An “insert article” in the Wellesley College alumnae magazine, incisively written by associate editor Francie Latour, grants distinction to O’Grady’s career as an alum.
by Francie Latour
Lorraine O’Grady ’55: Portrait of An Artist
Some Wellesley grads dream about landing a plum job on Capitol Hill. Some dream of joining an elite writer’s colony, or becoming a rock critic, or teaching at a cutting-edge university. By age 45, Lorraine O’Grady ’55—a pioneer of feminist conceptual art—had done all those things, yet she had not found her calling. She was living in New York, the art-world’s mecca, but did not consider herself an artist.
That didn’t happen fully until one night in 1980, as she walked home agitated about an exhibit of black artists showing abstract works, one of the few forms of black art accepted in mainstream galleries then. That night, Lorraine had a vision that crystallized her ideas about race, performance, and protest. She imagined a black woman in a gown made entirely of white gloves and crowned with a tiara. Several nights later, Lorraine performed Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middle Class), invading an art event and railing about assimilation.
It was an attack on an art scene she saw as too safe, too restrained—art
with white gloves on. And it was a pent-up revolt against her self-described bourgeois upbringing: Her mother, a dressmaker to white elites, had spent her life climbing the ranks of black society.
“Ultimately, my work is about pushing back against the way culture has been shaped,” says Lorraine, who is among the artists featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, one of the world’s leading art exhibitions, starting Feb. 25 at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. “I have always been rebellious against the forms I felt were being adopted to make black culture acceptable to the broader culture.”
Questions of culture permeate Lorraine’s work and life. Born in Boston, she was deeply marked by the values of her mixed-race Jamaican parents on the one hand, and the reality of segregated black America on the other. Her mother, who started as a maid, insisted on an elite education for her two daughters.
For years after Wellesley, Lorraine literally stumbled through careers others dream about, from US intelligence analyst to
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© 2009 Lorraine O'Grady | All rights reserved.