Lorraine O’Grady, the conceptual and performance artist who died on Dec. 13 at age 90, was an inveterate correspondent — you never got a short note from Lorraine, you got the full intensity of her warmth, intellect and inquisitiveness in long missives often sent in the middle of the night, her favored time to work.
But still I was surprised a few years ago, arms deep in her archives, to find that she had made carbon copies of what seemed like every letter she had ever sent from her early 20s until the advent of email — whether to professional contacts, recalcitrant vendors, potential collectors, her relatives, her friends. There were even carbon copies of her breakup notes to old lovers.
Though she didn’t become an artist until age 45, she was confident from a young age that she would one day be considered a genius, no matter what the field. And she knew, too, that her importance would likely be recognized only belatedly, given the way Black women’s contributions were so often overlooked. If she didn’t save all of this stuff, no one else was going to.
When fame finally came, it was for her wide-ranging practice over four decades, her performance work and conceptual photography; her art and music criticism; her critical and theoretical essays on art and culture, race and identity.
Her first artwork, “Cutting Out The New York Times” (1977), started as a thank you card to her handsome oncologist after a breast cancer scare. But it was also O’Grady’s attempt to find traces of Black female subjectivity in a world that seemed intent on ignoring or erasing it. She turned to the Sunday paper, finding snippets of text from 26 issues over the course of months and pasting them onto typewriter paper, turning them into Dada-esque found poetry.
She had been hanging out at Just About Midtown gallery, a magnet for the Black avant-garde of the 1970s founded by Linda Goode Bryant on West 57th Street. After her previous careers — which included stints at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the State Department, a translator (her clients included Encyclopaedia Britannica and Playboy magazine), a rock critic for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, and literature instructor at the School of Visual Arts — she was shocked to find out that the art world was more segregated.
Around the same time, she began attending events at Franklin Furnace, sometimes twice a week. She joked with the founder of that alternative space, Martha Wilson, that she took her Master of Fine Arts in performance there. She was in the audience for Eleanor Antin’s 1979 performance in San Francisco, which featured her alter ego Eleanora Antinova, a Black ballerina in blackface. The blackface didn’t bother O’Grady as much as the way the character didn’t sound like any Black woman she knew. “That was the moment I decided I had to speak for myself,” she said.
Speaking for herself meant doing more than just challenging racism, as she wrote in her groundbreaking text “Olympia’s Maid”: “Critiquing them does not show you who you are: it cannot turn you from an object into a subject of history.” Her first public performance, “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire,” in which O’Grady dressed as a beauty queen and crashed an opening of an exhibition at the New Museum, decrying the white art world’s blinders, had been preceded by an earlier outing at Just About Midtown Gallery, in which she critiqued Black art’s failure to take risks.
“Rivers, First Draft,” also known as “The Woman in Red,” a performance in 1982, was mounted in a quiet corner of Central Park on a shoestring budget, and the cast and crew practically outnumbered the audience. In it, she explored the complexities of her own upbringing as the child of middle-class Jamaican immigrants in Boston and her attempts to navigate her path as a Black woman artist.
A year later, for what would be her most beloved performance, “Art Is…,” she constructed a float for the annual African American Day Parade in Harlem. Dancers worked the crowd, holding frames in front of parade goers, who shouted, “Frame me, make me art!” and “That’s right, that’s what art is, WE’re the art!”
Museums around the country asked O’Grady to repeat “Art Is …” over the years. “I could have supported myself on that piece alone,” she said in one of our conversations. But she always demurred, sensing that their enthusiasm was rooted in misunderstanding. It wasn’t a statement that art is for everyone — it was quite pointedly a work about Black people and their beauty, and their right to be at the center of the art world.
O’Grady didn’t make a lot of work, but each series was a banger. “I started late — I only have time for masterpieces,” I heard her say more than once. For much of her career, she was acutely aware she was not getting the attention she deserved, a fact that she attributed both to art world gatekeeping and to her own prescience: “The problem is that I’m always saying things that haven’t been said before, so it takes a while to be heard,” she lamented in 1996. She considered building her future audience to be part of her mission: amassing an archive, setting up her website herself at age 70, and above all writing. For a Black woman artist, she wrote in 2019, “It’s not enough to make the work.” She added, “More often, one must find or invent language so the work can be understood, be seen.”
