Lorraine O’Grady, a pioneering conceptual artist whose bold works challenged the conventions of Contemporary Art while fiercely advocating for the representation of Black women, has died aged 90. Her death was confirmed by the Lorraine O’Grady Trust and her gallery, Mariane Ibrahim. The cause was not specified.
In a tribute on Instagram, Mariane Ibrahim, who began representing the artist in recent years, called O’Grady “a force to be reckoned with,” praising her refusal to be constrained by labels or limitations. “Lorraine paved a path for artists and women artists of colour to forge critical and confident pathways between art and forms of writing,” Ibrahim wrote.
O’Grady’s works were bold confrontations with the exclusionary narrative of race, gender, and class. In exposing blind spots in the history of art and today’s living culture, performance, photography, collage, and incisive essays place the Black female subject at the centre. Her iconic 1992 essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity” fiercely analyzed the 1863 Olympia painting by Édouard Manet and focused on Laure, the often-overlooked Black servant depicted therein.
Born in Boston in 1934 to Jamaican immigrants, O’Grady grew up in a household shaped by her mother’s entrepreneurial clothing business. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1955 with degrees in economics and Spanish literature, later exploring careers in government, writing, and teaching. She briefly attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the mid-1960s before moving to Chicago with her husband, Chappelle Freeman Jr.
When she arrived in New York in 1973, O’Grady plunged into the city’s cultural life. She wrote music criticism for Rolling Stone and taught literature at the School of Visual Arts before turning to art in the late 1970s. The first significant performance she staged was Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83), an audacious critique of the marginalization of Black artists in the art world, done at age 45. Clad in a gown sewn from white gloves, O’Grady’s creation brandished flowers formed into a whip against complacency and systemic exclusion.
Over the following decades, her art changed but didn’t compromise. Collages such as her Cutting of the New York Times series (1977) and later photographic works interrogated power structures and societal norms, earning her a reputation as one of contemporary art’s most vital voices.
Her contributions have gained broader recognition in recent years. A 2022 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum cemented her influence, and a 2020 collection of her writings, edited by Aruna D’Souza, brought her literary rigour to a new generation. This past spring, Mariane Ibrahim Gallery announced a major exhibition of her work, “The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel,” slated for Chicago in 2024.
Though shaped by different histories, our lives mirrored in ways that connected each other,” Ibrahim wrote. “Her legacy will live on, a force that continues to echo through everything she created.
Lorraine O’Grady’s voice is intellectual and uncompromising, filled with the profoundly human tones that have so transformed our understanding of race, gender, and history through her remarkable body of work. Yet her art, once rigorous, continues as a testament to her lifelong commitment to representation and self-expression in all their unyielding guises.
She is survived by her trust, an artistic legacy, and the generations of artists and thinkers she inspired.
Photo: Lorraine O’Grady, Photo by Ross Collab 2018 © Ross Collab. Courtesy of the Lorraine O’Grady Trust