ART IS …
(ON LORRAINE O’GRADY’S TRANSCREATIONS)
By DK Nnuro on May 1, 2025.
Last December, the world lost the fearless and trailblazing artist and writer Lorraine O’Grady. Working across forms, she challenged conventions, celebrated beauty, and altered the cultural landscape. Here, DK Nnuro considers her work through the lens of translation and transcreation.
John Singer Sargent, we know, is widely considered the foremost portraitist of late-nineteenthcentury America, the period dubbed the Gilded Age. And according to Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent, a 2020 exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, this celebrated artist was also responsible for erasing the relevance of a certain Black man to the work of his later years. Here for the first time was an exhibition devoted to that Black man, Thomas Eugene McKeller, as Sargent captured him in nine charcoal drawings and a lithograph, all made between 1916 and 1921. In each, a mid twenties McKeller, roughly thirty-five years younger than Sargent and his secret paramour, luxuriates homoerotically in muscular nude (hence the Apollo of the exhibition’s title). For his popular murals in the rotunda at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and subsequent major works, Sargent would also appropriate McKeller’s body, transforming it into the figures of classical gods and goddesses, both male and female but always white, keeping McKeller himself in the shadows. As told by Boston’s Apollo, this erasure was informed by Sargent’s casual racism and internalized homophobia. A month before the show, the Gardner launched an installation on its building’s facade: The Strange Taxi, Stretched, an enlargement of an autobiographical photomontage from 1991 by the groundbreaking conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady. The work features four elegantly dressed Black women—O’Grady’s mother and three maternal and paternal aunts
—seemingly rising into the sky from a New England mansion equipped with wheels. In the early twentieth century these women emigrated from Jamaica to Boston, where they worked as maids in homes like this one. In the large-scale 2020 version of The Strange Taxi, the sky is stretched to suggest the limitless possibilities of the women’s postdomestic existence. But all is not redeemed: as they ascend, the wheeled mansion trundles along another Black woman’s back. In this commentary on Black female subjectivity from one of its leading philosophers, both white prosperity and Black prosperity happen on the backs of Black women.
These simultaneous Black-themed exhibitions at the Gardner occasioned an essay by O’Grady in the catalogue for the McKeller/Sargent show. At first blush, the title of her text, “Notes on Living a Translated Life,” suggests a piece grounded in her résumé as a translator: a late-’60s tenure at a Chicago-based translation firm, then her own late- ’80s founding of another that counted Citibank as a client. Perhaps most impressive is their precedent, the publication of the Chilean writer José Donoso’s novel Este domingo (1966) in O’Grady’s English translation as This Sunday (Knopf, 1967). O’Grady and Donoso, student and instructor respectively, had cultivated a friendship and working relationship after meeting at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1965. O’Grady would complete her translation of the novel within a year. In a letter to Donoso dated December 29, 1966, Knopf editor Angus Cameron outlined his impressions of the manuscript: “let me say that your translator did a very good job. . . . The novel has illuminated that mysterious business of the living of the simultaneous lives of the generation in one family.” ( … )