Now renowned performance and visual artist Lorraine O’Grady passed away on December 13, 2024, a few months after she was named a Guggenheim Fellow and shortly after her 90th birthday was marked. Although she never visited the Caribbean, endlessly postponing an invited, funded trip to Jamaica because the timing, it seemed, was never right, she described herself as a “West Indian woman.” Born to Jamaican parents in Boston in 1934, she would grow up in a highly accomplished group of Caribbean folks tagged the “Black Brahmins,” and would contend with these and other aspects of her heritage throughout her life.

In the fifteen years since our introduction to each other on February 19, 2010, O’Grady pursued the making of only three new works, including Looking for a Headdress (2015), a video shown at the En Mas’ traveling exhibition curated by Claire Tancons, in which I also appeared. She was still in the throes of the long-forming project Sir Lancela, elements of which were previewed at Both/And, her 2021 solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and at her 2023 exhibition, The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel at her new gallery, Chicago-based Mariane Ibrahim. Sir Lancela was the primary subject of thirteen hours of recorded Zoom dialogues between us in 2021 and 2022, an effort she anticipated would result in an authoritative essay about her life’s work, in Small Axe, which will still come.