Lorraine O'Grady

O'Grady was profiled at age 88 in an article in The New Yorker Magazine in September 2022.

A retrospective of the artist's work, Lorraine O'Grady: Both/And, is on view at the Brooklyn Museum from March 5 through July 18, 2021. For this exhibition, she collaborated on an anthology of her writings with the art historian and critic Aruna D'Souza.

O'Grady's collected writings were published by Duke University Press in 2020 and were edited with Aruna D'Souza. In addition to the articles she has written for Artforum magazine and Art Lies, her essay, "Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity," has now been anthologized numerous times, most recently in Amelia Jones (ed.), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (2nd edition, Routledge, 2010). Reflecting on the great care apparent in the artist's writing, D'Souza observes: "O'Grady's words are a gift, a call to action, and a vision of a world as it could be."

She was featured in "We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–85", an exhibition organized by Catherine Morris, Sackler Family Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and Rujeko Hockley, former Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum. The exhibit was shown at the Brooklyn Museum April 21–September 17, 2017, and at the California African American Museum October 13, 2017–January 14, 2018, and will be at The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston June 27–September 30, 2018. It explores Black feminist art where the ideas come first, and then through multiple mediums including, video, sculpture, performance, photography and painting she decided which will portray her expression best. The work of each artist is placed in the historical context of cultural movements during 1965-85. She engages frequently in dialogue with contemporary artists, such as Juliana Huxtable.

In October 2017 she received the Alumnae Achievement Award, the highest honor given to Wellesley College alumnae.

In 2016 O’Grady was the subject of musician Anohni's video "Marrow" from the Hopelessness album.

From 2015 to 2016, Art Is... was featured at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where Assistant Curator Amanda Hunt asserted that O’Grady’s performance “affirmed the readiness of Harlem’s residents to see themselves as works of art.” In January 2020, four of O'Grady's Art Is... photographs were featured in Artpace’s exhibit titledVisibilities: Intrepid Women of Artpace. As a past summer 2007 International Artist-in-Residence at Artpace, O'Grady's series was included in a show celebrating female-identifying artists. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art argued that the event made an impact for the Black community by describing how there were people everywhere shouting things like "That's right. That's what art is. We're the art!" and "Frame me, make me art!".

O'Grady first exhibited at the age of 45, after successful careers among others as a government intelligence analyst, literary and commercial translator, and rock critic. Her strongly feminist work has been widely exhibited, particularly in New York City and Europe. O'Grady's early Mlle Bourgeoise Noire performance was given new recognition when it was made an entry-point to the landmark exhibit WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, the first mainstream museum show of this groundbreaking art movement. Her practice, seemingly located at and defining the cusp between modernism and a "not-quite-post-modernist" present, has been the subject of steadily increasing interest since it received a two-article cover feature in the May 2009 issue of Artforum magazine. In December 2009, it was given a one-person exhibit in the U.S.'s most important contemporary art fair, Art Basel Miami Beach. Subsequently, O'Grady was one of 55 artists selected for inclusion in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Her work has since featured in many seminal exhibitions, including: This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s; Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, and En Mas': Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean.

In 1997–98, she was a Senior Fellow of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New School University. In 2009 she received the Anonymous Was A Woman award, a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship in Visual Art in 2011, the College Art Association's Distinguished Feminist Award in 2014, and a Creative Capital Award in Visual Art in 2015.

In 1995–96, O'Grady held the Bunting Fellowship in Visual Art at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. There she became immersed in the internet during its early years.

"Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity" is an essay originally published in 1992 in the book, New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action. The first part of the essay was published in Afterimage 20 (Summer 1992). Widely referenced in scholarly works, it is a cultural critique of the representation of Black female bodies, and the reclamation of the body as a site of black female subjectivity. On the importance of self expression, O'Grady wrote, “to name ourselves rather than be named we must first see ourselves.”

