LORRAINE O'GRADY (1934 - ) Group of 4 Photographs (From Rivers, First Draft).
Four digital C-prints from Kodachrome 35mm slides, 1982. Each 406x508 mm; 16x20 inches. Each signed, dated and numbered 5/8 in pencil, verso. Printed in 2015.
Their flirtation begins * The Debauchees dance to New Wave music with the Woman in Red following * The Woman in White eats coconut and looks away from the action * The Debauchees dance down the hill, the Woman in Red falls further behind.
Rivers, First Draft was a single, unique performance created by Lorraine O'Grady for "Art Across the Park," curated by Gilbert Coker and Horace Brockington. It was performed in the Loch, a northern section of Central Park, on August 18, 1982, and was a "collage-in-space," with different actions taking place simultaneously on two sides of the stream and further up the hill. The narratives being told were competing for attention, simultaneously uniting two different heritages, the Caribbean and New England, and three different ages and aspects of the self, a young girl, a teenager, and an adult woman. It was a three-ring circus of movement and sound that, unlike the randomness of Futurists attempting to shout each other down, played more like a unitary dream.
The pivotal moment of Rivers, First Draft occurs after the Woman in Red has been ejected by the Black Male Artists from their closed studio: she descends to the stream bank where she sees a white stove and claims it by painting it red. The figures are actively guided by the male New England figure, the Nantucket Memorial statue, while the female Caribbean figure, the Woman in White, continues to endlessly grate coconut, calmly indifferent to the scene unfolding below. The performance was seen by a small invited audience, mostly friends from Just Above Midtown, and occasional pedestrians walking through the seldom visited Loch.
