The artist’s iconic 1983 performance posed people inside picture frames, celebrating diversity and unity
A campaign video for the Biden-Harris US presidential campaign has drawn inspiration from Lorraine O’Grady’s iconic 1983 performance project in which the conceptual artist posed participants in golden painting frames at a 1983 African-American Day Parade in Harlem – the event is documented through photographs.
A two-minute film, released over the weekend following a projected victory for Biden by various networks including AP, is set to a performance of ‘America the Beautiful’, with people from different backgrounds across the country appearing inside empty golden frames; the video, which comes with the artist’s blessing, is influenced by O’Grady’s healing vision of diversity and unity.
Campaign officials were reportedly inspired to approach the artist having seen documentation of the 1983 performance Art Is at the exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles.
‘The translation of my ideas is almost direct,’ the artist told the New York Times. ‘Biden is saying the same thing to the country that I was saying to the artworld […] We are a very large and diverse community and we all need to be included.’
You can watch it here:
