AN ARTIST COMES HOME
Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And—the first retrospective of the acclaimed conceptual artist, cultural critic, and Wellesley ’55 alumna—is the debut exhibition at the newly reopened Davis Museum.
By Kerry Gaertner Gerbracht ’01
Winter 2024
When the Wellesley class of 1955 was celebrating its 25th reunion, then 45-year-old Lorraine O’Grady, already an accomplished rock critic, writer, translator, and government analyst, was in New York City making her world debut as an artist. Wearing a dress made of 180 pairs of white gloves from thrift shops and some from her time at Wellesley (a reference, she has said, to the Black middle class’s obsession with respectability), and whipping herself with a white cat-o’-nine-tails (widely used during the Atlantic slave trade)
of sail rope embellished with white chrysanthemums, O’Grady waltzed into an art opening at the famed Black avant-garde gallery Just Above Midtown.
In this unscheduled guerilla performance piece, O’Grady arrived as “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, 1955,” a fictional beauty pageant winner celebrating the 25th anniversary of her win. She did not shy away from onlookers, reading protest poems against the segregated art world, declaring “Black art must take more risks!!” This persona, O’Grady’s website states, “was created under the Futurist dictum that art has the power to change the world.” The 1980 performance, as well as future appearances of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, laid bare “the racial apartheid still prevailing in the mainstream art world,” according to O’Grady’s site. Later appearances would take place at the very white New Museum of Contemporary Art, where she criticized the institution for its exclusion of artists of color with a poem that read, “Now is the time for an invasion!” ( … )