“Reframing Resistance & Surveillance: Lorraine O’Grady’s Art Is…”
In Social Practice Art in Turbulent Times: The Revolution Will Be Live, 47-59. Edited by Eric Schruers and Kristina Olson. New York: Routledge, 2019.
Publishers Site & GoogleBooks
Abstract: We continuously circulate accounts of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Travyon Martin, but “haven’t been able to do the same thing for black women and girls. We haven’t carried their stories in the same way,” laments African American Policy Forum Director Rachel Gilmer. This public failure to harness black women and girls’ stories has everything to do with their historical disenfranchisement from hegemonic forms of representation. Lorraine O’Grady’s 1983 street performance, Art Is… [sic], at the African American Parade in Harlem and its subsequent photo-installation challenge this disenfranchisement. Over the past few years, her project’s profile has grown alongside the mainstream media’s awakening to racialized state violence. This chapter examines the overlooked ways in which Art Is defies post-civil rights-era policing of black women by law enforcement and popular culture alike. Drawing on Simone Browne’s concept of “dark sousveillance,” the author proposes that Art Is critically reconfigures the racialized forms of social control imposed on its performance’s diverse black setting and the gendered parameters of famous civil rights movement photography that O’Grady’s photo-installation evokes.
