20 Facts About Lorraine O'Grady

Lorraine O'Grady was an American artist, writer, translator, and critic.

Lorraine O'Grady was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 21,1934, to Jamaican parents, Edwin and Lena Lorraine O'Grady, who helped establish St Cyprian's, the first West Indian Episcopal church in Boston.

In 1955, Lorraine O'Grady graduated from Wellesley College, where she majored in economics and minored in Spanish literature.

Lorraine O'Grady married her first husband, Robert Jones, with whom she had a son, while she was in school.

Lorraine O'Grady was later honored with a Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award in 2017.

Lorraine O'Grady pursued a master's degree in fiction from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop before becoming an artist in 1980.

Lorraine O'Grady then moved to New York in 1973, becoming a music critic for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice.

Lorraine O'Grady died at her home in New York City on December 13,2024, at the age of 90.

Lorraine O'Grady credited Mlle Bourgeoise Noire for curating exhibitions, such as The Black and White Show in 1983 at Kenkeleba House, a black-run gallery situated in Manhattan's East Village.

Lorraine O'Grady worked on a performance in which she focused on Knights in the year 2020, wiith "Lorraine O'Grady herself, outfitted in a custom-made, plated-steel suit of armor, poses against a black backdrop with her sword, jousting poles and ornate helmet, which in some images sprouts different varieties of palm trees".

Lorraine O'Grady was profiled at the age of 88 in an article in The New Yorker magazine in September 2022.

Lorraine O'Grady first exhibited at the age of 45, after successful careers among others as a government intelligence analyst, literary and commercial translator, and rock critic.

Subsequently, Lorraine O'Grady was one of 55 artists selected for inclusion in the 2010 Whitney Biennial.

Lorraine O'Grady engaged frequently in dialogue with contemporary artists, such as Juliana Huxtable.

Lorraine O'Grady's collected writings were published by Duke University Press in 2020 and were edited with Aruna D'Souza.

Lorraine O'Grady uses the painting Olympia by Edouard Manet as an example of the Eurocentric depiction of Black womanhood.

This, Lorraine O'Grady argues, comes at a time when subjectivity itself has been problematized by ideology.

In 2024, Lorraine O'Grady was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts.

In 2016, Lorraine O'Grady was the subject of musician Anohni's video "Marrow" from the Hopelessness album.

Lorraine O'Grady's name appears in the lyrics of the Le Tigre song "Hot Topic".