Lorraine O’Grady
Jan 14, 2020 - Nov 24, 2020
Ticket: $15.00*
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Lorraine O’Grady’s piece for the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade was chosen to provide additional context for the exhibition Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent. It is an adaptation of one of two autobiographical photomontages made by O’Grady in 1991: The Strange Taxi: or From Africa to Jamaica to Boston in 200 Years and The Fir-Palm, to depict and clarify her New England and Caribbean heritages. In both the original and the stretched versions of The Strange Taxi, female members of O’Grady’s family—her mother, Lena, second from left, and three maternal and paternal aunts—emerge through the roof of a New England mansion to show black women escaping from the limitations placed on them in post-World War I Boston, when domestic service was virtually the only employment available to them. In the stretched version of The Strange Taxi for the Gardner, O’Grady was able to double the height of the sky above them, metaphorically giving the women (and their descendants) expanded room to grow.
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Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
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