Conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady, renowned for her insightful critiques on identity, passed away in New York at the age of 90. Her gallery, Mariane Ibrahim, confirmed the news via email, stating that her death was due to natural causes. O’Grady embarked on her artistic journey relatively late, beginning in her early 40s, and labored for two more decades in relative obscurity before her work gained widespread recognition in the early 2000s.

She was a part of the pivotal 2007 exhibition “WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the 2010 Whitney Biennial in New York. In 2021, the Brooklyn Museum celebrated her extensive body of work with a major retrospective, “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And,” during which the artist, then in her late 80s, introduced a new performance art character donning a full suit of armor. “I anticipated a grand moment during the retrospective when I would step into the galleries and see all of my work together, in one place, and experience a profound revelation,” she shared with New York Magazine in 2021. “The interaction with the audience, which includes a dialogue of questions and answers, was what was missing.”  

O’Grady is perhaps most celebrated for her three signature projects—two under her own name and one as a member of the anonymous feminist collective, the Guerrilla Girls. In 1980, she debuted her most iconic performance persona, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, dressed in a gown crafted from 180 pairs of white gloves, at an opening at Just Above Midtown, a non-profit gallery supporting Black artists.

After distributing white chrysanthemums to the attendees, she put on a pair of white gloves, lashed herself with a white cat-o’-nine-tails, and concluded with a poem that declared: “Black art must take more risks!!!” (She reprised this role the following year at the New Museum in New York for an exhibition she was not invited to participate in, though she had been asked to contribute to its educational programming.) In 1983, she entered a float into the annual African American Day Parade in Harlem, featuring a large, gilded, and empty frame, accompanied by a troupe of 15 Black performers hired by O’Grady.

Each performer carried their own frame, holding them up before spectators, other performers, and even, in one memorable image, a New York Police Department officer. Images from this project, “Art Is…” have become part of the broader visual culture as O’Grady’s career gained momentum in recent decades. In late 2020, a video released by the Biden-Harris campaign reinterpreted the piece with O’Grady’s approval.  

Born in Boston on September 21, 1934, to Jamaican immigrants, O’Grady’s identity was shaped by her Caribbean heritage and her family’s unique class status. Her parents, who were upper and middle class in Jamaica, were relegated to working-class jobs upon moving to the US. She did not fit in with either the predominantly White working-class community in Boston’s Back Bay, where she spent most of her childhood, or with Boston’s upper-middle-class African American elite. “I always felt that nobody knew my story, but if there wasn’t room for my story, then it wasn’t my problem,” she told New York Magazine. “It was theirs.”  

Before discovering art, O’Grady explored various pursuits and careers. She initially studied Spanish literature at Wellesley College before switching to economics. After graduation, she briefly worked for the Department of Labor before becoming a fiction writer. She enrolled in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa but did not complete her studies. She moved to Chicago and worked for a translation agency before starting her own, working on projects for clients including Encyclopedia Britannica and Playboy. In the early 1970s, she moved to New York City and became a rock music critic, contributing to The Village Voice and Rolling Stone.

In the mid-1970s, she began teaching literature at the School of Visual Art in New York. While cutting up an edition of The New York Times to create a gift, she started collaging fragments of texts. These collages became her first series, “Cutting Out the New York Times.” “The problem I always had was that no matter who I was with or what I did, I got bored pretty quickly,” O’Grady told New York Magazine. “This was something I knew I would never get bored with, because how can I get bored? I would always be learning, and I would never, ever master it. That was part of the appeal.”

After that, although she continued to write—a collection of her writings, edited by scholar and critic Aruna D’Souza, was published by Duke University Press in 2020—art-making became O’Grady’s primary focus. She also mentored new generations of artists, taking on a full-time position at the University of California, Irvine, in the early 2000s. “I don’t think the average person who becomes an artist starts off thinking of it as anything other than self-expression,” O’Grady told the Brooklyn Rail in 2016. “That gets educated out of them gradually. ‘Self-expression’ is something that gets tamped down in graduate school in particular—teaching at UC Irvine, I watched people struggling against that, against having to learn how to fit into the market. I don’t know that the nature of art itself has changed; I do think the idea of an ‘art career’ has changed.”  

Defying conventional notions of an art career until the end, O’Grady was more active than ever in recent years. Last year, she left her longtime dealer Alexander Gray to join Mariane Ibrahim, a Chicago-based gallery with locations in Mexico City and Paris. At the time of her death, she was working on her first solo exhibition with the gallery, scheduled for spring 2025 at its French location. “Lorraine O’Grady was a force to be reckoned with,” Ibrahim said in a statement. “Lorraine refused to be labeled or limited, embracing the multiplicity of history that reflected her identity and life’s journey. Lorraine paved a path for artists and women artists of color, to forge critical and confident pathways between art and forms of writing.”  

This past April, O’Grady received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, which was intended to support a new performance art piece reviving a character from her past work. Despite the drastic change in the reception of her art over the years, her work maintained an intellectual rigor, criticality, and playfulness that spanned her performances, collages, photographic diptychs and series, writings, and more. “I’m old-fashioned. I think art’s first goal is to remind us that we are human, whatever that is,” she told the Brooklyn Rail. “I suppose the politics in my art could be to remind us that we are all human. Art doesn’t change that much, actually. I’ve read lots of poetry from Ancient Egypt and Ancient Rome and they talk about the same things poets do today. Is anyone more down and dirty and at the same time more introspective than Catullus?”