Miss Major Griffin-Gracy
counterlight #3 "joyride"
July 2026
counterlight #3 "joyride"
July 2026
Some people survive what was built to erase them — and then turn around and come back for everyone else.
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy was at Stonewall on the first night. She survived Dannemora, Bellevue's "queen tank," and five decades of a country that kept telling her she shouldn't exist. She cared for people dying of AIDS in New York in the 1980s, drove San Francisco's first mobile needle exchange, led the TGI Justice Project, and went back into prisons again and again for the incarcerated trans women she called her gurls. In her last chapter she planted herself in Little Rock and built the House of GG, a place for Black trans women to rest, heal, and learn to lead. She was a pioneer, an organizer, and — above all — a mother to a generation of activists who are still doing the work.
This piece is not a memorial. It's a joyride. Miss Major loved her Cadillac, so she gets the wheel, and she gets to drive it fast and a little recklessly, because she was never much for rules. Riding with her are five women carrying her legacy forward: Ceyenne Doroshow, Tiommi Luckett, CeCe McDonald, Tracie Jada O'Brien, and Janetta Johnson.
The car and figures are digital photo mosaics printed on Kozo paper and mounted to canvas, suspended on strings so they sway and shift as viewers pass — the piece is never quite still. Light glows upward onto the faces the way it does in movie car scenes, the same thread of light that runs through every counterlight piece. The landscape they're racing through is built from her own words. The dangling Arkansas plate is her real vanity tag, TSCUGR, with the registration date set to the month she died.
Recognition only ever mattered to Miss Major if it did something for her gurls. So the bumper sticker is a call to action, and the QR code is the ask. The work she started is not finished, and the ground she won is being taken back right now.
Empower trans lives. Scan the bumper. Meet the gurls. tinyurl.com/missmajorvir
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy was at Stonewall on the first night. She survived Dannemora, Bellevue's "queen tank," and five decades of a country that kept telling her she shouldn't exist. She cared for people dying of AIDS in New York in the 1980s, drove San Francisco's first mobile needle exchange, led the TGI Justice Project, and went back into prisons again and again for the incarcerated trans women she called her gurls. In her last chapter she planted herself in Little Rock and built the House of GG, a place for Black trans women to rest, heal, and learn to lead. She was a pioneer, an organizer, and — above all — a mother to a generation of activists who are still doing the work.
This piece is not a memorial. It's a joyride. Miss Major loved her Cadillac, so she gets the wheel, and she gets to drive it fast and a little recklessly, because she was never much for rules. Riding with her are five women carrying her legacy forward: Ceyenne Doroshow, Tiommi Luckett, CeCe McDonald, Tracie Jada O'Brien, and Janetta Johnson.
The car and figures are digital photo mosaics printed on Kozo paper and mounted to canvas, suspended on strings so they sway and shift as viewers pass — the piece is never quite still. Light glows upward onto the faces the way it does in movie car scenes, the same thread of light that runs through every counterlight piece. The landscape they're racing through is built from her own words. The dangling Arkansas plate is her real vanity tag, TSCUGR, with the registration date set to the month she died.
Recognition only ever mattered to Miss Major if it did something for her gurls. So the bumper sticker is a call to action, and the QR code is the ask. The work she started is not finished, and the ground she won is being taken back right now.
Empower trans lives. Scan the bumper. Meet the gurls. tinyurl.com/missmajorvir
Dimensions: 54 x 40 inches
Materials: Canvas, acrylic, digital print on Kozo paper, string, LED lights
