“Lorraine O’Grady, Still Cutting into the Culture.”
By Siddhartha Mitter, 05 Mar, 2021.
Had her life been more conventional, Lorraine O’Grady would have been, that Thursday in June 1980, at Wellesley College for her 25th class reunion.
Instead, she was donning a dress hand-stitched from 180 pairs of white gloves —accessorized with a tiara, sash and cat-o’-nine-tails — and heading to the gallery Just Above Midtown to carry out a guerrilla-theater intervention.
O’Grady, a daughter of Jamaican immigrants in Boston, had a picaresque itinerary already. An economics graduate, she had worked for the Labor and State departments, including as an intelligence analyst in the period leading up to the Cuban missile crisis; attempted a novel in Europe; dropped out of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; run a translation agency in Chicago; been a New York rock critic. Two marriages, both brief, were over.
Now, at 45, she was taking her decisive turn — as an artist.
Just Above Midtown was a hub of the Black avant-garde. O’Grady had turned up a few months earlier, presenting herself as a writer, volunteering for office tasks. But now, in character as “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire,” she had a message.
The plumage of white gloves symbolized the repressed psychology of the Black middle class, consumed with respectability. The whip represented the history of external violence that conditioned it. Her critique was that Black artists should scrutinize their own privileges. Barging into the venue, she handed out flowers, then proceeded to flail herself with the whip, declaiming a poem. It concluded with the shout, “Black art must take more risks!” ( … )