In the Footsteps of Grace Jones

Standing nearly six feet tall with the imperious bearing of an androgynous black Amazon, Grace Jones was bending gender identity for her own purposes and playing with extreme fashion and multiple personae before Lady Gaga got her groove and her meat dress on.

Reportedly in her late 60s, though she's known to lie about her age, and still performing, the Jamaican-born musician, performance artist, actress, model and notorious shape-shifter paved the way for a raft of creative souls who've taken up the mantle of boundary-breaking and fluid gender. A darling of the 1980s New York art scene, photographed by Mapplethorpe, and friends with Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, the fire-and-ice Jones, with her trademark flattop, made hypersexual, transgressive womanhood her canvas, and flaunted her powerful, athletic black body.

Works in a range of mediums, from video to collage, by some of the artists liberated and inspired by Jones' formidable example, are currently on view in "The Grace Jones Project" at the Museum of the African Diaspora, one of those rare exhibitions that doesn't reduce or diminish the spirit of its larger-than-life subject in the aerie confines of a museum. Credit goes to curator Nicole J. Caruth, who clearly has an instinct for talent and the ability to put together live-wire artworks that complement but don't repeat each other and keep their eye on the prize. Stultifying art-historical scholarship could have sunk this effort, especially with a performer as electrifying and commanding as Jones, seen vamping in fashion magazine spreads and vintage album covers, such as a famous one that has her snarling, naked and on all-fours in a cage, or in clips from several theatrical-concert films projected on a gallery wall.

This excellent show emphasizes the responses of a variety of intriguing artists who invoke or simply channel Jones, whose aura infuses the project named for her like a heavy perfume. Xaviera Simmons, for instance, directly references Jones in the color photograph "Warm Leatherette," in which she wades in the water holding an image of Jones in front of her face. Others such as Lyle Ashton Harris have adopted Jones-spawned personas and motifs and incorporated them into their own work. Harris' enlarged Polaroids are a shout-out to Jones' penchant for dressing up, taking it off and trying on alternate personalities. He inhabits a bare-chested Josephine Baker in hoop earrings and a G-string of bananas; a bloody, beaten-down boxer after a losing bout - Jones' father was an amateur pugilist, and she had a fondness for boxing gear - and he morphs into a skinny prostitute of undetermined gender in black spider-web fishnet stockings, sitting in squalor, identity hidden behind a pointy white mask with narrow slits for eyes. The series title, "Better Days," alludes to a New York City dive bar frequented by gay black patrons in the early 1970s and 80s

"Eat Cake," an affecting piece by Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu, who has called the performer one of her "favorite cultural drag magicians," takes a more oblique approach to the Jones mystique. The black & white video portrays an unkempt woman resting on a rickety chair by a riverbank, maybe the Louisiana bayou, devouring a confection on the ground at her feet. The piece is projected on a screen mounted on a wooden palette lying flat on the floor, a novel installation that requires one to look down in order to view it, as if passing by and dismissing the troubling spectacle of a hungry, disheveled woman in the woods.

Cauleen Smith's "Living Grace's Life in the Google," a digital slide show presented on an old-fashioned TV monitor, surveys Jones' many guises: The high-priestess fashionista sporting orange cone breasts, a firebird costume, outrageous headgear carried off with the aplomb of an African queen, and an array of nifty bondage outfits and corsets; the jet-setting party girl keeping fast company with Warhol and Donna Summer, stepping out as an Afro-futurist cyborg, riding a camel, wielding a gun, donning tribal masks and decadent masquerade. It's said she wore a red constructivist maternity dress while pregnant, which is one way of warding off morning sickness. She also appears as the villainess May Day on a movie poster for "View to a Kill," posed next to co-star Roger Moore. Move over, Mr. Bond.

A concurrent exhibition at MOAD, "Dandy Lion: (Re)Articulating Black Masculine Identity," explores the diverse, self-styled images of cis-gender black men throughout the African Diaspora through photographs and film.

Through Sept. 18. Info: moadsf.org