Lorraine O’Grady, Path-Breaking Conceptual Artist, Has Died Aged 90
The artist, whose avant-garde works critiqued racism and sexism in the art world, made incisions into the skin of culture.
16 Dec, 2024.
American artist Lorraine O’Grady, whose conceptually driven work challenged binary thinking, centred Black subjects and deftly critiqued racism and sexism in the art world, has died at the age of 90 in New York.
In an email announcement, gallerist Mariane Ibrahim said, ‘Lorraine paved a path for artists and women artists of colour, to forge critical and confident pathways between art and forms of writing. [Her] legacy will live on, a force that continues to echo through everything she created, touching all who encounter her work with the same power and depth she embodied.’
The past decade saw O’Grady’s star rise as she received her overdue laurels for a singular artistic practice, begun in the late 1970s, that spanned media as varied as performance, photography, collage and text. ‘The fact that I didn’t give up is the only thing I can give myself credit for,’ O’Grady told Malik Gaines in an interview for frieze in 2021 on the occasion of her first retrospective, ‘Both/And’, at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. The show – which frieze editor Terence Trouillot deemed one of the best exhibitions of the year – travelled to the University of North Carolina’s Weatherspoon Art Museum and Wellesley College’s Davis Museum (the artist’s alma mater) in Massachusetts, where it was on view earlier this year. ( … )