they are a way of saying okay, get over it. Let's not talk about it anymore. I think the best post is post-post. It's the only one that sort of allows that conversation about what that means. And this is kind of the side but I have to say I keep thinking in relationship to the Mademoiselle Bourgeois figure who reflects I think my understanding of the white loves and that whole sort of persona that you're capturing is sort of a privileged persona in some way. Yes, you know, I just gave a lecture to another lecture but I was interacting with an artistic class at Wellesley just last week and, you know, there was a class in African-American art history and a half of the class were black students and they wanted to know how things were different when I was there. And, you know, there's no way of talking about that purely without involving privilege, do you know what I'm saying? And a privilege that you don't necessarily have to worry about. Well, and this is a sentence like this that I keep thinking about in relationship to this little thing that's going on now in the art world with Donal Wolford which is this character that's been developed in a white-outly situation and a black woman artist who it comes from this privileged background and I keep, I'm sorry, I just have to say I feel like it's when I'm looking at your piece which is so directly addressing a lived experience that this other sort of project thing that's going on in the art world why now you probably wouldn't fall under that conversation of post something feels very inadequate and very well, I began as a performance artist, I have to say because I went to a performance by goodness, the performance artist who did Elinor Anton, okay? I went to a performance that she was giving not knowing what it was going to be and I, you know, it was at A. Langdon Street I looked around, I was the only black person in the audience and I watched Elinor Anton give the performance because a slight performance of her persona of Elinor Antonova who was a black ballerina who had joined the DIY company in Paris in 1918 and Elinor Anton is kind of a shortened study well, let's not go there but I mean she's not the ballerina type and my mother was 5'8 and Reed Finn and very much the ballerina type so as she was giving this performance I began to look at these images and listen to what she was saying about this woman's experience and I said, this is so off you know, because I could just imagine my mother having gone to Paris instead of going to Boston and having maybe, you know joined that milieu having become maybe you didn't have to be that great a dancer to dance with the IELF you know, she could have done that and what her life would have been had nothing to do with the presentation that Elinor Anton was making and that was the moment when I said I have to speak for myself I have to speak for myself and so in some ways my work is really if someone has said to me that my work is about making the invisible visible and so I am talking yes about an upper middle class upper middle class black life that existed with great power and richness but deliberately effected deliberately made invisible so as not to be threatened and so as a result you could have somebody like Michelle Obama and Barack Obama elected and people thinking that there was somehow the first people who would ever live this way and you continue you mentioned you're continuing engaging with her with that result and you mentioned wanting to think about what she would say now in some way, right? Yes and it made me think you have you conceived of any of what her poem would be now? I haven't gotten that far in the image making part and she's not somebody that I really want to talk about that much because she's sort of I mean raps a little bit because she hasn't gotten far enough but yeah I don't know how you could critique the white and the black art worlds now in quite the confrontational way that I did then I mean I could get away with it then but I could do it then I'm not even sure I can do it now and then but there's this other thing about being post-feminist, post-racial in terms of my own personal life and trying to explore what it meant to be these people I could talk about Devonia and Nefertiti in one way but I think I'm going to have to talk about Lena and Jean in quite another way but I don't know what that way is yet and I'm just kind of wondering really in some ways what people in the audience think are the things that I need to look out for what are the things I should work about I have one idea which just to throw out one of the things I think may be another post that would have some usefulness in this context is post-binary and about that exactly, exactly and so that is a very interesting way to start this conversation in relation to that so did you start? I'm sorry I'm always invisible so I assume yeah I don't need to bore this room to this but Laurier is my former surrealist professor that's when we first met and uniquely starting can everybody hear I just want to get you into the mic she was my professor at SVA and uniquely in the world only she and I ever in the history of America have a thing in common that no other black woman has done and that could not be done prior to the final renaissance existing and therefore making a space for a black woman of a miscegenated album like us two exist so my question to Laurier you know what I'm referring to post-racial in this post binary that she just mentioned I have to say that Candia is the only person who