Artworks

Lorraine O’Grady (1934 - 2024) was born in Boston to West Indian parents, Lorraine O’Grady has led a remarkable, interdisciplinary career. A graduate of Wellesley College (1955), she began as a Research Economist for the U.S. Department of Labor, then pivoted to fiction writing and later worked as a translator and cultural critic. In the 1970s, O’Grady reviewed major musical acts for Rolling Stone and The Village Voice before discovering her calling as an artist while teaching literature at the School of Visual Arts.O’Grady’s art and writing—especially her seminal 1992 essay Olympia’s Maid and its 1994 “Postscript”—have significantly influenced feminist and Black cultural theory. Her theorization of "Both/And" expanded conversations around Black female subjectivity. In 2008, she launched an artist website as a living archive and donated her analogue archive to Wellesley in 2012.

Her retrospective Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And opened at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021 and the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in 2024. Other major solo exhibitions include From Me to Them to Me Again, Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, GA (2018) and Lorraine O’Grady: Initial Recognition, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Monastery and significant group exhibitions, such as Just Above Midtown: 1974 to the Present, Museum of Modern Art,  New York (2022) Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Tate Modern, London (2017), and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–85, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2017).

O’Grady’s work is held in leading collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Tate Modern, London, among many others.

Her many honors include a 2024 Gugeenheim Fellowship, a  2023 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art and a Lifetime Achievement Award  from Howard University, Washington, D.C. (2015); the Distinguished Feminist Award, College Art  Association, New York (2014); and the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2008), among others.