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. 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. 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.
