We Were All Just Catching Up to Lorraine O’Grady
Through her writing and performances, the artist helped new audiences to understand the cultural roots of racism and sexism.
By Aruna D’Souza
December 16, 2024
Lorraine O’Grady, the conceptual and performance artist who died on Dec. 13 at age 90, was an inveterate correspondent — you never got a short note from Lorraine, you got the full intensity of her warmth, intellect and inquisitiveness in long missives often sent in the middle of the night, her favored time to work. But still I was surprised a few years ago, arms deep in her archives, to find that she had made carbon copies of what seemed like every letter she had ever sent from her early 20s until the advent of email — whether to professional contacts, recalcitrant vendors, potential collectors, her relatives, her friends. There were even carbon copies of her breakup notes to old lovers.
Though she didn’t become an artist until age 45, she was confident from a young age that she would one day be considered a genius, no matter what the field. And she knew, too, that her importance would likely be recognized only belatedly, given the way Black women’s contributions were so often overlooked. If she didn’t save all of this stuff, no one else was going to.
When fame finally came, it was for her wide-ranging practice over four decades, her performance work and conceptual photography; her art and music criticism; her critical and theoretical essays on art and culture, race and identity.
Her first artwork, “Cutting Out The New York Times” (1977), started as a thank you card to her handsome oncologist after a breast cancer scare. But it was also O’Grady’s attempt to
find traces of Black female subjectivity in a world that seemed intent on ignoring or erasing it. She turned to the Sunday paper, finding snippets of text from 26 issues over the course of months and pasting them onto typewriter paper, turning them into Dada-esque found poetry.
She had been hanging out at Just Above Midtown gallery, a magnet for the Black avant-garde of the 1970s founded by Linda Goode Bryant on West 57th Street. After her previous careers — which included stints at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the State Department, a translator (her clients included Encyclopaedia Britannica and Playboy magazine), a rock critic for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, and literature instructor at the School of Visual Arts — she was shocked to find out that the art world was more segregated.
Around the same time, she began attending events at Franklin Furnace, sometimes twice a week. She joked with the founder of that alternative space, Martha Wilson, that she took her Master of Fine Arts in performance there. She was in the audience for Eleanor Antin’s 1979 performance in San Francisco, which featured her alter ego Eleanora Antinova, a Black ballerina in blackface. The blackface didn’t bother O’Grady as much as the way the character didn’t sound like any Black woman she knew. “That was the moment I decided I had to speak for myself,” she said. ( … )