‘Comeback? I Haven’t Ever Been There’: Artist Lorraine O’Grady on Why Her Retrospective, at Age 86, Feels Like Her First Big Break
On the occasion of a career retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, Lorraine O’Grady discusses Boston, Basquiat, and caste in the art world.
By Ben Davis, 2021.
This month, as the world inches its way toward spring (and, with it, hopefully a gradual return to normality), the Brooklyn Museum has opened a show, “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And,” that provides valuable fodder for thought in the year ahead.
As the title suggests, it’s a career retrospective of the venerated performance and experimental artist Lorraine O’Grady, who for more than 40 years has created poetic, hard-to-classify works that probe questions of inclusion and identity in a way that has deeply informed a rising generation of artists. Admirers are also quick to point to the power of her writing, perhaps particularly Olympia’s Maid, her classic 1992 essay considering the flattening of Black female sexuality in art history.
Recently, chief art critic Ben Davis sat down with the artist (via Zoom) to discuss her career, how her upbringing in Boston’s Caribbean-American community shaped her art, and what it was like to go viral when the Biden administration paid homage to her work in a post-election ad.
What do you think forms your artistic subjectivity? When you think about where you come
from, what is important for people to know?
First of all, I’ve felt completely invisible in the culture as a whole. And it wasn’t just that I felt I was personally invisible, but that everybody in my family, everybody that I knew, was invisible. In the beginning, I was just trying to make the invisible visible. It’s really been in the past 10, 15, 20 years or so that I began to focus on caste as the reason for the invisibility.
I was feeling that I was invisible not just to white people, but to Black people, and the purpose of this invisibility was the very purpose of segregation in itself, which was to prevent the entry of Black people into the middle class. Every time the middleclass appears, it has to be made invisible at some level or another.
So, for instance, we [Black people] have a great deal of the financial middle class in terms of the sports and entertainment industry, but we don’t have the sort of every day, lawyer/doctor middle-class. When I was a kid growing up, [I remember] realizing that all of the people that I knew were extremely accomplished, extremely well-educated. ( … )