Lorraine O’Grady: A Celebration of Life, 2025 — Family, friends, and colleagues gather to honor the memory of concept-based artist Lorraine O’Grady.
Lorraine’s life was defined by passion, creativity, and an unwavering commitment to her unique vision. She will be remembered for her sharp intellect, generosity, indomitable spirit, and the profound impact she had on art and culture.
Program includes:
ANOHNI, artist and musician
Linda Goode Bryant, artist and Founder of Project EATS
Andil Gosine, Professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University
Paula Johnson, President of Wellesley College
Carin Kuoni, Vera List Center
Simone Leigh, artist
Ciara Mendes, Lorraine O’Grady’s granddaughter
Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum
kembra pfahler, artist
Loretta Polk, Lorraine O’Grady Trust
Robert Ransick, Lorraine O’Grady Trust and artist
Martha Wilson, artist and Founding Director of Franklin Furnace Archive
Lorraine O’Grady: A Celebration of Life, 2025 — Family, friends, and colleagues gather to honor the memory of concept-based artist Lorraine O’Grady.
Lorraine’s life was defined by passion, creativity, and an unwavering commitment to her unique vision. She will be remembered for her sharp intellect, generosity, indomitable spirit, and the profound impact she had on art and culture.
Program includes:
ANOHNI, artist and musician
Linda Goode Bryant, artist and Founder of Project EATS
Andil Gosine, Professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University
Paula Johnson, President of Wellesley College
Carin Kuoni, Vera List Center
Simone Leigh, artist
Ciara Mendes, Lorraine O’Grady’s granddaughter
Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum
kembra pfahler, artist
Loretta Polk, Lorraine O’Grady Trust
Robert Ransick, Lorraine O’Grady Trust and artist
Martha Wilson, artist and Founding Director of Franklin Furnace Archive
Artifacts: Lorraine O’Grady — Lorraine O’Grady (September 21, 1934 – December 13, 2024) grew up in Boston, studied at Wellesley College and the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Her circuitous route to becoming an artist at the age of 45 included writing rock music critic for Rolling Stone, translation, and teaching at the School of Visual Arts. Exploring such seminal galleries as Just Above Midtown, and becoming a regular at performance nights at Franklin Furnace, she moved towards an art career. In the 1980s, she created her legendary persona, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. Lorraine received great attention in her later years: her writings were collected, she received exhibitions at the Studio Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. Lorraine was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship at the age of 89.
This conversation with Artifacts was Lorraine O’Grady’s final in-depth video interview. It was recorded at O’Grady’s Westbeth studio in June 2024, less than six months before her death, by Artifacts Founder Steven Watson and Franklin Furnace Founder Martha Wilson.
Artifacts June 24, 2024.
Lorraine O’Grady: The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel, 2024 — The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel is Lorraine O’Grady’s first exhibition with Mariane Ibrahim. It is also O’Grady’s first solo presentation to focus on the character of the Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel, her most recent artistic persona.
Special thanks to Brian Guerin for his contributions on this video.
PBS News Hour, 2024 — After decades of combating either/or thinking in both her art and in her career, O’Grady has been honored with the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. Her next work will see her returning to her Boston and Caribbean roots in the conception of a new personae.
Jared Bowen of GBH in Boston. The video is part of PBS News Hour’s arts and culture series, CANVAS.
Lorraine O’Grady: “Rivers, First Draft”, 2023 — In this Whitney Museum video, O’Grady describes the experiences and thinking that led to the creation of Rivers, First Draft, work that may be considered her most autobiographical while still interrogating the most prescient themes across her work including misogyny in the art world. “It’s the piece that comes out of who I am, rather than what I’m reacting to.”
Whitney Museum of American Art, 2023.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Baudelairian Voices, 2022 — “Lorraine O’Grady – ‘Fusées’ De Charles Baudelaire.” On the bicentennial of his birth in 1821, Charles Baudelaire’s work is read by artists and writers as part of an exhibition organized by the Musée d’Orsay. For the “Baudelairian Voices” program, O’Grady discusses Baudelaire and reads aloud “The Head of Hair”, “Even when she walks”, “Precious Notes” and “Those Pleasures”.
David Velasco in Conversation with Lorraine O’Grady, 2021 — David Velasco in Conversation with Lorraine O’Grady.” Lorraine O’Grady and Artforum editor-in-chief David Velasco discuss the March 2021 issue of Artforum as well as the artist’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum.
Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast: Lorraine O’Grady on Apple Podcasts— David Zwirner and Lorraine O’Grady discuss her retrospective Both/And at the Brooklyn Museum.
June 15, 2021.
