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About

Career Narrative

Lorraine O’Grady (b. 1934) is a concept-based artist and cultural critic widely regarded as a leading intellectual voice of her generation. Working across media and disciplines––including writing, photography, performance, curating, installation, and video––O’Grady continues to challenge artistic and cultural conventions through her incisive critique of the binary logic inherent in Western thought. She has skillfully deployed the diptych form to refute and subvert both the “either/or” logic of Western philosophy and, by extension, the prevailing understanding around gender, race, and class. Over the course of her career, she has advocated for an anti-hierarchical approach to difference that follows the reasoning of both/and. From her earliest work, Cutting Out the New York Times (1977), to more recent series like Family Portraits (2020), O’Grady has expanded the possibilities of conceptual art and institutional critique through her profound explorations of hybridism and multiplicity. And in writings such as “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” an influential essay of cultural criticism published in 1992, O’Grady continues to shape the theoretical contours of a body of work that has been groundbreaking in its charting of the emergence of Black subjectivity in both artistic modernism and Western modernity as a whole.

O’Grady came to artmaking in the late 1970s after having achieved professional successes as a research economist, a literary and commercial translator, and a rock music critic. Her decision to become an art maker being due to the desire to produce work in service of her own ideas, O’Grady has stated that art “is the primary discipline where an exercise of calculated risk can regularly turn up what you had not been looking for.” Indeed, O’Grady’s strategies in Cutting Out the New York Times (1977) were propelled by her readings of Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism. By 1980, she was affiliated with Just Above Midtown (JAM), the Black avant-garde gallery founded by Linda Goode Bryant, where artists such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, and Howardena Pindell were already active. O’Grady began by volunteering to work on communications for the gallery. It was during this time that she conceived of and first performed her landmark work Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83). “A critique of the racial apartheid still prevailing in the mainstream art world,” MBN saw O’Grady perform as the invented titular character whose unannounced “guerrilla” actions intervened in public art events. While she deemed the performance a failure due to its not having begun a meaningful integration of Black voices in the art world at the time, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire had a mythic aftermath that is felt to this day.

While honing her artistic voice O’Grady continued to write and publish. Her 1982 “Black Dreams,” featured in Heresies #15: Racism Is the Issue, was O’Grady’s first attempt to publicly engage with issues of Black female subjectivity. The essay employs personal anecdote and psychological description more than would her later writings which, though remaining accessible, gradually became more theoretical than narrative. In 1983, O’Grady, acting in her persona of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, curated a group exhibit, The Black and White Show, at the Black-owned Kenkeleba Gallery, and staged her well-known performance Art Is… in Harlem. Both works continued her inquiry into the political and aesthetic complexities of an industry she experienced as persistently segregated. Her Central Park performance Rivers, First Draft (1982), alternated a second tendency of her work in this period, that of intense self-exploration. The work was a one-time only event with a cast and crew of 20, several of whom were part of JAM, including a young Fred Wilson and the late George Mingo. A “narrative three-ring circus of movement and sound” about a woman trying to become an artist, Rivers, First Draft simultaneously expressed the protagonist’s perspectives as a young girl, a teenager, and an adult woman. Its characters also symbolized conflicting aspects of O’Grady’s identity as both a native New Englander and the child of Black Caribbean parents. In 2015, she would re-imagine the work as a suite of 48 images displayed as a “novel in space.”

Over the course of the 1990s O’Grady’s voice became increasingly important to both the alternative New York art scene and mainstream artistic discourse. She was a member of the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC), to which she contributed a crucial intersectional viewpoint on feminist theory and praxis. In works such as Miscegenated Family Album (1980/1994), O’Grady synthesized history and identity, the personal and the political, by pairing photographic portraits of her family members with images depicting Ancient Egyptian figures such as Nefertiti and her relations. O’Grady, whose antecedents include enslaved persons, views Ancient Egypt as a “bridge” country, the cultural and ethnic amalgamation of Africa and the Middle East which flourished only after its northern and southern halves were united in 3000 BC. The appropriation of the term “miscegenated” in conjunction with the use of ethnographic visual language poignantly addresses the hybrid experience of class, gender, and race across time. Through this lens, Miscegenated Family Album functions as a feminist opus whose goal is not to bring about a mythic “reconciliation of opposites” but rather to “enable or even force a conversation between dissimilars long enough to induce familiarity.” (. . . .)

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