A homecoming for Roxbury’s trailblazing artist Lorraine O’Grady
Decades after attending Wellesley College and becoming one of the school’s few Black graduates at the time, the groundbreaking artist has a career survey set to open at the Davis Museum
By Murray Whyte, January 19, 2024
Lorraine O’Grady was an intelligence analyst for the US State Department at the height of the Cold War, a professional translator, a rock critic at the Village Voice, a professor of art and literature at New York’s School of Visual Arts, and finally, in her 40s, a groundbreaking artist. That last one stuck, late as she came to it, prompting her to muse that she’s “only had time for masterpieces.” Boston will be able to see for itself when “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And,” her career survey, arrives at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum next month.
Initiated by the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition touches O’Grady’s deep roots right here: She grew up in Roxbury, the child of Jamaican immigrants, and was among the few Black students to graduate from Wellesley itself in the 1950s. “Both/And” would appear to close the circle, but O’Grady, at 89, is still active — her exhibition of all-new work opens in Chicago in April. Here, a look at a few of her landmark works coming home to Boston next month.
“Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire,” 1980
O’Grady began her art career almost by accident, creating spontaneous, provocative
collage poems from the pages of The New York Times (she was prompted by a crush on her doctor, the legend goes; she made them as a flirtation). But she’s best-known for her public performance pieces, and “Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire,” the persona she created for that purpose, is the beating heart of her early practice. Remember, O’Grady declared herself an artist only in her 40s — after the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, and on the cusp of the stock market spike of the early 1980s that established crass, acquisitive commercialism as a permanent feature of the art world. “Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire” was her antidote to a self-satisfied, almost exclusively white New York art scene brimming with cash: Wearing a long gown made of elbow-length white gloves, O’Grady would crash louche opening affairs peopled by the art world elite and their moneyed patrons and do outrageous things like whip herself with a cat o’ nine tails, as she did at a 1981 opening at the New Museum. Noire’s debut a year earlier had been telling: Storming into an opening at the Just Above Midtown gallery, a hub of the Black avant-garde art scene, she admonished her peers for tailoring their work to wealthy white art buyers; in full character, she bellowed, that “Black art must take more risks!” ( … )