2.03 | Lorraine O’Grady
Barbara London, 2021
Barbara London: My guest today is the acclaimed artist and inspired thinker Lorraine O’Grady. During her productive career, Lorraine has engaged in a range of disciplines, from performance and dance to photography, writing and the moving image, all while investigating the politics of diaspora and identity. Born in Boston in 1934 to Caribbean immigrant parents, Lorraine served as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. government, moved on to become a literary and commercial translator, then a rock music critic before she turned to visual arts in the late 1970s. Welcome, Lorraine. I’m delighted to speak with you today.
Lorraine O’Grady: Thank you. I’m very happy to be here.
BL: Let’s start with your art practice as it evolved in the late ’70s. Tell me a little bit about arriving in New York and those formative years. I know you were a vigilant volunteer at the Just Above Midtown gallery (JAM) in Manhattan. I’m curious, what was the atmosphere there like? At the time, artists like David Hammons were coming by, and the prescient gallery director Linda Goode Bryant was pretty astute. What was that like?
LO’G: It was really wonderful, but you couldn’t say that it was perfect because the gallery felt like a gallery living in sort of isolation. It was a gallery basically devoted to the Black avant-garde, and the white and black art worlds were totally separate at that time. There was a pretty rigid system, conscious or unconscious, of segregation in the art world. The thing about JAM was that it had become the de facto art world for the people who were there. When they weren’t working in their studios, they were coming down to the gallery to just hang out for their social life and to talk about art. Even as the gallery was setting up a new space on Franklin Street from the ground up, people would be helping with the scraping and the painting. When they were not in their studios, they would be hanging out in the front talking. Then there was an outdoor restaurant and bar down the street, where they’d be drinking white wine spritzers.
The talk was always excited and always about art. I think some people were keeping up with the white art world. Others didn’t care about the white art world. There was a sense that the really important art world was what was happening at JAM, and that made it a very exciting place to be, really. ( … )