Lorraine O’Grady, a one-of-a-kind conceptual artist who examined racism and sexism through a multitude of mediums, has died at age 90. The artist’s groundbreaking works came after decades spent in other pursuits, including research economist and rock critic.
The artist died Friday of natural causes in New York, her representatives at the Miriane Ibrahim Gallery confirmed.
Though O’Grady didn’t turn to art until she was in her 40s, she was motivated by “the desire to produce work in service of her own ideas,” according to her website. Her art took form through performances, photography, curation, installation, video and writing.
“O’Grady has stated that art ‘is the primary discipline where an exercise of calculated risk can regularly turn up what you had not been looking for,’” the biography on her website says.
And she proved time and again over the course of her artistic career that she was a risk-taker.
In one of her best-known performances, O’Grady crashed public art events as “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire,” or “Miss Black Middle Class.” She wore a gown made of 180 pairs of white gloves and carried a white whip studded with flowers. O’Grady critiqued racial and gender divides in the art world to her peers’ faces.
“She gave timid black artists and thoughtless white institutions each a ‘piece of her mind,’” the project description reads.
O’Grady was born in Boston in 1934 to parents from Jamaica. She studied economics and Spanish literature at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, which led her to a job as a research economist for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
After she left the department to write fiction, she worked at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
While working as an intelligence officer on African and Latin American affairs, she read dozens of news articles, radio-station transcripts and classified reports from agents in the field, according to her website. Eventually, after language “melted into a gelatinous pool,” she quit and entered the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1965.
After that, O’Grady worked in commercial translation for several years before moving into music criticism, reviewing acts including the Allman Brothers, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Bob Marley and the Wailers, and Sly and the Family Stone.
Her first work, “Cutting Out the New York Times,” is a series of 26 Dadaist poems formed from printed headlines that ran in the paper in 1977. After that, she remained in New York to produce art.
Her artistic works have been featured at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. But her website features digital versions of most of her archive.
Another performance, “Art Is…,” challenged the idea that avant-garde art had nothing to do with Black people.
O’Grady, during Harlem’s African-American Day Parade in September 1983, put 15 performers on a float carrying empty gold picture frames, taking real-time snapshots of people walking by. She believed if she could put art into a Black space, it would flourish.
“To shouts of ‘Frame me, make me art!’ and ‘That’s right, that’s what art is, WE’re the art!’ O’Grady’s decision was affirmed,” her website reads.
A faculty member at UC Irvine from 2000 to 2015, teaching art students, O’Grady won a Creative Capital artist grant in 2015.
O’Grady is survived by son Guy David Jones, daughter-in-law Annette Olbert Jones, grandchildren Devon April Jones, Kristin Emily Jones and Ciara Casey Mendes, and four great-grandchildren.
