Lorraine O'Grady: Rivers, First Draft Performance

Director: Lorraine O'Grady, Zawe Ashton

1982 / 54min / DCP

"For one night only, Metrograph, in collaboration with the Lorraine O’Grady Trust and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, present a special program encompassing never-before-seen footage of O’Grady’s performance, Rivers, First Draft, together with the Tate Modern’s commission of Meeting Lorraine O’Grady by filmmaker and actor Zawe Ashton. Catherine Morris, Sackler Family Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and co-curator of the retrospective Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021 will be joining Zawe in conversation.

“Rivers, First Draft was a one-time only performance created by O’Grady for Art Across the Park, curated by Gilbert Coker and Horace Brockington. It was performed in the Loch, a northern section of Central Park, on August 18, 1982, as a ‘collage-in-space,’ with different actions taking place simultaneously on two sides of the stream and further up the hill. Competing for attention, the two narratives are about uniting different heritages—the Caribbean and New England—and three different ages and aspects of the self: a young girl, a teenager, and an adult woman. It’s a three-ring circus of movement and sound that, unlike the randomness of Futurists attempting to shout each other down, plays more like a unitary dream. Preceded by Meeting Lorraine O’Grady, a short film in which multi-hyphenate talent Ashton visits O’Grady at her home in New York City, where they discuss race, gender, and the challenges for Black women artists in an often-segregated art world. Ashton and O’Grady also visit the site in Central Park where O’Grady performed Rivers First Draft.” —Robert Ransick, Executive Director & Trustee, Lorraine O’Grady Trust

Meeting Lorraine O’Grady (Zawe Ashton, 2017, 9 mins)

Rivers, First Draft, Rehearsal Raw Cut (Lorraine O'Grady, 1982/2026, 45 mins)"

Post-screening conversation with filmmaker and actor Zawe Ashton and Catherine Morris, Sackler Family Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and co-curator of Lorraine’s retrospective Both/And at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021 on Sunday, November 15th