Lorraine O’Grady, the conceptual artist and critic known for her incisive explorations of race, gender, and class, has died at 90. Beginning her artistic career in midlife after working as a research economist, she became widely recognized for her diptychs and cultural criticism, as well as her writing for Rolling Stone and The Village Voice. Her profile rose significantly in the past decade, cementing her legacy as a vital and influential voice in contemporary art.
Boston Globe, 2024. Murray Whyte reviews O’Grady’s “Both/And” at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. Whyte notes the multifaceted nature of O’grady with a life that includes a stint at the US Department of Labor, writing rock criticism, and teaching. All of these positions converged into her art making process, beginning with the performance “Rivers, First Draft.”
Sayaka Matsuoka reviews Both/And, noting that the retrospective not only presents O’Grady’s illustrious career, but shows her penchant for self-reflection and forward movement of her work.
Artbook’s listing for “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And”, the accompanying book to O’Grady’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021. The book surveys O’Grady’s work spanning over four decades of her major works and showcases, “Announcement”, her new persona and performance piece.
Anni Irish offers an overview of O’Grady’s art practice in consideration of her retrospective, Both/And, focusing on key conceptual stakes, such as the artist’s interest in language as form.
In light of O’Grady’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, Murray Whyte argues for the artist’s embrace of cultural hybridity through an in-depth analysis of her art practice. Specifically, she considers how O’Grady’s insistence to be “both/and” – to contain multiple backgrounds at the same time, refusing a singular identity – could usher in the next generation of interdisciplinary, multicultural artists.
In a one-paragraph review of Both/And, Lynne Cooke includes O’Grady’s retrospective in her highlights of 2021, noting the artist’s “fiercely intelligent, subversive” defiance of race-based exclusion in the New York art world and Second-wave feminist movement.
For Those Who Will Know—In her introduction for O’Grady’s “Writing in Space,” the first collection of the artist’s writing, Aruna D’Souza illuminates the throughline of forward-thinking found in O’Grady’s groundbreaking art. Resisting the simple and rigid classifications that box in many women and Black artists, O’Grady has continuously complicated and challenged cultural notions of binarism. This provocation has taken form in all modes of her practices—from her seminal performance of alter ego Mlle Bourgeoise Noir to the recurrent diptychs bridging unexpected figures like Michael Jackson and Charles Baudelaire. D’Souza delineates how these works are foregrounded by O’Grady’s training as a writer.
Alexandra M. Thomas affirms the range of O’Grady’s literature upon the release of her collected essays and interviews entitled Writing in Space, making clear the wisdom in her scholarship, much of which was written before she was (recognized as) a practicing artist.