Conceptual artist Renée Greene’s work Seen (1990) is also mentioned as representation based on Black female subjectivity, except according to O’Grady, the work falls short "because it is addressed more to the other than to the self" O’Grady discusses the struggle in depicting race, identity and proper representation as a Black female artist, drawing examples from her own artwork: the politics of skin color, hair texture and facial features. In privileging a facial feature that looks a particular way over another or in pairing light and dark skin tones, hierarchies of difference are created. These hierarchies of difference exist because of historical ideologies and they have difficulty breaking down because they are supported by the preconceived importance of the whiteness in the West. O’Grady states:

O'Grady also gives credit to Mlle Bourgeoise Noire for curating exhibitions, such as The Black and White Show in 1983 at Kenkeleba House, a black-run gallery situated in Manhattan's East Village. The concept for this event was to show the work of 30 black artists alongside 30 white artists. Beginning in 1991, she added photo installations to her conceptually based work.

In 1983, she choreographed a final participatory performance as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire called Art Is..., which consisted of a parade float she entered in the annual African American Day Parade in Harlem. It has become known as "O'Grady's most immediately successful piece". The float was shepherded up Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard by "O’Grady [in character as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire] and a troupe of 15 African-American and Latino performers, dressed all in white, [who] walked around the float carrying empty gold picture frames." Art critic Jillian Steinhauer described Art Is... as a float that consisted of an "empty nine-by-fifteen foot-gold-wooden wooden picture frame… O’Grady had [also] hired 15 young Black performers who walked and danced alongside it, carrying smaller golden frames that they held up before members of the crowd.” The performance not only encouraged onlookers – primarily people of color - to consider themselves art, but also drew attention to racism in the artworld. Published for the first time more than three decades later, O’Grady's photographs from the performance continue to celebrate Blackness, and to claim avant-garde art as a Black medium.

O'Grady's Art is… , performed in 1983, was referenced in the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. In an article by Alex Greenberger, he argues that the artist was “a key inspiration for a video put out by Biden and Kamala Harris… [in which] in the video, [there were] shots of people of various races holding empty picture frames.”

In the early 1980s, O'Grady created the persona of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, who invaded art openings wearing a gown and a cape made of 180 pairs of white gloves, first giving away flowers, then beating herself with a white studded whip, which she often referred to as, "the whip-that-made-the-plantations-move". Whilst doing this she would often shout in protest poems that railed against a segregated art world that excluded black individuals from the world of mainstream art, and which she perceived as not looking beyond a small circle of friends. Her first performance as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire was in 1980 at the Linda Goode Bryant's Just Above Midtown gallery in Tribeca.

An early review by O'Grady of the night Bob Marley and the Wailers opened for Bruce Springsteen at Max's Upstairs in Manhattan, July 18, 1973, was rejected at the time by her Village Voice editor, who said "It's too soon for these two." The review was first published nearly 40 years later in Max's Kansas City: Art, Glamour, Rock and Roll, 2010, a photo book with texts by O'Grady, Lou Reed, Lenny Kaye, and Danny Fields, among others, and was recently reprinted in Writing In Space.

O’Grady references African-American artist Adrian Piper’s art practice, specifically her performance, Food for the Spirit (1971), as an example of the proper representation of the subjective Black nude, though this is problematic because as of September 2012, Piper has "retired from being black."

In 1955, O'Grady graduated from Wellesley College, where she majored in economics and minored in Spanish literature. She was honored with a Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award in 2017. She pursued a master's degree in fiction from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop before becoming an artist in 1980. Prior to becoming an artist, O'Grady worked as an intelligence analyst for the Department of Labor and State in D.C., a professional translator, and a rock critic. O'Grady lives and works in the Meatpacking District of New York City.

Lorraine O'Grady (born September 21, 1934) is an American artist, writer, translator, and critic. Working in conceptual art and performance art that integrates photo and video installation, she explores the cultural construction of identity – particularly that of Black female subjectivity – as shaped by the experience of diaspora and hybridity. O'Grady studied at Wellesley College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop before becoming an artist at age forty-five. Regarding the purpose of art, O'Grady said in 2016: "I think art’s first goal is to remind us that we are human, whatever that is. I suppose the politics in my art could be to remind us that we are all human."