Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel, is Lorraine O’Grady’s most recent artistic persona. The Knight arrives 40 years after O’Grady’s earlier avatar, the renowned Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, confronted the prevailing racial segregation of the mainstream New York art world through unannounced performances at public art events. The Knight—together with attendants Pitchy-Patchy, her squire, and Rociavant, her horse—has set out to finish what her progenitor began. This time, however, the avatar’s identity is obscured. She wears a custom-forged suit of armor in the Early Renaissance style of the conquistadors, but its symbolic burden is subverted by the botanical Caribbean and other headdresses that alternately sprout from her barred burgonet helmet.

O’Grady has been gradually introducing the Knight to the public, beginning in 2021 with the landmark retrospective Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And at the Brooklyn Museum. In the museum’s European galleries, images of the Knight interacted with massive Rodin sculptures and with Early Renaissance paintings.

Later in 2021, at the height of the pandemic, O’Grady had herself filmed as the Knight doing a performance-without-audience in selected galleries of the Brooklyn Museum retrospective of her work. Under the watchful and approving gaze of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (invoked by a mannequin clothed in her iconic gown of white gloves nearby), the Knight declared her guiding concerns in the form of 9.5 theses. The edited footage became the “performance- film” Greetings & Theses which premiered at the museum later that year.

Although The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel is young and surprisingly sexy work, it addresses multiple audiences separately and simultaneously. It poses a question that is fundamental to the problem of subjectivity and to the politics of visibility in Western modernity and artistic modernism: “If you conceal everything—race, class, age, gender— what is left? What is possible?”

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