“Black art must take more risks! Black art must take more risks!” In 1980, the artist Lorraine O’Grady interrupted the opening-night benefit of Just Above Midtown—a gallery founded by Linda Goode Bryant in 1974 that championed primarily Black artists and artists of color from New York City and Los Angeles. O’Grady made a scene as her performance persona Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middle Class), a French-Guianese pageant winner dressed in a handmade ball gown made of 180 pairs of white gloves…

Codex, coding, coda, coded. To begin with a few words, we can trace the ways language is at the center of our constructed identities, and the images created by them. Language is plastic; as is the organization of sexuality, and race. The ways we categorize, keep, care, and recall are collections of codes held in our bodies informed by practices of habit…