page_title: Lorraine O'Grady
section_title: Life and work
hierarchical_section_title: Lorraine O'Grady / Life and work
caption_attribution_description: English: Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (New Museum performance, 1981)
context_page_description: Lorraine O'Grady is an American artist and critic. She works in conceptual art and performance art that integrates photo and video installation. Her work explores the cultural construction of identity - particularly that of black female subjectivity - as shaped by the experience of diaspora and hybridity.
  Born in Boston, Massachusetts to Jamaican parents, O'Grady studied at Wellesley College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop before becoming an artist.
  Regarding the purpose of art, O'Grady said in 2016: "I think art’s first goal is to remind us that we are human, whatever that is. I suppose the politics in my art could be to remind us that we are all human."
context_section_description: O'Grady was born in Boston to Jamaican parents, who helped establish St. Cyprian's, the first West Indian Episcopal church in Boston. Drawn to the form and aesthetics of the "high church" of nearby St. John's of Roxbury Crossing, O'Grady recalls: "I was permanently formed by the aesthetics of that experience, of the rituals, which are a more stately and elegant version of Roman Catholicism. I did believe until my mid-twenties, until my sister [Devonia] died, then I stopped believing." In 1955, O'Grady graduated from Wellesley College, where she majored in economics and minored in Spanish literature. She was honored with a Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award in 2017. O'Grady pursued a master's degree in fiction from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop before becoming an artist in 1980. Prior to becoming an artist O'Grady worked in many other professions, from a translator, a critic and an intelligence analyst for the American Government.
  In the 1980s, she created the persona of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, who invaded art openings wearing a gown and a cape made of 180 pairs of white gloves, first giving away flowers, then beating herself with a white studded whip, which she often referred to as, "the whip-that-made-the-plantations-move". Whilst doing this she would often shout in protest poems that railed against a segregated art world that excluded black individuals from the world of mainstream art, and which she perceived as not looking beyond a small circle of friends. Her first performance as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire was in 1980 at the Linda Goode Bryant's Just Above Midtown gallery in Tribeca. 
  In 1983, she choreographed a final participatory performance as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire called Art Is..., which consisted of a parade float she entered in the annual African American Day Parade in Harlem. The float was shepherded up Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard by "O’Grady [in character as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire] and a troupe of 15 African-American and Latino performers, dressed all in white, [who] walked around the float carrying empty gold picture frames." The performance not only encouraged onlookers - primarily people of color - to consider themselves art, but also drew attention to racism in the artworld. Printed for the first time more than three decades later, O’Grady’s photographs from the performance continue its legacy by interrogating issues of representation, celebrating Blackness, and claiming avant-garde art as a Black medium. From 2015-2016, Art Is... was featured at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where Assistant Curator Amanda Hunt asserted that O’Grady’s performance “affirmed the readiness of Harlem’s residents to see themselves as works of art.” In January of 2020, four of O'Grady's Art Is... photographs were featured in Artpace’s exhibit titledVisibilities: Intrepid Women of Artpace. As a past summer 2007 International Artist-in-Residence at Artpace, O'Grady's series was included in a show celebrating female-identifying artists.
  O'Grady also gives credit to 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. The concept for this event was to show the work of 30 black artists alongside 30 white artists. Beginning in 1991 she added photo installations to her conceptually based work. And in 2007, she made her first video installation during a residency at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas.
  Her strongly feminist work has been widely exhibited, particularly in New York City and Europe. O'Grady's early Mlle Bourgeoise Noire performance was given new recognition when it was made an entry-point to the landmark exhibit WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, the first mainstream museum show of this groundbreaking art movement. Her practice, seemingly located at and defining the cusp between modernism and a "not-quite-post-modernist" present, has been the subject of steadily increasing interest since it received a two-article cover feature in the May 2009 issue of Artforum magazine. In December 2009, it was gi
caption: O'Grady as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire
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