ever followed my lead and became a rock critic it's not it's not I'm the only one that can be a long list of there's a lot less of things we have in common that we don't need to get into so my question is can you please speak to from the post-racial and the post-binary angle we live in a world that was rock rock you were saying earlier rock rock because it was summer rock so what you and I have done the work is how has one situated itself as a black after politics and post something post story numbers to black women I think what you're saying is in scenes that I hear you because I think we need to develop our own language our own terminology to answer that maybe I'm asking is there a next work about your mom maybe is that the time to address what it's like to be ourselves almost if I live long enough can I do it if I don't do it I'm doing it in records right now so for your body of work my question is will you maybe address this issue of existing as yourself and me, your child amongst most European tribalism that is illegible because that's what rock rock is and I've only just found this out now because I'm making records and I've been able to answer this since I was a student well I don't have any answers yet but I'm struggling toward them it's just a thorny problem and it's always very it's been very hard for me all along because one of the benefits of this privilege was that I was arriving at a situation sooner than other people were and so the whole business of being post-racial which was I actually or post-black those are the terms actually my trajectory was the opposite I was post-black before I was black in other words I lived a life where my blackness I thought I thought my blackness had been essentially made irrelevant I was so successful in so many ways and nobody ever treated me though I were black until I got to the art world and then I realized I was black from both black to being black so how did you come to the art world at age 45 where is that transition well actually I had gone to the Iowa writers workshop to try to write a novel but I decided that I wasn't a very good writer and I came to New York with a boyfriend who was in the rock music business and I started freelancing for Village Voice and Rolling Stone and I began to see very clearly the limits of living a freelance life and so a friend of mine who I met at Iowa who was having a break up with his girlfriend he was teaching in SVA and he said please you got to take these courses because I can't deal with it he needed to do full time so I took over his courses at SVA and when I got there I said well this is much this place is really more happening than Latin school or Wellesley or any of the other places I've gone to school and I said I want to figure out what's going on here and so I went and I found a book my first sort of art book to see what's going on and the book that I picked up was Lucy LePard's Six Years of Demeterization I said I said I'm probably the only person in the world from cover to cover and she said well you were I said well I said I did and I said at the end of it I said you have these ideas all the time but you just didn't know they were art and so then I said oh you could actually do something here and SVA was the place where the conceptual art movement is sort of begun and would be carried on in a way and I was teaching this course of foundation English on the second floor on 23rd Street and I saw that this guy was teaching on the third floor at the same time I was teaching and I said I told my class okay you stay here I'm leaving and I go upstairs to see this guy and I took one look at him and I said if you can do it why are you doing it because his name is Vito Macanchina well he was a pretty much a poet I was a fiction writer he had gone to Iowa right as workshop he declared himself a poet a fiction writer if he didn't I could do it and that's what he did and the rest is history and the rest is history well so one of the things you mentioned about the piece and I promise we can move on to another work is if you call it a failure and then you call the piece a failure in some sense because it didn't have a response that I'm assuming tell me if I'm wrong that you were hoping for but then the life of the piece as it's gone on has obviously has had some impact and I'm wondering if you still consider it a failure over the life of living with the work now seeing where it's happened I haven't really come to grips with the success of my work I mean I get a lot of energy out of being transgressive and I get a lot of energy out of the negativity that's coming toward me so we just want to try harder and get angry and make more work so I'm not sure that all that great a thing for me to be accepted but I'm not sure how far the acceptance goes I know that if I were to resume the same kinds of arguments that I was making in those pieces if I were to pull up the political parts of those pieces and you know work with those I don't know that the reception would be all that different today I think that I think that longevity defends work and defends people and so you know I'm very aware that when I was using sort of the last of my physical attractiveness in matters of which I'm more that you know now I'm a little old lady and so I'm not like so threatening or so you know I'm more lovable I don't know I don't know the answer to that I think I distrust the acceptance of these works in some ways I feel like it's neutralized the original message well you know for instance a miscegenated