Lorraine O'Grady (September 21, 1934 – December 13, 2024) was an American artist, writer, translator, and critic. Working in conceptual art and performance art that integrates photo and video installation, she explored 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 the age of 45. 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."
O'Grady was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 21, 1934, to Jamaican parents, Edwin and Lena O'Grady, who helped establish St. Cyprian's, the first West Indian Episcopal church in Boston. Drawn to the form and aesthetics of the "high church" of nearby St. John's of Roxbury Crossing, O'Grady recalled: "I was permanently formed by the aesthetics of that experience, of the rituals, which are a more stately and elegant version of Roman Catholicism. I did believe until my mid-twenties, until my sister [Devonia] died, then I stopped believing."
In 1955, O'Grady graduated from Wellesley College, where she majored in economics and minored in Spanish literature. While at Wellesley, she was one of three Black women in her class; she told The New York Times that this trio of girls was "totally invisible". She married her first husband, Robert Jones, with whom she had a son, while she was in school. She was later honored with a Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award in 2017. After graduating from Wellesley, O'Grady worked in the Labor and State Departments as an intelligence analyst.
She pursued a master's degree in fiction from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop before becoming an artist in 1980. While in Iowa, she met her second husband, Chappelle Freeman Jr. The two moved to Chicago in 1967, consequently forcing her to drop out of the MFA program. While in Chicago, O’Grady operated a translation agency, specializing in seven languages. Her clients included Playboy and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
O’Grady then moved to New York in 1973, becoming a music critic for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice.
O'Grady died at her home in New York City on December 13, 2024, at the age of 90. She was eulogized by Andil Gosine as "a singular force".
In 1977, O’Grady began her “Cutting Out the New York Times” works: she collaged together clipped phrases from the newspaper; the rearranged words took on different meanings and formed miniature poems.
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". While doing this, she would often shout in protest poems railing 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.
O'Grady also credited 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 that of 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.
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 such as "That's right. That's what art is. We're the art!" and "Frame me, make me art!"
O'Grady worked on a performance in which she focused on Knights in the year 2020, with "O'Grady herself, outfitted in a custom-made, plated-steel suit of armor, poses against a black backdrop with her sword, jousting poles and ornate helmet, which in some images sprouts different varieties of palm trees". Titled Announcement of New Persona (Performances to Come!), the performance had its debut at the Brooklyn Museum.
O'Grady was profiled at the age of 88 in an article in The New Yorker magazine in September 2022.
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.
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, at the California African American Museum October 13, 2017 – January 14, 2018, and 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 engaged frequently in dialogue with contemporary artists, such as Juliana Huxtable.