April Austin, “The Artist As Critic: Lorraine O’Grady ‘55.” Wellesley Magazine, Oct 1, 2017.
When Lorraine O’Grady ’55 announced herself a visual artist at the age of 45, she had lived many lives: government analyst, translator, rock critic, educator, and writer. Now at 82 years old, she and her work are having a profound impact on the art world, which has not always welcomed her.
Interest in her art continues to grow. In the last year, O’Grady has been featured in two traveling exhibitions originating at the Tate Modern in London and at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. A major installation of hers will be mounted at the National Portrait Gallery in London next year, and she is busy creating new work for a solo exhibit to be held at Alexander Gray Associates, a contemporary art gallery in New York City, in fall 2018.
O’Grady’s work is reaching a new generation of curators and artists who prize her fierce independence, penetrating intellect, and willingness to take on the art establishment. As a conceptual artist, she has created performance pieces, photomontages, photo installations, and videos, along with essays and criticism.
“Lorraine works at the intersections of performance and writing and image and text,” says Jarrett Earnest, a writer who also teaches at the experimental art school BHQFU in Brooklyn. “She’s dealing with complex issues that she never allows to resolve into an easy solution. That’s a paradigm that younger artists, especially those marginalized by society, find inspirational.”
O’Grady’s body of work is an exploration of her identity as the daughter of West Indian immigrants. The branches of her family tree include both enslaved Africans and white slave owners. Her parents, immigrants from Jamaica who settled among middle-class blacks in Boston, had high expectations for their two daughters. O’Grady was a talented student, and received an elite education, attending Girls’ Latin School and then Wellesley College.(…)