This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s
Walker Art Center
Minneapolis, MN
June 30 - September 30, 2012
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL
February 11 - June 3, 2012
Lorraine O'Grady exhibits in This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, a group exhibition organized by Helen Molesworth, Barbara Lee Chief Curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston. O'Grady's Art Is... series (1983/2009) is featured in this traveling exhibition that tackles political concepts in visual art from 1979-1992. Art Is.. a 1983 performance intervention in the African-American Pride Parade was made in response to a fellow activist’s challenge that “avant-garde art doesn’t have anything to do with Black people”. Photo-documentation of the resulting artwork, made specifically for a non-art world audience, shows performers interacting with parade spectators, framing people and the Harlem street scape with gold frames in an affirmative, joyful encounter.