The New Yorker Interview
Lorraine O’Grady Has Always Been A Rebel
The eighty-eight-year-old artist and critic, whose profile has risen in the past decade, examines her role in the art world then and now.
By Doreen St. Félix, September 29, 2022
How to walk properly, according to Lorraine O’Grady, the eighty-eight-year-old conceptual and performance artist: “With your chin tucked under your head, your shoulders dropped down, your stomach pulled up.” Good posture has become a concern for O’Grady in the past couple of years, as her latest persona, the Knight, is a character that requires her to wear a forty-pound suit of armor. “As long as I don’t gain or lose more than three or four pounds, I’m O.K.,” O’Grady told me in late August, over Zoom, while we discussed “Greetings and Theses,” the fourteen-minute film that constituted the official performance début of the Knight. The première was held, in late July, at the Brooklyn Museum, the site of the 2021 exhibition “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And,” a retrospective of her radical and soul-shaking oeuvre. The film is meta: the Knight trawls the arteries of “Both/And,” surveying the contents of a life’s work.
I hesitate to assign the honorific of “master” to O’Grady, because of the notion of dominance which word evokes. But I can say that she is a legend of extraordinary magnitude, precisely because her legend has resisted being flattened, tokenized, ossified. She was born in Boston in 1934, to a Jamaican family that believed in a dogma one might now call Black Excellence. Although O’Grady excelled in the bourgeois space, she always knew that she did not belong there—that she was an other within the class of others. It was not until she was in her early forties that she began putting out works. Since then, she has reached across media—criticism, performance, photography, collage—to produce foundational pieces of the Black avant-garde conceptual art. “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire,” her first and most famous performance, in the early eighties, was an insurrection which saw her, clothed in a débutante’s gown made of gloves, bring to light the conservatism and the racism that beset the art world.
It has been in the past decade that O’Grady has become an art star. I met her this past May, at Alexander Gray Associates, her gallery, during a vegan dinner held in honor of a photo exhibition that harked back to her first solo show, from 1991: “Body Is the Ground of My Experience.” She was wearing leather, and her hair was softly spiked and striped black and white. No one could look cooler.
It is now chic to attach a certain narrative to O’Grady, that the trailblazer is receiving a belated coronation from a generation of art-world arbiters who are better equipped to recognize her genius. O’Grady is not receiving this status passively. In “Greetings and Theses,” she explicitly asks, “Have I become part of what is keeping the door closed to them?” The atmosphere gets lifted, toward the end of the film, by the addition of music. The Knight dances the cumbia. The movement speaks to O’Grady’s humor—she tends to punctuate spoken paragraphs of intimidating insight with welcoming laughter—and her restlessness. She works at least sixteen hours a day. She recently published “Writing in Space, 1973–2019,” a compendium of essays, with Duke University Press. In October, her work will be featured in an exhibition at the MoMA, memorializing Just Above Midtown, the experimental Black gallery founded by Linda Goode Bryant, where O’Grady developed her intellectual interventions. When I asked about the provenance of the Knight, her latest persona, she replied, “The question I ask is, when you remove all the markers of identity, race, gender, age, class, what’s left?” Our conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity. ( … )