Lorraine O'Grady

Miscegenated Family Album

In pairing ancient Egyptian artworks with contemporary portraits of her family, artist Lorraine O’Grady invites her audience to dismantle the artificial divides between the personal, cultural, and historical. Miscegenated Family Album comprises 32 prints, framed in pairs. Each frame juxtaposes images of O’Grady’s family members with reproductions of ancient sculptures depicting Egyptian Queen Nefertiti and her royal family. The work memorializes O’Grady’s sister, Devonia Evangeline, who died at a young age like Nefertiti. O’Grady often worked in diptych formats like this one to encourage people to think beyond binaries into a space of hybridity and overlap. In addition to the uncanny parallels between Nefertiti and Devonia, O’Grady cited these sculptures because of her interest in ancient Egypt as a place of hybridity: a society built upon cultural mixing from across North Africa and the Middle East. Through Miscegenated Family Album, O’Grady speaks to ancient Egypt’s importance as a site of pan-African cultural and historical empowerment for people in the contemporary African diaspora.