Lorraine O’Grady, Pathbreaking Conceptual Artist, Has Died Aged 90

American artist Lorraine O’Grady, whose conceptually driven work challenged binary thinking, centred Black subjects and deftly critiqued racism and sexism in the art world, has died at the age of 90 in New York.

In an email announcement, gallerist Mariane Ibrahim said, 'Lorraine paved a path for artists and women artists of colour, to forge critical and confident pathways between art and forms of writing. [Her] legacy will live on, a force that continues to echo through everything she created, touching all who encounter her work with the same power and depth she embodied.’

The past decade saw O’Grady’s star rise as she received her overdue laurels for a singular artistic practice, begun in the late 1970s, that spanned media as varied as performance, photography, collage and text. ‘The fact that I didn’t give up is the only thing I can give myself credit for,’ O’Grady told Malik Gaines in an interview for frieze in 2021 on the occasion of her first retrospective, ‘Both/And’, at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. The show – which frieze editor Terence Trouillot deemed one of the best exhibitions of the year – travelled to the University of North Carolina’s Weatherspoon Art Museum and Wellesley College’s Davis Museum (the artist’s alma mater) in Massachusetts, where it was on view earlier this year.

The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, O’Grady was born in Boston in 1934. She received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Wellesley College and worked as a research economist at the Department of Labour before turning to fiction. After dropping out of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop program in 1965, she worked as a translator in Chicago, a rock critic in New York City and a literature professor at the School of Visual Arts.

Even as she oriented herself toward visual art, language remained a cornerstone of her practice: from her early project featuring newspaper cutups, ‘Cutting Out the New York Times’ (1977), which she reprised in 2017, to her important essay on the maid figure in Édouard Manet’s oil painting Olympia (1863) (‘Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity’, 1992, expanded in 1994). In 2020, Duke University Press published Writing in Space, 1973–2019, a collection of her texts that ranged from her music criticism to her art historical essays.

Her breakout artwork was ‘Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’ (1980–83), a guerilla performance project that saw her arriving at art events dressed as her titular alter ego. Wearing a gown sewn from white gloves, she whipped herself and recited poetry that critiqued respectability politics (‘Black art must take more risks!’) as well as segregation in the art world (‘now is the time for an INVASION!’).

O’Grady challenged the boundaries between art and life yet again with her performance piece ‘Art Is…’ (1983). After she heard an acquaintance say that ‘avant-garde art doesn’t have anything to do with Black people’, she decided to participate in the African-American Day Parade in Harlem, New York with a float topped with a giant, gilded picture frame. As the frame captured the scene, performers ran out to audience members with smaller frames, encouraging them to see themselves as and within the art. In 2020, a campaign video for US President Joe Biden referenced the piece.

Lens-based works, many of which used the diptych format to problematize Western binaries, would follow. Among them was ‘Miscegenated Family Album’ (1980/1994), a photographic installation that paired images of the artist’s family members with Ancient Egyptian sculptures. As it honoured her family, including her deceased sister, the project explored the connections between these individuals despite their disparate circumstances, and posed questions about how people are memorialized, including in the field of Egyptology.

Profiling O’Grady for the New Yorker in 2022, Doreen St. Félix called her ‘a legend of extraordinary magnitude, precisely because her legend has resisted being flattened, tokenized, ossified’. ‘I am a breadth artist’, O’Grady told Gaines. ‘I make incisions into the skin of culture and then stuff as much of myself into each little incision that I make, so that nobody could ever think I only do one kind of thing, or that I am only one kind of person ... I want people to know that Black people can be complicated. That has always been my goal.’

_{Main Image: Lorraine O’Grady, 2021, portrait. Photograph: Lelani Foster; courtesy: Lorraine O’Grady Trust}