The ARTnews Accord: Artist Lorraine O’Grady and Andrea Fraser Talk Art World Activism and the Limits of Institutional Critique
By Alex Greenberger, 2021
Lorraine O’Grady was born in 1934 in Boston. Before becoming an artist in the 1980s, her jobs included translator, intelligence analyst, writer, teacher, and rock music critic. Starting in 1980, she began performing as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, a middle-class Black persona that stormed art openings and opined about Black art; she retired the persona in 1983, the same year she staged Art Is . . . at the African American Day Parade in Harlem, for which she created her own float. Fifteen helpers left the float periodically to hold out gilded picture frames in which parade attendees were invited to pose. Her art since then has taken the form of performance and photo-based works dealing with Egyptology, Michael Jackson, Charles Baudelaire, and her family and personal life; her work is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. Last year, Duke University Press published Writing in Space, 1973–2019, an anthology of her writings.
Born in 1965 in Billings, Montana, Andrea Fraser was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. After dropping out of high school, she moved to New York, and later attended the School of Visual Arts, the Whitney Independent Study Program, and New York University. Starting in the ’80s, Fraser pioneered a style known as institutional critique, making artworks, usually in the form of performances, whose subject is the very museums, galleries, and other spaces in which art is presented. In making these pieces, Fraser took on the guises of gallery assistants, curators, and even a therapist. Her writings on Minimalism, institutional critique, and museum architecture were assembled in Museum Highlights, an anthology released by the MIT Press in 2005.
In February, O’Grady and Fraser joined ARTnews for a Zoom conversation focused on the limits of institutional critique and the continued importance of activism in the art world. ( … )