Lorraine O’Grady, Who Dismantled Art World Binaries, Dies at 90
From her newspaper collages to her performance persona Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire, O’Grady subverted hierarchies from a Black feminist perspective.
Rhea Nayyar
December 13, 2024
Conceptual artist and critic Lorraine O’Grady, known for pivotal works that subverted the binaries of Western thought, died at the age of 90 in New York City on Friday, December 13. O’Grady has left an indelible impact across nearly five decades of performance, film, photography, collage, and text-based analysis that both contribute to and critique the contemporary arts sphere from a Black feminist perspective. The news of her death was confirmed by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, which began representing the artist last year.
O’Grady was born in 1934 to a middle-class immigrant Jamaican family in Boston, Massachusetts, where her parents Edwin and Lena were instrumental in establishing the first West Indian Episcopal church in the area. She was deeply impacted by the aesthetics of Episcopalianism but lost her faith during her mid-20s after the unexpected death of her only sister, Devonia Evangeline. O’Grady was educated in the city’s Girls’ Latin School and went on to graduate from Wellesley College with a degree in Economics and a minor in Spanish Literature. Soon after receiving her degree, she opted to find stability by working for the federal government, having cleared the challenging Management Intern Program exam as one of only six women and 200 total individuals who passed out of 20,000 candidates.
The dawn of O’Grady’s art career was decades away as she worked for the Department of Labor as a research economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics — which she described as a boys’ club and difficult to navigate as a single mother at the time. Finding no upward mobility, she switched gears and pivoted to translation while living in Chicago with her
second husband, where she flourished due to her early education in Latin and her studies in Spanish literature. After an incomplete graduate education in fiction writing at the University of Iowa, she moved into writing as a rock music critic for the Rolling Stone and the Village Voice in the early ’70s.
Her visual arts endeavors started with Cutting Out the New York Times (1977), a collage series that O’Grady embarked on after accepting a position teaching literature at the School of Visual Arts and becoming interested in the works of the Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists. For 26 consecutive Sundays, she trimmed snippets of headlines from the publication and reorganized them to form her own poetry, which she has referred to as her first artwork.
Then came “Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire,” a persona who donned a gown and cape made from 180 white leather gloves stitched together whom O’Grady embodied in performances from 1980 to 1983. The artist debuted the character, who was modeled after a ’50s pageant queen, at the Black-owned avant-garde gallery Just Above Midtown (JAM), turning heads by lashing herself with what she called “the whip-that-made-plantations-move” and shouting poetry. The piece targeted NYC’s art institutions for racial discrimination and Black artists whom she found to be suppressing their true sense of self to cater their practices to White audiences and collectors. Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire “invaded” exhibition and gallery openings throughout the city for three years, including at the New Museum for Contemporary Art. ( … )