Pathbreaking conceptual and performance artist Lorraine O’Grady, whose visceral work explored the latent tensions arising at the intersection of culture, race, class, and national origin, died at her home in New York on December 13. She was ninety. Her death was announced by her eponymous trust. Though O’Grady launched her artistic career comparatively late, in her mid-forties, she leaves behind a body of work as vast and diverse as her experiences before she arrived to artmaking, the two spheres of her life continuing to resonate with generations of artists. From her early canonic performances as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, which highlighted the racial apartheid experienced by Black artists; to her joyful 1983 performance Art Is. . ., which presented everyday people of color as framed living art; to her Body Is the Ground of My Experience, a 1991 project of Surrealistic photocollages investigating the violence to which women are subjected on a daily basis, O’Grady boldly reckoned with a prevailing Western power structure that sought to subjugate women, especially those of color. Her determination to expose and remake this structure spilled into her incisive writing, which arguably reached its apotheosis in the 1992 essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” in which she called out