Her tireless commitment to her practice was apparent in her apartment in Westbeth, the artist’s community in the West Village where she lived since the 1970s. Every inch of the space was turned over to her art, save for a small, almost monastic, corner which held a twin-size bed. She had three closets for her clothes: one filled with black tops, another with black pants and leggings, and a third with black leather jackets. She wore cowboy boots, she told me, because they never went out of style. She topped everything off with silver jewelry. Despite or because of her pared down wardrobe, she was always the chicest woman in the room.
Her “future audience” began to emerge in earnest after her participation in a number of group shows and collaborations in the 2000s and 2010s. Her trusted advisor and studio manager, the artist Sur Rodney (Sur), introduced O’Grady to the singer, songwriter and visual artist Anohni, who subsequently cast her in a music video, “Marrow.”
The sculptor Simone Leigh was another key figure for O’Grady. “She described our lives as being intertwined,” Leigh told me this week. “We both benefited greatly from our Jamaican heritage. We met more times than I can count at The Islands,” a restaurant in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, “and made plans over jerk chicken.”
“Her passing is devastating but her life was a triumph,” Leigh added.
Robert Ransick, an artist and educator who is now executor of her artist’s trust, said in an email that the late recognition was a source of great joy to her. “Near the end of her life, she told me ‘I can’t let a complaining word out of my mouth,’ knowing she had succeeded, at least in part, to achieve what she had set out to do so many decades ago.”
Catherine Morris, senior curator at the Elizabeth Sackler Center of Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and I embarked on curating what would be her first full retrospective, “Both/And,” which opened at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021, when she was 86 years old.
The stakes were high for O’Grady — it was the first time her body of work would be seen in its entirety — and perhaps not surprisingly her famously exacting standards were on full display, a quality that was both endearing and infuriating. The email chain with the exhibition designer choosing the precise color of green for her wall text ran to 70 messages. Weeks after the exhibition opened, O’Grady came in to inspect the installation of a piece — and decided we could do better. She charmed the staff of the Brooklyn Museum to reinstall it completely. I was livid, but she was, as usual, entirely correct.
Legacy Russell, the executive director and chief curator of the Kitchen, the nonprofit art space, honored O’Grady at its 2022 gala. She said getting her to sign off on news releases and brochure copy “was always hard won, and when it came it felt amazing — you knew you’d really earned it.”
O’Grady stopped live performances by the early 1990s. After that, she revisited and recast earlier work, turning her performances into photo installations, including “Miscegenated Family Album,” a photographic series in which she paired pictures of her older sister, Devonia Evangeline, and family members with those of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti. The family resemblances were a product, O’Grady believed, of the hybridity of ancient Egyptian society — it was a place where Africa and Europe met and created a new culture. In her 80s, when a certain frailty set in, she began developing a “performance for the camera” that involved dressing in a custom-made suit of armor weighing around 40 pounds.
She had long embraced the idea that the only way society could dismantle racial hierarchies is by embracing both/and thinking: recognizing that whiteness and Blackness developed in relationship to each other in a never-ending conversation marked by both beauty and violence. (Like so many people descended from enslaved Africans in the Americas, she was biracial — a fact that she explored in her work over decades.) Her approach resulted in pieces that were never completed — she was constantly reimagining, tweaking, reinterpreting.
I witnessed the measure of O’Grady’s embrace by a younger generation at “Loophole of Retreat,” a convening of Black women scholars, artists, and activists in Venice alongside Leigh’s showing at the U.S. Pavilion for the 2022 Venice Biennale. O’Grady electrified the audience of more than 1,000 people, almost all of them Black women, many of them students and emerging artists, when, at 88, she appeared onstage. “She was the belle of the ball,” said the choreographer and curator Rashida Bumbray, who organized the event. “We’re all living in the house Lorraine built.”
O’Grady did not disappoint. She first warned her audience of the hard work they faced, and asked them, “How imaginative are we going to be in forming allies?” But she also expressed confidence that her rapt listeners would win the battles to come. “Black women are no longer standing still, defending a position. We’re going forward,” she said. “This movement is unstoppable.”
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