Lorraine O’Grady crashed gallery openings in the 1980s as her alter ego, Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire, a fake international beauty pageant winner from French Guiana.

O’Grady’s escapades as this persona were documented through a titular series of 14 photographs, currently held in the MOMA. Inspired by her middle-class Jamaican American experience growing up as the daughter of Caribbean immigrants in Boston, O’Grady draws on symbols of societal acceptance and racial oppression in her construction of the beauty queen.

O’Grady was an intelligence analyst, a rock music critic, and a writer before becoming a visual artist at the age of 40. She faced difficulties throughout her career stating, “When I started thinking about art in the '70s, there were basically no Blacks in the mainstream art world, and only a handful of women. Later I was in feminist organizations that fought successfully to help change the art world’s awareness of this situation. But even though there are now a few Blacks and many more women than there once were, contemporary art is still primarily a white male world. ‘La lutte continue!’ as they say in French. The struggle goes on and on.” Through her performance, she addresses these complex issues of gender and sexuality, class, cultural identity and hybridity, and race.

Mlle Bourgeoise Noire wears elbow-length gloves and a dress constructed from 180 pairs of gloves found in Manhattan thrift shops. Her tiara and sash, which proclaims “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 1955," serves as certification of her achievements. She carried a cat-o-nine tails whip, a torture device which was used on slaves on Southern plantations, decorated with white chrysanthemum blossoms. The white gloves act as a metaphor for the repressed psychology of the Black middle class, and the whip represents the history of violence which conditioned it.

Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s modus operandi was invading New York’s downtown art world, making her debut at Just Above Midtown, a Black avant-garde gallery in Tribeca run by Linda Goode Bryant, at the opening of the exhibit Afro-American Abstraction in 1980. In this performance, she plucked the chrysanthemums from her whip and bestowed them upon spectators before flagellating her own back. She then recited a poem which ended with the declaration that “Black Art Must Take More Risks!” O’Grady felt that the art being exhibited was too tame, critiquing it as “art with white gloves on.”

The second appearance of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire was at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1981, at the opening of the exhibition Persona which featured artists working with alter egos, all of whom were white. The performance was an act of protest against the exclusion of artists of color and ended with a poem which declared: “Now is the time for an Invasion!” Her poems, clipped from the headlines of the New York Times, were inspired by the automatic writing processes of Surrealists.

Beyond invading art spaces, O'Grady considered Mlle Bourgeoise Noire to be "a state of mind," a perspective that exists throughout all of her work, indicated by white gloves she would sometimes pin to her clothing, even when out of costume or using her own name. O'Grady considers the performances to be "failures," as they were ultimately unsuccessful in racially integrating the art world, and images from her performances of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire have been reproduced and disseminated out of context, contributing to misunderstanding of her intent. This was remedied in the mid-'90s when the costume was purchased by Peter and Eileen Norton and then, in 2007, was featured as the entry piece in the WACK! Art and Feminist Revolution exhibition, the first-ever museum exhibition on the origins of feminist art.