Lorraine O'Grady
CRASH Magazine

In its Fall 2025 printed edition, Crash Magazine features an article on Lorraine O’Grady’s first solo exhibition in France, presented at Mariane Ibrahim gallery. A major yet long-undervalued figure of the New York art scene, O’Grady became involved in feminist and antiracist movements in the 1980s, notably co-founding the Guerrilla Girls under the name Alma Thomas to denounce the exclusion of women — and particularly Black women — from art institutions. The magazine also revisits her seminal essay Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity (1992), which significantly shifted the discourse around the representation of Black women in art history.

 

The exhibition highlights the importance of performance and photomontage within her practice. Portraits of the Artist as a Young Girl (1982) traces the stages of a Black woman’s life in public space, while The Clearing (2021–2022) imagines a family scene revealing the ongoing legacies of colonial history. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of Relation, O’Grady weaves together intertwined narratives, memories, and identities. Her influence, long underestimated, now stands as a vital force shaping contemporary debates.