Lorraine O’Grady
ART IS… Online

Lorraine O Grady ART IS…Line of Floats 1983-2009 (Detail)

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 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.

See the entire Lorraine O’Grady’s ART IS