Lorraine O’Grady, Conceptual Artist Who Advocated for Black Women’s Perspectives, Dies at 90
By Alex Greenberger
December 13, 2024
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.
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. ( … )