Lorraine O’Grady, groundbreaking conceptual artist, dies aged 90
By Benjamin Sutton
December 16, 2024
(CNN)- Lorraine O’Grady, an indefatigable conceptual artist whose work critiqued definitions of identity, died in New York on Friday aged 90. Her gallery, Mariane Ibrahim, confirmed her death via email, adding that it was due to natural causes. O’Grady became an artist comparatively late in life, when she was in her early 40s, and then worked for another two decades in relative obscurity before her work started coming to widespread attention in the early 2000s. She was included in the landmark 2007 exhibition “WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the 2010 Whitney Biennial in New York. In 2021, the Brooklyn Museum hosted a major retrospective, “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And.” For the occasion the artist, then in her late 80s, debuted a new performance art persona that involved her donning a full suit of armor.
“I thought that when I had the retrospective, there would be this great big moment when I would go into the galleries and see all of my work at the same time, in the same place, and have this big Aha!” she told New York Magazine in 2021. “The engagement of the audience, which involves a back-and-forth of question-and-answer, is the thing that was missing.”
Performance and back-and-forth questioning with an audience are hallmarks of the three projects O’Grady is arguably best known for — two under her own name, the other as a
member of the anonymous feminist collective the Guerrilla Girls. In 1980, she premiered
her most famous performance persona, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, a figure clad in a dress made from 180 pairs of white gloves, during an opening at Just Above Midtown, a non-profit gallery championing Black artists’ work. After handing out white chrysanthemums to those in attendance, she slipped on a pair of white gloves, whipped herself with a white cat-o’- nine-tails and, before leaving, shouted a poem that ended: “Black art must take more risks!!!” (She would reprise the role the following year during an opening at the New Museum in New York for an exhibition that she had not been invited to show in, though she had been asked to participate in its education programming.)
Then, in 1983, she entered a float into the annual African American Day Parade in Harlem. It featured a large, gilded and empty frame, and was accompanied by a troupe of 15 Black performers hired by O’Grady. Each one carried their own frame, holding them up in front of spectators lining the parade route, other performers and even — in one indelible image of O’Grady wielding her frame — a New York Police Department otcer. Images from that project, “Art Is…” entered the wider lexicon of visual culture as O’Grady’s career gained momentum in recent decades. In late 2020, a video released by the Biden-Harris campaign celebrating its election victory reinterpreted the piece, with O’Grady’s blessing. ( … )