At the age of 45, Lorraine O’Grady emerged as an artist fully formed when she made her first public appearance as “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire” in 1980 at Just Above Midtown, the center of New York’s Black avant-garde run by revolutionary gallerist Linda Goode Bryant. Dressed in a handmade gown comprised of 180 pairs of white gloves, a sparkling tiara, and beauty queen sash, O’Grady entered the gallery bearing flowers and a cat-o’-nine-tails whip.
.
The flowers were for the audience, the whip she saved for herself in a performance that decried the respectability politics that consumed the Black American middle class desperately striving to find some semblance of protection from the horrors of systemic racism. But O’Grady, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, knew such ideas were illusions at best. As she whipped herself, she spoke verse, her poem ending in a firm declaration: “Black Art Must Take More Risks!”
.
O’Grady wasn’t wrong, and she wasn’t afraid – even if it meant her work would go without proper recognition for more than 40 years. Now 86, the artist is finally being given her proper due with her first museum solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, entitled Both/And and which just ended, and the publication of two collections of her work from Duke University and Dancing Foxes Press.
.
.
