When I interviewed the groundbreaking black feminist performance and visual artist Lorraine O'Grady over the phone in April, she started our conversation with the question all Bostonians ask each other: "Where did you go to school?" Boston is a surprisingly small, insular city, and the high schools serve as immediate shorthand for your race, age, and class level. I went to a tiny, formerly radical and experimental private school that was painstakingly trying to transform itself into a respectable prep school. O'Grady graduated from Girl's Latin (now Boston Latin Academy), a 150-year-old public school famous for its academic rigor, and a symbol of the kind of egalitarian access to education and learning that represents the best traditions of the city.
But O'Grady is so much more than all that. Her photo installation Miscegenated Family Album is basically a compendium of all the things I'm drawn to: family, matriarchy, the complicated relationship between sisters, and the profound loneliness and loss that is felt when those tangled bonds are broken.
O'Grady has been an influential artist for nearly 30 years. Beginning as a performance artist, she'd show up at the blindingly white galleries of 1980s New York as the character "Mlle Bourgeoise Noire," dressed in a cape made of 180 pairs of white opera gloves, whipping herself with a white cat-o'-nine-tails and calling out — in poetry form, no less — the racial bias and segregation in the art world. Her 1970s series Cutting Out The New York Times, a series of found poems using only the text of The New York Times from a week in 1977, finds its echoes in the work of contemporary black women artists like Alexandra Bell, with her New York Times police-brutality-coverage pieces. O'Grady's essay "Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity" set the groundwork for describing the ways black women's bodies are erased, ignored, and distorted in Western art.
She's lived many lives: O'Grady was a translator for decades, as well as a federal intelligence analyst and a rock critic (she was one of the first to review Bob Marley and the Wailers). Topping all that, she's name-checked in the enduring single "Hot Topic" from Le Tigre's first album — her name is chanted alongside those of other women artists who defy categorization like Yoko Ono, Vaginal Crème Davis, and Kara Walker.
I was lucky enough to talk with O'Grady as her work was about to be highlighted again, in We Wanted a Revolution, a collection of second-wave black feminist artists at the Brooklyn Museum through September.
Above: Lorraine O'Grady, Miscegenated Family Album (Sisters I), L: Nefernefruaten Nefertiti; R: Devonia Evangeline O'Grady, 1980/1994. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. ©2017 Lorraine O’Grady / Artist's Rights Society (ARS), New York Below: Lorraine O'Grady, Miscegenated Family Album (Cross Generational), L: Nefertiti, the last image; R: Devonia's youngest daughter, Kimberley, 1980/1994. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. ©2017 Lorraine O’Grady / Artist's Rights Society (ARS), New York