Murray Whyte, “Lorraine O’Grady Outpaced the Culture for Years. In Brooklyn, It Finally Catches Up.” BostonGlobe.com, Mar 17, 2021.
BROOKLYN — Coming to art as a later-in-life fourth or fifth act, Lorraine O’Grady has joked that she “only had time for masterpieces,” which doesn’t surprise. Now 86, she’s only ever made the most of her time. She was an intelligence analyst for the US State Department (during the Cuban Missile Crisis, no less); the owner of a Chicago translation agency (a keepsake from this era, she told The New York Times, is a crystal paperweight from Hugh Hefner, whose journals she used to translate); a rock critic in New York for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone (in her first-ever piece for the Voice, she called The Allman Brothers “the first white band I’d enjoyed dancing to”); and a teacher of literature and art (the Futurist/Dadaist/Surrealist moment, with its confluence of word and image, remains her favorite). “I don’t feel I’ve had much unlived life,” she told the Times recently, in the understatement of the year.
One thing rings clear: A relentlessly interesting person with a slate of life experiences far afield of the art world makes for an artist just as compelling. Her show at the Brooklyn Museum is called “Both/And,” and its broadly inclusive worldview feels made for this moment. “Lorraine always said her audience would catch up to her, eventually,” Aruna D’Souza, one of the show’s co-curators, told me. And while it’s true her expansive, outsider’s approach to her last and longest-lasting profession has been more way-of-life than career strategy — as if being a Black woman in an overwhelmingly white male field wasn’t hard enough — it’s finally O’Grady’s time. (…)