Lorraine O'Grady (1934-present) is a ground-breaking conceptual artist, who didn’t enter the art world until she was in her 40s.
Lorraine O'Grady (1934-present) is a ground-breaking conceptual artist, who didn’t enter the art world until she was in her 40s.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan. This is Womanica.
This month, we’re talking about visionaries -- women who made profound contributions to the fields of photography, film, sculpture, and the performing arts.
Today, we’re talking about a ground-breaking conceptual artist who didn’t enter the art world until she was in her 40s. She took a circuitous route, but it all informed the work she still does today.
Let’s meet Lorraine O’Grady.
Lorraine was born in Boston in 1934 to Jamaican immigrant parents. She was raised in a family that expected a lot from her, and her sisters. And she delivered. Lorraine did well in school and studied social sciences at Wellesley College, graduating in 1955 with a degree in economics. She also attended the Iowa Writers Workshop.
After college, Lorraine embarked on a variety of careers. First, she worked for the government as an intelligence analyst. She realized it wasn’t the place for her, so, at the age of 25, she quit that job. And with her retirement fund, she moved to Europe to write a novel. She also worked as a translator and ran her own translation agency.
Eventually, Lorraine returned to the U.S., and began another career as a rock critic and writer.
Everywhere she went, she often noticed and remarked upon the fact that she was the only Black person in the room.
By the 1970s, Lorraine was teaching English at the School of Visual Arts in New York. It’s here at SVA that she really began thinking about becoming an artist. Lorraine took advantage of the fact that there were artists in the building, and began searching for artistic frameworks. She would later recall, she had a lot of ideas, but never realized they were art before.
Later in the 1970s, Lorraine had a breast cancer scare. Luckily the results turned out to be negative, but that moment in the hospital led to a big pivot: She saw a headline in the New York Times that caught her eye. She began cutting and pasting and turning the words into a poem -- as a thank you to her doctor. In the end, she said she liked it so much, she kept the original for herself, but she did give her doctor a copy. Lorraine went on to make 26 poems in this style in a series she called “Cutting Out the New York Times.”
Lorraine continued on with this method of writing poems by cut and paste. She said that it felt like something that might “bring language back to her in a way that it had been taken away before.”
Lorraine felt sure that she was not just a writer, but a visual artist. And so, in her 40s, she began pursuing art in a real way.
In 1980, she performed a piece called Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. The piece involved her crafting a dress made out of 180 white gloves, which she sourced from thrift stores throughout Manhattan. Over the glove dress, she wore a sash that read Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire 1955. The way the piece worked was that she would walk into an event, dressed up in this gown. And she would give away white chrysanthemums to other people at the event. Eventually, she would be left holding just a cat-o-nine-tails whip. And, she would begin to whip herself, sometimes while shouting poetry.
The piece was a commentary on race, gender, and class. Lorraine was disappointed with the lackluster response she got. She used that energy and three years later, she created another seminal piece called Art Is…
The scale of this one was much larger. Lorraine hired fifteen dancers and actors to participate with her in Harlem’s African-American Day parade. She had a float with a giant gold frame, and the dancers and actors dressed in white and had their own gold frames.
This time, the message got across. Parade goers started shouting, “That’s right, that’s what art is, WE’re the art!”
At that point, Lorraine’s mother was living with late stage Alzheimer’s. And so she took a step back from her career and didn’t make art for the next five years.
In a recent interview with Art Forum, Lorraine said she hasn’t produced a vast amount of work, and that she “didn’t have time for anything but masterpieces.”
In 2020, Lorraine released a book of her collected works and writing, titled “Writing In Space.”
In March 2021, the Brooklyn Museum opened a major retrospective of her work, titled “Both/And.” She is 86 years old, and is still performing, making art, and living in New York City.
All month, we’re honoring incredible, artistic visionaries.
For more information and pictures of some of the work we’re talking about, find us on Facebook and Instagram @womanicapodcast.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator. And another special thanks to Alesandra Tejeda who curated this month’s theme.
Talk to you tomorrow!