Lorraine O’Grady
1934 | BOSTON, UNITED STATES
American conceptual and performance artist.
Lorraine O’Grady was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1956 with a degree in economics and Spanish literature from Wellesley College. Her path to the art world was unconventional. L. O’Grady worked as an intelligence analyst for the United States government, a professional translator, and a music critic before teaching a class on Baudelaire and Rimbaud at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) as a favour to a friend. It was at SVA in the mid-1970s where L. O’Grady turned towards art. Her first body of work, Cutting Out the New York Times (1977), a series of cut-up newspaper collages, L. O’Grady completed in 1977 when she was 43 years old. Three years later, L. O’Grady debuted Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire (MBN, 1980), her now renowned performance featuring a boisterous debutant clad in a white gown made of 180 pairs of white gloves. During her unsolicited enactments, MBN wielded a bouquet of white chrysanthemums that
transformed into a cat-onine-tails as flowers were distributed to spectators. Once it was revealed, MBN beat herself with the whip, shouted a poem at the top of her lungs that ended with the exclamation “BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!!!”, and then promptly took her leave. Performing a dual critique on segregated New York art spaces and fellow Black artists, MBN first appeared at Just Above Midtown Gallery, an experimental hub for black performance artists, where she demanded more from the artists present at the opening for Outlaw Aesthetics (1980), and rebuked them for pandering to white audiences. She later performed various iterations of the piece throughout the city, including The New Museum, Kenkeleba House Gallery (The Black and White Show, 1983), and as part of the annual Afro-American Day Parade in Harlem (Art Is…, 1983). ( … )