In this reflection, Chloë Bass remembers Lorraine O’Grady’s generosity, mentorship, and intellectual clarity. Through personal correspondence and encounters over the years, Bass highlights O’Grady’s enduring concept of “both/and”—a rejection of rigid binaries—and her ability to articulate ideas about race, power, and culture that continue to shape generations of artists and thinkers.
Though Lorraine O’Grady began her artistic career later in life, she became one of the most influential conceptual artists of her generation. Through performances, photo-collages, and writing, she challenged ideas of race, class, and gender, most notably in her groundbreaking 1992 essay Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity, which critically examined representations of the Black female body in Western culture.