Conceptual artist and critic Lorraine O’Grady, known for pivotal works that subverted the binaries of Western thought, died on Friday, December 13 at the age of 90 in New York City. O’Grady has left an indelible impact across nearly five decades of performance, film, photography, collage, and text-based analysis that both contributes to and critiques the contemporary art world from a black feminist perspective. The news of her death was confirmed by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, which began representing the artist last year.
O’Grady was born in 1934 to a middle-class Jamaican immigrant family in Boston, Massachusetts, where her parents Edwin and Lena were instrumental in founding the first West Indian Episcopal Church in the area. She was deeply affected by the aesthetics of Episcopalianism, but lost her faith in her mid-twenties after the unexpected death of her only sister, Devonia Evangeline. O’Grady was educated at the city’s Girls’ Latin School and then graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in economics and a minor in Spanish literature. Shortly after receiving her degree, she chose to find stability by working for the federal government, having passed the challenging Management Intern Program exam as one of only six women and a total of 200 individuals who came from the 20,000 candidates passed.
The beginning of O’Grady’s art career was still decades away when she worked for the Department of Labor as a research economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics – which she described as a boys’ club and difficult to navigate as a single mother at the time. Unable to find upward mobility, she turned to translating while living with her second husband in Chicago, where she flourished thanks to her early training in Latin and her studies of Spanish literature. After an incomplete education in fiction writing at the University of Iowa, she began writing as a rock music critic for the Rolling stone and the Village voice early 70’s.
Her efforts in the field of visual arts began with Cutting out the New York Times (1977), a collage series that O’Grady began after taking a job teaching literature at the School of Visual Arts and becoming interested in the works of Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists. For 26 consecutive Sundays, she cut out excerpts from the publication’s headlines and reorganized them to form her own poetry, which she called her first work of art.
Then came “Mademoiselle Bourgeois Noire”, a persona who donned a dress and cape made of 180 stitched together white leather gloves, which O’Grady embodied in performances from 1980 to 1983. The artist debuted the character, which was modeled after a 1950s pageant queen, at the Black-owned avant-garde gallery Just Above Midtown (JAM), drawing attention by hitting herself with what she called “the whip-that-made-the-plantations-movement’ and shouted poetry. The piece targeted New York art institutions for racial discrimination and Black artists who she found suppressed their true sense of self in order to cater their practices to white audiences and collectors. Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire ‘invaded’ three years of exhibitions and gallery openings throughout the city, including at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.
This fierce search for performance art opened the floodgates for O’Grady, who soon staged her second performance work at JAM. “Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline” (1980) not only analogized her relationship with her late older sister Devonia to that of Nefertiti and her younger sister Mutnedjmet, but also criticized black artists’ attempts to attach themselves to broader African traditions through their practice and the prevalence of racism in the field. of Egyptology. Special, location-specific versions such as “Rivers, first draft” (1982) and “Art is…” (1983) followed shortly afterwards.
O’Grady began integrating photographic media into her practice after a years-long withdrawal from the arts caused by her mother’s declining health, specifically using the diptych in her artistic critiques of ‘both/and’ and ‘either/or’ binary concepts. Using family photographs, archival images, experimental photography, and images of himself, the artist’s serial photomontages often navigated the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, colonialism, documenting histories through confrontational and uncomfortable juxtapositions.
In addition to her art practice, O’Grady was an avid writer and critic and made a splash in 1992 with her groundbreaking essay “Olympia’s maid”, which identified the glaring lack of scholarly attention to the black servant depicted in Édouard Manet’s “Olympia” (1863) (painted from the black model Laura) as a good example of prejudice in the visual arts.
“Olympia’s maid, like all other ‘peripheral Negroes,’ is a robot conveniently made to disappear into the background curtains,” O’Grady wrote in the essay. “From Laura [sic] place lies outside what can be understood as woman. She is the chaos that must be excised, and it is her excision that stabilizes the Western construction of the female body, for the “femininity” of the white female body is secured by assigning the non-white to a chaos that is safely excised the view has been removed. ”
In 2020, Duke University Press published Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space (1973–2019)edited by critic Aruna D’Souza, spotlighting the artist’s writing from her time as a rock music critic throughout her artistic career, featuring interviews, scholarly essays, and transcripts of performances that canonized the written word as essential to her practice . That same year, Hyperallergic published O’Grady’s essay which was included in Boston’s Apollo, Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent, including several photographs documenting the artist’s upbringing in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood.
O’Grady has recently become the subject of renewed institutional appreciation solo exhibitions, group exhibitions, and profilesbut also in her 2021 Retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. Many of her works have found homes in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and several others.
O’Grady is survived by her son and daughter-in-law, Guy David Jones and Annette Olbert Jones, her three grandchildren and her eight great-grandchildren.
