Lorraine O’Grady, a conceptual artist who had careers as a research economist, literary translator and rock critic before producing her first art in her 40s, and who went on to influence a generation of younger Black artists, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 90.
Robert Ransick of the Lorraine O’Grady Trust confirmed the death.
Embracingly interdisciplinary in her formal choices, Ms. O’Grady had no fixed style. She worked in collage, photography, performance, video and installation. And she dealt forthrightly with the complicated realities of race and gender, drawing on her own experience of being excluded from the white art world because she was Black and marginalized within the Black art world because she was a woman. As a result, no one knew quite what to do with her, and her art career remained little known until recently.
The child of middle-class Jamaican immigrants who had, she said, “more education than they would be allowed to use in this country,“ Lorraine Eleanor O’Grady was born in Boston on Sept. 21, 1934, and grew up within a few blocks of the city’s main public library, where she spent much of her childhood reading and writing.
She majored in economics and Spanish literature at Wellesley College and, after graduation, took a job in Washington as a research economist with the U.S. Department of Labor, focusing on labor conditions in Africa and Latin America.
But her path was a restless one. After a few years, she quit her government job and moved to Europe to write a novel. She returned to the U.S., where she studied at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. For a while, to support herself, she taught high school Spanish. In 1970, she opened a commercial translation agency in Chicago that attracted clients ranging from the Encyclopaedia Britannica to Playboy magazine.
A stint as a rock critic for The Village Voice and Rolling Stone brought her back to New York. And when a friend asked her to take over an English course he was teaching at the School of Visual Arts, she did. There, in a characteristic plunge into self-education, she created courses of her own, including one on historical Dada and Surrealist literature and one on contemporary conceptual and performance art.
She did not begin making art of her own until 1977. Her early works were in the form of haiku-style text collages composed of phrases cut from the Sunday New York Times. She also immersed herself in new work then being made in the city, and specifically in the art that was emerging from the Black community — work that, given the de facto apartheid in the art world as a whole, she considered far too tame.
In response, in 1980, Ms. O’Grady staged an intervention at the city’s leading Black-run gallery, Just Above Midtown. Dressed in a kind of cotillion gown made from dozens of sewn-together white gloves and identifying herself as a renegade beauty queen named Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire (“Miss Black Middle Class”), she crashed the opening party of an exhibition there, passing out flowers to the mostly Black crowd while haranguing them with words like “No more bootlicking!” and “Black art must take more risks!” and periodically lashing herself with a cat o’ nine tails — “the whip-that-made-plantations-move,” as she called it.
Over the next few years, she turned up in this guise in other institutional settings, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art when it mounted an all-white show of performance-based work in 1981.
Other performances from around the same time took a more autobiographical tack. One, “Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline,” was based on paired photographic images of Ms. O’Grady’s older sister Devonia, who had died at 38, and the famed Egyptian queen. (The pairing, part of a series called “Miscegenated Family Album,” is featured in the current Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now.”)
Another performance, “Rivers, First Draft, or the Woman in Red,” was a full-scale narrative based on Ms. O’Grady’s life as she understood it at the time. Staged for the camera in a remote corner of Central Park in 1982 with a large cast of actors, many of them artists, including Ms. O’Grady as herself, it tells the story of one woman’s attempt — shaped by a culturally complex background (New England-born, with Afro-Caribbean and Irish roots) and personal history (dreamy and bookish child, driven government worker, late-blooming artist) — to achieve a unified self. The photographs were exhibited in 2015.
This experimental dramatization of a life in progress was out of sync with a lot of art being produced at the time, including Black art. And, as she later recalled, Ms. O’Grady was made to understand how much out of sync it was when she heard a dismissive comment made by a Black feminist social-worker colleague: “Avant-garde art doesn’t have anything to do with Black people.” It was in an effort to demonstrate otherwise that, in 1983, Ms. O’Grady created a participatory piece titled “Art Is …”
For that piece, she constructed a float at the 1983 Afro-American Day Parade in Harlem and hired a crew of performers to ride on it. Each of the performers held an empty gilded picture frame. As the float made its way up Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, the performers descended into the street and invited spectators to pose for portrait photos within the frames — that is, to be turned into art.
The piece was a hit. The people who had their portraits made — including many children and at least one smiling cop — look jubilant in photos of the event, as does Ms. O’Grady herself as she watches this communally affirmative work of conceptual art unfold.
(“Art Is …” had an unexpected afterlife when, in 2020, some Democratic election campaign workers saw photos of it and used it as a model for a video celebrating the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president.)
Since the early 1980s, Ms. O’Grady’s profile has been on the rise in the art world She had become well known in academic circles for her writing on art, notably her much-cited 1992 essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity.” Galleries — Thomas Erben and Alexander Gray Associates in New York and, since 2023, Mariane Ibrahim in Chicago — were showing her. And she had begun to appear in important historical shows.
In 2007, her glove-stitched “Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire” dress, along with photos of the artist in action, appeared front and center in the foundational survey called “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. (To coincide with that show, Ms. O’Grady created a career-encompassing website that remains a model of self-archiving: lorraineogrady.com).
In 2017, a selection of her work was included in two other landmark exhibitions: “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985” at the Brooklyn Museum and “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” which originated at Tate Modern in London. In 2020, Duke University Press published a collection of her interviews and essays, “Writing in Space, 1973-2019,” edited by the critic and art historian Aruna D’Souza. In 2021, she had first career retrospective, “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And,” at the Brooklyn Museum.
In that show, Ms. O’Grady introduced a fresh body of work: a photographic series called “Announcement of a New Persona (Performances to Come!).” Most of the photographs, shot in a studio, focus on a single figure, the artist herself, armed with swords and pikes and entirely encased, like a medieval European knight or conquistador, in a suit of armor, to which exotic features had been added: Palm trees and other forms of tropical vegetation sprouted from the helmet.
As always, Ms. O’Grady gave us multiple possible readings. The figure of the knight refers to the tales of King Arthur and his chivalrous Round Table that enchanted the artist as a child reading in the Boston library. But it has here been customized to evoke the fantastic inventiveness of Jamaican masquerade traditions, with their sly sendups of colonial aggression.
Ms. O’Grady is survived by a son, Guy David Jones; three grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. She was married and divorced twice.
Ms. O’Grady’s goal in art was not, she said, to bring about an illusory “reconciliation of opposites” but simply to “force a conversation.” As she put in one of her newspaper collages: “This could be/The Permanent Rebellion/that lasts a lifetime.”
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