family album is here at the museum that I wanted it to be at there had been some discussion Connie was talking to me about bringing it to the moment and the thing about miscegenated family album was that it was a family piece and Brooklyn was the place where family was we were from Boston but for all of our friends and relatives had settled in Brooklyn because this was the place of the diaspora all my life so that we would get on the train and go to visit people and come back and lay you with the bread from the West Indian bakeries you know so this is the barrel of my people and so I wanted that piece to be here on the other hand I am not sure whether or not the Brooklyn Museum or the Brooklyn Dolce deal with the controversial aspects of putting my sister with Nefertiti and what that means because I have come to feel that the everything that we know about ancient Egypt that we think of as Egypt which is pyramids which is hieroglyphs which is a certain kind of royal family all of these were structures from the southern part of Egypt the African part of Egypt and yet that part of Egypt which was strong and powerful and very you know advanced they were the ones I think to dam the the river Nile and all built agriculture but Egypt did not really become its full south until the southern part the African part conquered the northern Mediterranean or Europeanized part to become a unified whole and I felt that the hybridization of Egypt which is represented in the marriage politics that produced a Nefertiti had also produced something unexpected in slavery in the western hemisphere which was these two cultures coming together and informing each other and becoming linked inextricably culturally, racially and every other way you can and I felt that this hybridization was the source of great power and that was also part of what I was putting up in the insulation as well as the critique of Egyptology because as I think I don't know if I remember to say it but I made the piece 1980 and it was not until 1987 that a scholar at Cornell published his book for volume about opus called the Black Athena which was about the influence of ancient Egypt on ancient Greece and how so much of what was Greece what we think of as European what actually derived from ancient Egypt and all of so if I was making this work before seven years before Black Athena and a curator once came to my studio and said you know when you were making this work he was the only person who could vouch for these images and so I made it very much out of like already the same but now of course what also happens is that the had become a vocabulary in order to understand what I was doing so a large part of what's happened in terms of the acceptability of the work is not just that I softened or it softened but also that a critical structure had been built up around it and enabled its reception in a different way I think you sort of just answered this question but I pulled this quote from your website actually in relationship to politics of the piece the website says show in isolation from its larger context was both too baldly political one artist said that it was more political and David Hammons is how you like me now also in the show and too pretty yeah actually the business of PD and politics and I belong very much to I'm not alone Tony Morrison has made this case very effectively about one day work to be to make work that is radically political and unregeneratively beautiful it both can be done I mean I think that the idea that political art has to be the latest I don't know whose idea that is but it's certainly not mine imagine myself making art that's not beautiful and I look at black people and I say no matter how bad it gets they go out there in style and this is one of the most basic things about black culture is it beauty no matter what else is going on and so I reject the premise that political art has to be ugly or have edges in order to be effective but that's been a problem it's too pretty it's too pretty and some people felt that putting two people on the screen on the wall at the same time was gave you nowhere to go I don't know if I agree with that I don't know if I agree with that but that was also an objection it didn't allow you to just sit back and dream but what it also is it's extremely moving in a personal way and as a result it makes me think of which is another question that you've talked about it comes back to me that what I think is the link between conceptual art and feminism which is personalist political and I think that the piece very much is a part of that is a great example of that could you tell us a little bit about where and when you came to feminism you mentioned the heresies collective and the same way that you seem to have entered the art world sort of finding your own path I'm wondering how you came to feminism in New York I had a very curious career in feminism and the reason is that I've always positioned myself as the black feminist bringing the message to the mainstream feminism that's not been an easy decision to be in I know that there are black feminists who did not want to have that discussion who felt that the discussion would be fruitless, hopeless, whatever and not worth their time but I always felt that it was worth my time to try to move the comprehension of these differences further and I did not have when I was at the height of my involvement in mainstream feminism that was in 1991 and 2002 as you probably know and others, except around that time the once again we're