Lorraine O'Grady (1934- 2024)

We are deeply saddened to announce the passing of the extraordinary artist, Lorraine O'Grady (1934 - 2024), at 90 years old, today, Friday, December 13, 2024. 
 
Throughout her four-decade career, Lorraine O’Grady’s comprehensive concept-based practice and cultural criticism have positioned her as one of the art world’s leading intellectual voices. Her ability to work across media and disciplines––including writing, photography, performance, curating, installation, and video––was remarkable, and will continue to challenge artistic and cultural conventions through her incisive critique of the binary logic inherent in Western thought.  
 
“Lorraine O’Grady was a force to be reckoned with. Lorraine refused to be labeled or limited, embracing the multiplicity of history that reflected her identity and life’s journey. Lorraine paved a path for artists and women artists of color, to forge critical and confident pathways between art and forms of writing. 
 
Our lives, though shaped by different histories, mirrored in ways that connected us to each other. Lorraine legacy will live on, a force that continues to echo through everything she created, touching all who encounter her work with the same power and depth she embodied.” 
 
– Mariane Ibrahim  
 
Lorraine O’Grady was born in Boston to West Indian parents. A talented scholar, she was educated at the elite Girls Latin School before studying economics and Spanish literature at Wellesley College (class of 1955). She worked in a multiplicity of fields, including working as a Research Economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, writing in the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1965, and by 1968 was working in Chicago at a commercial translation agency (after, she opened her own agency with major contracts for Playboy and Encyclopædia Britannica), and in 1973 moved to New York and became a critic for Rolling Stone and The Village Voice, among others and then taught literature at the School of Visual Arts (SVA).  
 
Lorraine O’Grady’s journey to becoming an artist is as unconventional as it is inspiring. At the age of 45, O’Grady experienced a profound realization that would set her on the path to becoming one of the most important conceptual and performance artists of her time. This epiphany came in a moment of creative spontaneity when she made a collage when she was hospitalized while going through a procedure. This act of creation was no mere gesture—it was transformative. As O’Grady later reflected, it was at this moment that she understood she was an artist. The collage itself became the seed for her seminal series Cutting Out the New York Times (CONYT). In this series, she meticulously dissected pages from The New York Times, rearranging fragments of headlines and imagery into stark, poetic juxtapositions. These works interrogated themes of language, identity, and cultural critique, bridging the worlds of art and literature in innovative ways. 
 
Lorraine O’Grady reshaped cultural criticism through her art and writing, most notably her groundbreaking 1992 essay, Olympia’s Maid, which redefined Black female subjectivity with her pathbreaking theorizing of the Both/And challenging the restrictive boundaries of Western either/or frameworks. From her earliest work, Cutting Out the New York Times (1977), to more recent series like Family Portraits (2020), O’Grady expands the possibilities of conceptual art and institutional critique through her critical explorations of hybridism and multiplicity. In landmark performances, such as  Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83) and Art Is… (1983), she pointedly delved into the political and aesthetic complexities of an art world she experienced as persistently segregated. Until mere days before her passing, Lorraine O'Grady worked intensely in her studio, ensuring her archives were updated and that her writings were readily available to accompany her works and inspire younger curators and artists alike. Her intellectual contributions and conceptual frameworks endure through her artist website, and the Wellesley College Archives, ensuring ongoing research and public access for future generations. 
 
Since before 2017, O’Grady has been developing a new body of work, an update of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire which centers on a new persona, that of The Knight. The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel, is inspired by the stories of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, Joan of Arc, and Don Quixote, and also by Caribbean masquerade traditions, including the characters of “Courtier,” “Pitchy-Patchy,” and “Actor Boy” from the Jonkonnu festival of Jamaica. Like Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, The Knight, too, embarks on a series of actions ranging from self-exploration to cultural critique, documented in both film and photography. As both art and cultural criticism, her new work is characteristic in its probing of complex and perhaps irresolvable questions. In her voice, “If you conceal everything–race, class, age, gender–what is left? What is possible?” 
 
O’Grady has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibits. Her retrospective, Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And, Brooklyn Museum (2021), traveled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC (2022) and at the Davis Museum of Wellesley College (2024).  
 
Her work is represented in many museum collections which include the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; 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.  
 
She has received numerous awards, including the 2023 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art; a 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art; the Skowhegan Medal for Conceptual and Cross-Disciplinary Practices (2019); a 2015 Creative Capital Award in Visual Art; a Lifetime Achievement Award from Howard University, Washington, D.C. (2015); the Distinguished Feminist Award, College Art Association, New York (2014); an Art Matters grant (2011); a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship (2011); and the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2008), and most recently, the Guggenheim Fellow (2024). 
 
Lorraine O’Grady’s legacy endures through key monographs and critical works such as Writing in Space 1973–2019, Both/And, Speaking Out of Turn, and The Art of Language. These publications document her continuous engagement with the culture of her time, highlighting her visionary insight and the lasting relevance of her critiques, ensuring her critical voice continues to shape ongoing dialogues in art and critical theory. 
 
The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel marked a significant milestone in Lorraine O'Grady’s career, offering audiences their first opportunity to engage with the series of four Announcement Cards—cartes de visite-style photographic portraits of the Knight in full costume. This exhibition was the first to present these images as a single, contiguous unit, exactly as O'Grady had envisioned. It was a pivotal moment that revealed the complexity and depth of her work, expanding conversations around art, representation, and the fluidity of identity. 
 
Special thanks to the artists' trusted friends, colleagues, and studio team - Ursula Davila-Villa, Anna Stothart, Sur, Robert Ransik, Brian Guerin, and Laura Lappi. Your past and continued support is invaluable.
 
“People tell me my world looks as if it could have been made yesterday. To me, this is a sign that little has fundamentally changed. Even our successes stay safely bracketed. My tasks in art remain the same: to find ways to develop and maintain a rich inner life while standing firm in the attempt to overturn the depredations of the outer world.” 

– Lorraine O’Grady
Diciembre 13, 2024