Literary Hub, 2025
Though Lorraine O’Grady began her artistic career later in life, she became one of the most influential conceptual artists of her generation. Through performances, photo-collages, and writing, she challenged ideas of race, class, and gender, most notably in her groundbreaking 1992 essay Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity, which critically examined representations of the Black female body in Western culture.