talking about the language that enables understanding and there was a thing that happened in 1991 which the thing that started black women's action coalition was the Anita Hill, Clowns Thomas heroes and feminists were so incensed by that that it sort of jump-started the feminist movement a second time and and at the same time the WAC was part of the sort of white response to feminism, white feminist response to the Anita Hill theories but there was another response which was possibly not so well known and that was that just as WAC was starting there was an advertisement in the New York Times paid for which was $25,000 which is what it cost them, full page and it was signed by every black woman intellectual artist, whatever whatever that you could think of which was taking which was speaking to Fort Anita Hill the black feminist perspective you remember that who organized that who organized that I'm not sure it may have been the women around the comedy collected for there were several important black feminist collectives they may have organized it but the people whose names were the most prominent private place Toni Morrison for most of them so she was one of the premier signers of that ad I was a signer but simultaneously with that Toni Morrison who was also an editor at Knopf simultaneously with that Toni Morrison published a book about teen gender 1992 I think it came out and there were a number of essays she edited it and there were a number of essays in that book and one of them was by a young woman lawyer who was teaching at that time her first teaching position at Samford or UC Berkeley and her name was Kimberly Crenshaw and Kimberly Crenshaw became sort of one of the founders of the political race movement and she within just a few years about 1995 within three years after that book was published she had developed the linguistic structure to describe this which is intersectional feminism Karen has gone through some hard times more recently but I would say that it really enabled a certain kind of discussion to begin to take place to move these forward. Should I read a couple of the questions if you were thinking I have the audience respond to? What do you think of political art and do you think that there is room for it now? Do you think that we live in a culture of post-feminism, post-racialism or post-black culture? What kinds of attitudes and strategies would you suggest that Lorraine very generous of you to ask these questions adopt to help people understand what she is trying to say now? And then the last one is you said this already I think in a way. What kind of problems might people expect you would encounter in doing this kind of work? I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that question I'm not doing this work because I don't know any other kind of work to do I mean it's the work that is me in that I have to live my life out doing is am I going to run into the same kind of problems that I run into? Am I going to still run into the same kind of problems that I ran into when I did this in 1980 or is it going to be easier, is it going to be more I am? Even though I want to ask the question that I asked anybody who looked different but only the same thing the face of it might not apparently at first glance see what you think it is but if you then think about it it will be the same thing What's that face of it look like? What's its appearance going to be? It starts to say I mean you know Tamara Halloway is an extremely highly regarded black art historian she teaches at the University of Delaware and she has an organization called Association for Critical Race Art History which is an important college art association so she knows where she is speaking from What's the word? What's the word? I asked and Kandia is my twin sister but over the years we've had conversations and just like you were saying things like post black my sister and I were having conversations like this before I ever knew and in fact one day we were lost in this conversation but because of our generation which is we're the first generation of blacks born after desegregation and we're thinking about our mother who is pre desegregation we have a background of privilege of a certain extent going to schools like monthly etc but things that my mother might have faced or that you might have faced before 1970 we experience same things but they look different and they come from the people that you're hanging out with and they might be a weird offhand comment or it might be something that has some material consequence it's not as necessarily overt but the same impetus is behind it and the same intent it's the same way in which now that Obama is president people want to say racism exists but then all of a sudden Oprah cannot walk into a store on the left bank because she's perceived as being a who can't afford an amnesty or whatever it was so it's going to look different but it's going to be the same thing it's really strange because one of the phrases that I would get sometimes when I was a college student or a young adult just being myself I would run into this phrase when I would be around certain kinds of white people and there was the phrase who does she think she is and the frequency with which that phrase is addressed to Obama and Michelle is just frightening who does he think he is when he's the president of the United States but who does he think he is who does she think she is and that's what I was saying at the black pros this year if I go I'm the uppity deans because