Lorraine O’Grady, an artist who bravely used her conceptual pieces and performance art to critique systems of power, incisively underlining the ways that class, race, and gender influence one another, died at her home in New York on Friday.
Her death was announced by a trust in her name; its announcement did not specify a cause.
O’Grady developed a loyal following for artworks that often proved unclassifiable. She produced photographs, collages, and performances, and wrote frequently, on topics ranging from her own work to Édouard Manet’s Olympia, from feminism to Surrealism, from rock music to her own biography. Across much of her work, she dedicated herself to prioritizing the perspectives of Black women.
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Her art critiqued racism, misogyny, and privilege, but it did so using methods that were ambiguous and occasionally even tough to interpret. She spoke frequently of wanting to use what she called “both/and thinking” that stood against Western systems, which she wrote are “continuously birthing supremacies from the intimate to the political, of which white supremacy may be only the most all-inclusive.”
O’Grady’s defining artworks are the performances she did during the early ’80s in which she took up a character called Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, a vampy pageant queen who wore a sash bearing her name and brought with her a cat-o’-nine-tails. Without invitation and performing in character, O’Grady arrived at New York gallery openings, where she whipped herself and read aloud a brief statement. It culminated in an abrasive diagnosis of the cultural scene: “Black Art Must Take More Risks!” Few could accuse O’Grady of failing to fulfill her own directive.
In 2021, in an interview with ARTnews, O’Grady pointed out that she had performed this piece for two audiences—a Black one, at Just Above Midtown gallery, and a white one, at the New Museum. Neither audience, she said, seemed willing to acknowledge the existence of a Black middle class. “To lay a theoretical foundation for the work in the face of this opacity, this was a hard job,” she said. “And I felt that really only language, direct and unmediated language, could do it.”
The Mlle Bourgeois Noire performances are considered legendary, especially for Black performance artists and critics.
In Art in America, the scholar Christina Sharpe wrote, “O’Grady was teaching us to see the world differently and to envision another horizon; she reoriented our sight (‘to name ourselves rather than be named, we must first see ourselves’), and in so doing she also clarified that many white art world preoccupations in the 1990s were another form of gatekeeping—inclusion by way of exclusion.” Critic Doreen St. Félix has called O’Grady a “rock star” for younger artists.
O’Grady was able to mount this critique, she often said, because she was an outsider to the art world—she did not perform as Mlle Bourgeois Noire until she was 45, and by that point had been through several decades working outside art spaces.
Lorraine O’Grady was born in 1934 in Boston. Her parents were Jamaican immigrants, and although she recalled visiting art museums as a child, her more formative childhood experiences involved watching her mother at work, designing and styling clothes from a business led at the family’s home in Roxbury.
As an undergraduate, she attended Wellesley College, graduating in 1955 with a degree in economics and Spanish literature. At that school, she was just one of three Black women in her class; she told the New York Times that this trio of girls was “totally invisible.” Amid her studies, she married her first husband, Robert Jones, with whom she had a son.
After Wellesley, she took jobs in the Labor and State Departments, where she felt a Black woman might find the greatest opportunities in a workforce stacked against her. Starting in 1965, she entered the famed Iowa Writers Workshop with plans to write fiction. While in Iowa, she met her second husband, Chappelle Freeman Jr. The two moved to Chicago in 1967, forcing her to drop out of the MFA program.
In Chicago, O’Grady helped operate a translation agency, specializing in seven languages, including Spanish and French. Her clients included Playboy, which was at the time was based in Chicago, and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
O’Grady moved to New York in 1973, becoming a music critic for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. Even less than five years later, however, it was clear she had aspirations to become an artist. Unfulfilled with writing about rock concerts, O’Grady started teaching about literature at the School of Visual Arts. “I felt I was home,” she said. “I knew I was an artist.”
Starting in 1977, O’Grady began making her “Cutting Out the New York Times” works, for which she collaged together clipped phrases from the titular newspaper that she pasted together. The words, now rearranged to form something like miniature poems, took on different meanings. “An Area of Darkness / Dream Still Eludes,” reads one.
“I was already teaching Dadaism, Surrealism,” O’Grady told the New Yorker. “It was very easy for me, but I knew I had to do it not from the point of view of the Dadaists or the Surrealists but from the point of view of an African American woman.”
But she quickly found herself pulled toward an entirely different medium: performance. “I was drawn to performance because I thought I could do it,” she said in her ARTnews interview. “I felt that a medium like performance allowed the ultimate freedom of exploration of ideas because it had almost no history.”
While her Mlle Bourgeoise Noire performances have come to stand in for her oeuvre as a whole, other pieces from the ’80s took a gentler tack. In 1982, O’Grady performed Rivers, First Draft, for which she spun her own biography into an expansive performance staged with multiple actors in Central Park. During the course of the performance, O’Grady’s actors walked a makeshift boat across a calm river, spray-painted a faux stove, and danced in red fabrics.
And in 1983, she realized Art Is . . . at the African-American Day Parade in Harlem. Working without permission, O’Grady brought in a float and dancers holding empty picture frames, effectively bringing art out of museum walls, into the public arena. The piece has been so influential that Tracee Ellis Ross wore a dress based on it to the 2019 Met Gala; Joe Biden and Kamala Harris also alluded to the O’Grady work in their 2020 campaign.
Alongside all this art, O’Grady remained politically active, contributing to the feminist journal Heresies and joining the Guerrilla Girls collective.
O’Grady continued to push her art in stranger and more outré directions during the ’90s. In photographic collages, she drew unexpected comparisons between her sister Devonia and ancient Egyptian sculptures; between herself and her white partner, and Sally Hemings and her enslaver, Thomas Jefferson.
All the while, in 1992, O’Grady also made a significant contribution to art history when she responded in writing to Manet’s Olympia, viewing the lack of attention to Laure, the Black maid pictured, as a form of racism par exemplar. Few others at the time had ever paid so much mind to Laure.
“Laure’s place is outside what can be conceived of as a woman,” O’Grady wrote. “She is the chaos that must be excised, and it is her excision that stabilizes the West’s construct of the female body, for the ‘femininity’ of the white female body is ensured by assigning the not-white to a chaos safely removed from sight.
“Thus,” she continued, “only the white body remains as the object of a voyeuristic, fetishizing male gaze. The not-white body has been made opaque by a blank stare, misperceived in the nether regions of TV.” In a typical O’Grady flourish, she expanded her essay far beyond this one painting, noting that in order for the systemic issues broached to ever be resolved, one must view the situation in all its “complexity.”
While O’Grady had always had her admirers, it was not until recently that her work achieved wider fame. In 2020, Duke University Press put out a book of O’Grady’s writings that was edited by Aruna D’Souza, who in 2021 curated a Brooklyn Museum retrospective for the artist with Catherine Morris. O’Grady’s work featured this year alone in sizable museum exhibitions about the Caribbean diaspora, Surrealism beyond Europe, and contemporary responses to ancient Egyptian art. Revised versions of her New York Times works are currently afforded a gallery to themselves at Glenstone, the luxe private museum of Emily and Mitchell Rales in Potomac, Maryland.
She continued working into her final years, producing a performance for the Brooklyn Museum show in which she donned a knight’s armor.
Yet it was clear that O’Grady was not yet finished thinking through all the knotty, intricate concepts she had begun mining decades earlier. “I’m trying now to determine what really is the role of the individual artist to the community that they serve,” she said in her 2022 New Yorker interview. “I don’t want to define it too quickly. I’m trying to define it through the work that they do. I don’t know, and I’m not going to know until the end.”