The AUDACITY of LORRAINE O’GRADY
At 89, the eternally PUNK-ROCK PERFORMANCE and CONCEPTUAL ARTIST still gets a kick out of CRASHING art world parties. Only now she’s the GUEST of HONOR.
Story by SORAYA NADIA McDONALD
Photographs by COLLIER SCHORR
Styling by SAMIRA NASR
What if Lorraine O’Grady—acclaimed artist, glorious wit, and the very best kind of miscreant renegade—turned out to be a knight in shining armor? It’s a question I find myself contemplating as I sit across from her in the café at the Whitney Museum of American Art, just a few blocks from her studio in Manhattan’s West Village.
For more than four decades, O’Grady has exercised a kind of valiance as she has sought to create a place for herself within the racism, sexism, and inhospitality of the art world. Beginning in the late 1970s and early ’80s, her conceptual and performance art took aim at the constellation of forces that conspired to marginalize artists of color in mainstream institutions and galleries—and women of color especially. Instead, O’Grady found community with the group of artists that surrounded Linda Goode Bryant’s scrappy, idealistic Just Above Midtown (JAM) gallery and contemporaries like David Hammons and Senga Nengudi, who chafed against the way the art establishment rejected the notion of a Black avant-garde.
O’Grady’s exploits, at this point, are legend. In 1981, she crashed an opening at the New Museum with a performance of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middle Class, or MBN), in which she dressed up as a debutante in a gown constructed from white gloves, brandished a cat-o’-nine-tails, and recited poetry that called out the racism of the art world. “It was so fucking amazing,” says Goode Bryant, who had seen O’Grady debut Mlle Bourgeoise Noire as a part of a group show at JAM a year earlier. “You have this unplanned, unauthorized performance,” she says. “People’s jaws dropped.”
In 1983, O’Grady created Art Is… , a group performance piece that took place during the African American Day Parade that September in Harlem. It involved mounting a large antique gold frame on a float as a group of other participants dressed in white danced and
milled gleefully about the crowd with empty gold picture frames in hand. Instead of flattening Black experiences, O’Grady framed them, literally, in all their ebullience.
O’Grady has been dreaming impossible dreams, fighting unbeatable foes, and slaying metaphorical dragons for years. But it’s only relatively recently that the overwhelming influence of her work has been appropriately celebrated, culminating in her first institutional survey, a 2021 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum titled “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And,” a version of which opened in February at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, O’Grady’s alma mater, in Massachusetts.
Now O’Grady is a bona fide punk-rock star in the art world. Nevertheless, she has managed to slip into the Whitney incognito, her petite frame swallowed up by a long black parka, her signature black-and-white mohawk obscured by a knit hat, with a black mask covering her face. Once seated, she unpeels her various layers, revealing a black leather vest over a long-sleeve black top.
“I mean, I like the idea that people are starting to catch up with me. I like that,” O’Grady tells me after ordering a turkey sandwich with side bowls of Parmesan cheese, crushed red pepper flakes, and extra Dijon mustard. She eats the sandwich open-faced, with a knife and fork. “But the fact is that it makes not one bit of difference to the way I live. It’s so late that it hasn’t changed anything,” she says. “You’re the sum of your choices, and so at any given moment, you are what you are.”
O’Grady is carrying two iPhones. During her waking hours, she always keeps alarms set, and they chime at regular 15 minute intervals as prompts to keep her mind and spirit in motion. “I tend to be prolix,” she explains. “It keeps me moving.” ( … )