A Black Avant-Garde: How Lorraine O’Grady’s Literary Artwork Fused Poetry and Politics
Peter Trachtenberg Holds up the Frame to an Iconic Artist Who Redefined Being an Icon
Peter Trachtenberg
March 25, 2025
Lorraine O’Grady didn’t become an artist until she was in her mid-forties. She was fifty-five when she had her first show. Still, at the time of her death at the age of ninety last December she had achieved iconic status in the art world, though “iconic” is probably the wrong word.
An icon is a single image that’s instantly recognizable. It’s Frida Kahlo with her unibrow and her wounds or Marina Abramovic undoing strangers with the vacuous neutrality of her gaze.
O’Grady was an icon that kept changing: the rogue debutante crashing art openings in a gown sewn from 180 pairs of white gloves; the creator of photo collages that placed her family members in conversation with Baudelaire and Baudelaire in conversation with Michael Jackson; the black-clad elder with a two-tone Mohawk that made her as spikily elegant as a wasp lip-synching to Anohni.
In all these incarnations and through multiple modes of expression, the concept-based artist turned received ideas of race, class and gender inside out and took a close look at their seams.
Something that may get lost in that outpouring of projects and personae is that O’Grady was a writer. She always saw herself as one. As a young woman she studied in the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she undertook a novel and translated another—Este Domingo, “This Sunday”—by the Chilean writer Jose Donoso, who was one of her instructors.
In 1992 she published the groundbreaking “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” arguably the first work to call critical attention to representations of the Black female body and the truth those representations leave out. Even thirty-some years later, its aphoristic directness registers like a slap in the face, the kind that’s not meant to hurt you but to snap you out of hysteria:
The female body in the West is not a unitary sign. Rather, like a coin, it has an obverse and a reverse: on the one side, it is white; on the other, non-white or, prototypically, black. The two bodies cannot be separated, nor can one body be understood in isolation from the other in the West’s metaphoric construction of “woman.” White is what woman is; not-white (and the stereotypes not-white gathers in) is what she had better not be. ( … )