Brooklyn Talks: Lorraine O’Grady and Zoe Leonard, 2021 — Event announcement for Brooklyn Talks: Lorraine O’Grady and Zoe Leonard, in which the two talk about O’Grady’s retrospective Both/And. 27 May 2021.
The Art Angle Podcast: Lorraine O’Grady on the Social Castes of the Art World— Lorraine O’Grady and Ben Davis discuss her retrospective Both/And at the Brooklyn Museum.
March 19, 2021.
Visiting Artist Lecture – Lorraine O’Grady in conversation with Robert Ransick, 2021 — Event announcement and video of artist talk with Lorraine O’Grady and Robert Ransick discussing O’Grady’s retrospective exhibition Both/And at the Brooklyn Museum. 12 Apr. 2021.
Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Visiting Artist Lecture Series, 2021.
One’s Own Bifurcations: Lorraine O’Grady on Both/And Thinking in Art— Interview with Lorraine O’Grady and Caro Fowler for the In The Foreground: Conversations on Art and Writing Podcast discussing O’Grady’s art practice and work.
January 27, 2021.
Artist in Conversation: Lorraine O’Grady— Video documentation of Lorraine O’Grady in discussion with Stephanie Sparling Williams, Associate Curator at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.
Smith College Museum of Art, February 18, 2020.
Loophole of Retreat: A Conference Part 3 of 3 — Celebrating Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat, Lorraine O’Grady speaks at the conference about the importance of feminism while also highlighting issues of black female subjectivity and diaspora.
Peter B. Lewis Theater, Guggenheim Museum, April 27, 2019.
Artist Conversation: Lorraine O’Grady — Soul of A Nation Symposium artist conversation with Lorraine O’Grady. O’Grady is joined in conversation with Tate curator Zoe Whitley for a discussion revealing insights into the complete arc of the Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire persona. O’Grady will discuss the compelling and critical contexts in which she developed her singular strategies for artmaking.
March 3, 2018.
Meeting Lorraine O’Grady, 2017 — In this short film by Zawe Ashton, the filmmaker and actress visits O’Grady at her home in New York City where they discuss race, gender, and the challenges for black women artists in an often segregated art world. Ashton and O’Grady also visit the site in Central Park where O’Grady performed Rivers First Draft.
A film commissioned by Tate, supported by Ford Foundation and directed by Zawe Ashton.
Lorraine O’Grady, La Hora De La Artista Multidisciplinar — La artista Lorraine O’Grady presenta su exposición fotográfica en el CAAC (Centro andaluz de arte contemporáneo) de Sevilla. En su exposición también aparece una de sus performances más conocidas: “Madmoiselle bourgoise noir”.
YouTube, September 21, 2016.
Anohni: Marrow — In 2016, Anohni, fka Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, made her first album in 6 years, the first under her new name, and one that marked a radically changed direction from chamber pop to political electronica, The critically acclaimed Hopelessness uses seductive dance beats to sound an alarm against the direction of an American-dominated global system. In its bold lyrics, society’s multiple ills—misogyny, racism, corporate greed, etc.—are equal threads in a single shroud: ecocide. The promotional tour featured 25’ tall video clips, with each track lip-synched by an individual woman, most in head-and-shoulder closeup. Videos from the tour performance have been uploaded to YouTube as individual songs. O’Grady lip-synchs “Marrow,” the last track on the album CD.
Norma Marshall Memorial Lecture: Lorraine O’Grady — In this second annual lecture honoring the memory of Norma Marshall, a former President of the Museum’s Community Committee, artist Lorraine O’Grady discusses how conversations around “post-racial” and “postfeminist” political ideologies impact her work. This event took place at the Brooklyn Museum on Thursday, May 15, 2014.
Voice of the Artist: Lorraine O’Grady — Voices in Contemporary Art, 03 Oct. 2013 at Fales Library, Bobst Library at NYU.
Program Partners: VoCA (formerly known as INCCA-NA), Grey Art Gallery, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Fales Library and Special Collections and NYU Museum Studies.
On Baudelaire & Michael Jackson — During “Portrait of the Artist: Lorraine O’Grady” at the Performa Institute, NYU, in conversation with the art historian Kellie Jones, O’Grady discussed her work as a conceptual and performance artist and spoke of the two men whose lives and philosophies she’d compared in her photo-installation “The First and the Last of the Modernists,” in the 2010 Whitney Biennial.
April 25, 2012.
Wellesley in the Art World— At a panel on “Wellesley in the Arts,” at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NYC, O’Grady described the effect of her Wellesley education on her art making and what she had to strip away to become “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire,” her guerrilla art persona in the early 1980’s.
