Lorraine O’Grady, Rivers, First Draft, 1982

Rujeko Hockley: Rivers, First Draft is an installation of forty-eight prints by Lorraine O'Grady. It documents a one time only performance that happened in Central Park, in which O'Grady created almost a moving play. A roving play with a very specific cast of characters. The idea behind the piece is that it served as this path through her life. Her childhood and adolescence in New England, in Boston where she was born and raised as the child of Caribbean immigrants, through to her varied career path. O'Grady was a rock critic. She was a translator. She had many, many different lives before becoming an artist, which she did in her forties.

So, the piece has all these different figures and her at different points in her life. She's the lady in red, for example. That's her when she becomes an artist. But she's also shown earlier wearing magenta, and that's her as a teenager. She's also shown prior to that, even, in a pink sash, and that's her as a child. So, it's charting her way through her life and all these twists and turns and the different obstacles she encountered. But also the different opportunities and the times in which she really asserted her desire to have a certain life, to live a certain way. To be an artist, ultimately.