they're Southern and from Georgia I'm always the uppity deans and that has not changed since 1991-92 when I was in your class and you didn't know that you'd ever written rough because we're invisible which would mean there's illegible what our experience is that's what I'm trying to say so unfortunately that's why we never would subscribe to the postal I for whatever the terms of the moment and that's what we are and that's what we are trying to you were saying all of a sudden you walked into a certain space and you were treated as black black people are still going to be at some moment in their lives in this post-Obama post-racial utopia still treated as black you don't know how it's going to look until that stops your responses to your work in this new iteration if it's Manmusell or she's become Italian Countess I don't know if she's going to be now but whoever she's going to be there's going to be a moment where there's going to be a backlash against it that is profoundly racial and gendered and sexualized and it's not going to accentuate us Kamara I absolutely agree with you and it's so frightening it's frustrating and it's frightening because I did live the 30 years that it took for that to change for that first generation of work I won't be here for that but when it finally changes all I'm ever going to experience with this new work is and I have no friends the women who were freedom writers and who did this and I have a lot more freedoms than my mother's generation did but there are moments where still those same things happen I want to know there are several people here who are not black does this just sound like a strange conversation that you're overhearing or does it sound like a conversation that it's affecting you in any way I think the whole notion of post black or post feminist is really nonsense life does not change that way it will take generations for change to occur none of us not even the youngest one here will live to see those phrases have a reality I'm thinking about all the turmoil in the world today of our revolutions and uprisings going on everywhere and so I'm thinking of our I'm trying to think of our conversation in the context of what's going on in the world today which is in frightening and in a way encouraging because people are speaking up all over the place but it's a very dangerous tenuous moment that we're living in what about others what about black to you I'm really more interested I already know what I'm saying it's disconcerting when you're living here in New York City we like to think it's such a liberal place and there's so much quality here and so much diversity we like to think about the rest of the world's life but even in New York City there is still racism in Louisiana and all around and when I go down there I'm in a beauty parlor and there's only white people in the beauty parlor people hear them saying near and using word like it's nothing because we're all white here so it's shocking when I'm in New York City that this is still happening I feel like I've gone back 50, 60 years it's not that again it's less racist here in New York City too but certainly not as white it's disconcerting I also think I think that Bulls Trooper the female identity but for a lot of different ethnicities both in class and different races so I definitely think that that although maybe not the same term would be used in a competition I might have I think a lot of things are true I think something that you touched on that's really interesting is the notion that all of the racism are not necessarily malicious anymore kind of like somebody might say oh all Hispanic people do this it's a fact it's not something like I'm not against Hispanic people I'm not against black people I'm not against these people it's just a fact it's just a fact it's just a fact it's just a fact it's just a fact against these people it's just a fact I think a lot of that is why the confrontational identity won't work anymore because it's not like people are like I hate you what people do awful things to you it's like there are these vestiges of the system that are still keeping us down and that people are still holding but not with malicious intent to say this is to keep you down it's just still there so I think that that's kind of an interesting thing to consider when you're thinking about what why people are using post-racial why people are talking about this post-identity because they're trying to bypass it even if they can't do you have thoughts or questions but with this possible athletes keeping it from doing it no I can't not do it I'm just sort of like trying to get myself steeled but that was coming down a lot right but when you took the original work when you were thinking of I mean so in a sense you don't have to be concerned you do it and what will be you weren't operating out of the place like oh what are they going to say and what are they going to say to anybody I had the benefit of ignorance then unfortunately I'm not so blessed right now you know I'm horrible I mean I didn't know then that I should bring a photographer to shoot me when I did my first performance that I don't thought never occurred to me I would never go I wouldn't step out of my bed actually would I I wouldn't step out of my bed oh we all live in that world now you have time for one more question or I would like to suggest we continue this conversation in the reception because I feel like so many great points have been raised if we all just want to keep talking it would be great thank you