Lorraine O’Grady: A Celebration of Life, 2025 — Family, friends, and colleagues gather to honor the memory of concept-based artist Lorraine O’Grady.
Lorraine’s life was defined by passion, creativity, and an unwavering commitment to her unique vision. She will be remembered for her sharp intellect, generosity, indomitable spirit, and the profound impact she had on art and culture.
Program includes:
ANOHNI, artist and musician
Linda Goode Bryant, artist and Founder of Project EATS
Andil Gosine, Professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University
Paula Johnson, President of Wellesley College
Carin Kuoni, Vera List Center
Simone Leigh, artist
Ciara Mendes, Lorraine O’Grady’s granddaughter
Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum
kembra pfahler, artist
Loretta Polk, Lorraine O’Grady Trust
Robert Ransick, Lorraine O’Grady Trust and artist
Martha Wilson, artist and Founding Director of Franklin Furnace Archive
Lorraine O’Grady: A Celebration of Life, 2025 — Family, friends, and colleagues gather to honor the memory of concept-based artist Lorraine O’Grady.
Lorraine’s life was defined by passion, creativity, and an unwavering commitment to her unique vision. She will be remembered for her sharp intellect, generosity, indomitable spirit, and the profound impact she had on art and culture.
Program includes:
ANOHNI, artist and musician
Linda Goode Bryant, artist and Founder of Project EATS
Andil Gosine, Professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University
Paula Johnson, President of Wellesley College
Carin Kuoni, Vera List Center
Simone Leigh, artist
Ciara Mendes, Lorraine O’Grady’s granddaughter
Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum
kembra pfahler, artist
Loretta Polk, Lorraine O’Grady Trust
Robert Ransick, Lorraine O’Grady Trust and artist
Martha Wilson, artist and Founding Director of Franklin Furnace Archive
Lorraine O’Grady: The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel, 2024 — The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel is Lorraine O’Grady’s first exhibition with Mariane Ibrahim. It is also O’Grady’s first solo presentation to focus on the character of the Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel, her most recent artistic persona.
Special thanks to Brian Guerin for his contributions on this video.
PBS News Hour, 2024 — After decades of combating either/or thinking in both her art and in her career, O’Grady has been honored with the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. Her next work will see her returning to her Boston and Caribbean roots in the conception of a new personae.
Jared Bowen of GBH in Boston. The video is part of PBS News Hour’s arts and culture series, CANVAS.
Lorraine O’Grady: “Rivers, First Draft”, 2023 — In this Whitney Museum video, O’Grady describes the experiences and thinking that led to the creation of Rivers, First Draft, work that may be considered her most autobiographical while still interrogating the most prescient themes across her work including misogyny in the art world. “It’s the piece that comes out of who I am, rather than what I’m reacting to.”
Whitney Museum of American Art, 2023.
Meeting Lorraine O’Grady, 2017 — In this short film by Zawe Ashton, the filmmaker and actress visits O’Grady at her home in New York City where they discuss race, gender, and the challenges for black women artists in an often segregated art world. Ashton and O’Grady also visit the site in Central Park where O’Grady performed Rivers First Draft.
A film commissioned by Tate, supported by Ford Foundation and directed by Zawe Ashton.
In 2016, Anohni, fka Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, made her first album in 6 years, the first under her new name, and one that marked a radically changed direction from chamber pop to political electronica, The critically acclaimed Hopelessness uses seductive dance beats to sound an alarm against the direction of an American-dominated global system. In its bold lyrics, society’s multiple ills—misogyny, racism, corporate greed, etc.—are equal threads in a single shroud: ecocide. The promotional tour featured 25’ tall video clips, with each track lip-synched by an individual woman, most in head-and-shoulder closeup. Videos from the tour performance have been uploaded to YouTube as individual songs. O’Grady lip-synchs “Marrow,” the last track on the album CD.
October 17, 2011. At a panel on “Wellesley in the Arts,” at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NYC, O’Grady described the effect of her Wellesley education on her art making and what she had to strip away to become “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire,” her guerrilla art persona in the early 1980’s.
April 25, 2012. During “Portrait of the Artist: Lorraine O’Grady” at the Performa Institute, NYU, in conversation with the art historian Kellie Jones, O’Grady discussed her work as a conceptual and performance artist and spoke of the two men whose lives and philosophies she’d compared in her photo-installation “The First and the Last of the Modernists,” in the 2010 Whitney Biennial.
