O’Grady was born in 1934 to a middle-class immigrant Jamaican household in Boston, Massachusetts, the place her dad and mom Edwin and Lena had been instrumental in establishing the primary West Indian Episcopal church within the space. She was deeply impacted by the aesthetics of Episcopalianism however misplaced her religion throughout her mid-20s after the sudden demise of her solely sister, Devonia Evangeline. O’Grady was educated within the metropolis’s Women’ Latin Faculty and went on to graduate from Wellesley Faculty with a level in Economics and a minor in Spanish Literature. Quickly after receiving her diploma, she opted to search out stability by working for the federal authorities, having cleared the difficult Administration Intern Program examination as considered one of solely six ladies and 200 whole people who handed out of 20,000 candidates.
Lorraine O’Grady, “Cutting Out CONYT 04” (1977/2017) (© Lorraine O’Grady; picture courtesy Lorraine O’Grady Belief)
The daybreak of O’Grady’s artwork profession was a long time away as she labored for the Division of Labor as a analysis economist on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — which she described as a boys’ membership and troublesome to navigate as a single mom on the time. Discovering no upward mobility, she switched gears and pivoted to translation whereas residing in Chicago together with her second husband, the place she flourished on account of her early schooling in Latin and her research in Spanish literature. After an incomplete graduate schooling in fiction writing on the College of Iowa, she moved into writing as a rock music critic for the Rolling Stone and the Village Voice within the early ’70s.
Her visible arts endeavors began with Slicing Out the New York Instances (1977), a collage collection that O’Grady launched into after accepting a place instructing literature on the Faculty of Visible Arts and changing into within the works of the Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists. For 26 consecutive Sundays, she trimmed snippets of headlines from the publication and reorganized them to type her personal poetry, which she has known as her first art work.
Lorraine O’Grady, “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Goes to the New Museum” (1981/2007) (© Lorraine O’Grady, courtesy Lorraine O’Grady Belief)
Then got here “Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire,” a persona who donned a robe and cape produced from 180 white leather-based gloves stitched collectively whom O’Grady embodied in performances from 1980 to 1983. The artist debuted the character, who was modeled after a ’50s pageant queen, on the Black-owned avant-garde gallery Simply Above Midtown (JAM), turning heads by lashing herself with what she known as “the whip-that-made-plantations-move” and shouting poetry. The piece focused NYC’s artwork establishments for racial discrimination and Black artists whom she discovered to be suppressing their true sense of self to cater their practices to White audiences and collectors. Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire “invaded” exhibition and gallery openings all through town for 3 years, together with on the New Museum for Modern Artwork.
This fierce foray into efficiency artwork opened the floodgates for O’Grady, who quickly staged her second efficiency work at JAM. “Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline” (1980) not solely analogized her relationship to her late older sister Devonia to that of Nefertiti and her youthful sister Mutnedjmet, but additionally critiqued Black artists’ makes an attempt to connect themselves to broader African traditions via their follow and the prevalence of racism within the subject of Egyptology. Singular, site-specific performances corresponding to “Rivers, First Draft” (1982) and “Art is …” (1983) adopted quickly after.
Lorraine O’Grady, “Art Is. . . (Dancer in Grass Skirt)” (1983/2009) (© Lorraine O’Grady; picture courtesy Lorraine O’Grady Belief)
O’Grady started integrating photographic media into her follow after a years-long withdrawal from the humanities precipitated by her mom’s declining well being, particularly deploying the diptych in her inventive critiques of “both/and” and “either/or” binaries. Utilizing household images, archival photographs, and experimental pictures and photographs of herself, the artist’s serial photomontages usually navigated the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and documented histories via confrontational and discomforting juxtapositions.
O’Grady was a fervent author and critic along with her artwork follow, making waves in 1992 together with her seminal essay “Olympia’s Maid,” which recognized the blatant lack of scholarly consideration to the Black servant depicted in Édouard Manet’s “Olympia” (1863) (painted after the Black mannequin Laure) as a chief instance of prejudice within the advantageous arts.
“Olympia’s maid, like all the other ‘peripheral Negroes,’ is a robot conveniently made to disappear into the background drapery,” O’Grady wrote within the essay. “Laura’s [sic] place is outside what can be conceived of as woman. She is the chaos that must be excised, and it is her excision that stabilizes the West’s construct of the female body, for the ‘femininity’ of the white female body is ensured by assigning the not-white to a chaos safely removed from sight.”
Lorraine O’Grady, “Miscegenated Family Album (Cross Generational), L: Nefertiti, the last image; R: Devonia’s youngest daughter, Kimberley” (1980/1994) (© Lorraine O’Grady; picture courtesy Lorraine O’Grady Belief)
In 2020, the Duke College Press printed Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Area (1973–2019), edited by critic Aruna D’Souza, spotlighting the artist’s writing from her time as a rock music critic all through her inventive profession, incorporating her interviews, scholarly essays, and efficiency transcripts that canonized the written phrase as important to her follow. That very same 12 months, Hyperallergic printed O’Grady’s essay that was included in Boston’s Apollo, Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent, together with a number of images documenting the artist’s upbringing within the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury.
O’Grady turned the topic of newfound institutional appreciation in latest solo exhibits, group exhibitions, and profiles, in addition to in her 2021 retrospective on the Brooklyn Museum. A lot of her works have discovered properties within the collections of the Artwork Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork, the Pérez Artwork Museum Miami, and several other others.
O’Grady is survived by her son and daughter-in-law, Man David Jones and Annette Olbert Jones, her three grandchildren, and her eight great-grandchildren.
Lorraine O’Grady, “Rivers, First Draft: The stove becomes more and more red” (1982/2015) (© Lorraine O’Grady; picture courtesy Lorraine O’Grady Belief)
Lorraine O’Grady, “Art Is. . . (Cop Framed)” (1983/2009) (© Lorraine O’Grady; picture courtesy Lorraine O’Grady Belief)
