Blackness and Self-Imaging: Lorraine O’Grady’s Performance as Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire

Abstract

The continued lack of visibility and representation of Black women in studies of historical and contemporary performance art not only forces their work to exist within the margins, but their exclusion also exposes broader questions around the terrain for decolonising performance histories. In order to begin to recover interventionist performances by Black women, this article focuses on the work of African American conceptual artist and theorist Lorraine O’Grady. It recuperates O’Grady’s performance work and expand Black feminist histography for performance art. In the 1980s, O’Grady created Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83), a series of performative invasions into mainstream art spaces in New York as the persona Mlle Bourgeoise Noire to enable her to become visible in exclusionary spaces. O’Grady’s performances sought to disturb the structures of race, gender and class that excluded her as a Black woman from the mainstream art world. In turn, I argue, her intrusion complicated the already existing and speculative modes of blackness.