Contact: Karen Frascona
617.369.3442
Lorraine O’Grady: Family Gained Henry and Lois Foster Gallery August 11, 2018–December 2, 2018
When the Boston-born, New York-based artist Lorraine O’Grady (born 1934) visited Egypt in her 20s, two years after the unexpected death of her sister, she found herself surrounded for the first time by people who looked like her. While walking the streets of Cairo, the loss of her only sibling, Devonia, became confounded with the image of “a larger family gained.” Upon returning to the U.S., O’Grady began painstaking research on ancient Egypt, particularly the Amarna period of Nefertiti and Akhenaton, finding narrative and visual resemblances between their family and her own. This exhibition celebrates the recent acquisition of Miscegenated Family Album (1980/1994), the first work by Miscegenated Family Album (Sisters IV), L: Devonia’s sister, Lorraine; R: Nefertiti’s sister, Mutnedjmet, O’Grady to enter the MFA’s collection. The title of this major installation— 1980/1994 consisting of 16 diptychs of color photographs that compare Devonia’s family with that of Nefertiti—reclaims the pejorative term “miscegenation,” which was used in the context of the post-Civil War laws that made interracial marriage illegal until 1967. In this strongly feminist “novel in space,” as the artist describes it, and the 1980 performance that led to it, O’Grady attempts to resolve a troubled relationship with her older sister by inserting their story into that of Nefertiti and her younger sister, Mutnedjmet. Building on remarkable physical resemblances, the paired images span the coeval distance between sibling rivalry and hero worship through “chapters” on topics such as motherhood, ceremonial occasions, husbands and aging. Lorraine O’Grady: Family Gained represents an important moment of exhibiting the photographs in the city where O’Grady grew up in a family of Jamaican immigrants. Installed at the MFA, which contains one of the world’s greatest collections of ancient Egyptian art, the work reflects O’Grady’s view of ancient Egypt as a “bridge” country—the cultural and racial amalgamation of Africa and the Middle East, which flourished only after its southern half conquered and united with its northern half in 3000 B.C. Both families featured in the photographs—one ancient and royal, the other modern and descended from slaves—are products of historic forces of migration and hybridization.
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