Lorraine O’Grady

ages appeared separately and simultaneously, moving through different sequences and actions until, at the end, they united and walked together through a stream. “I would say that the Mlle Bourgeoise Noire project, those pieces were not the core of my work,” she told me. “The core was this other work that combined selfexploration with cultural critique.”

That quality grew more pronounced over time as she abandoned performance and moved her work to the wall. Her first solo show, at intar gallery in midtown in 1991, featured a group of photomontages now collectively titled “Body Is the Ground of My Experience.” These surreal, playful, and sometimes dark pieces, such as The FirPalm, which shows a composite tree springing from a Black woman’s navel, posit Black women’s bodies as a kind of ground zero for Western culture—a subject O’Grady continued to investigate the following year with “Olympia’s Maid.” Referencing the Black woman in Manet’s 1863 painting Olympia, this groundbreaking essay asserted the need for Black women to reclaim their subjectivity. One line perfectly sums up her ethos: “Critiquing them does not show who you are: it cannot turn you from an object into a subject of history.”

Soon after, O’Grady would add a postscript: Western culture is structured by binaries and a logic of either-or—good versus evil, black versus white—that create supremacies. The solution is to embrace the concept of “both/and,” the coexistence of supposed opposites. Plurality and hybridity as the norm. “Look, I’m not somebody who tries to say we’re all the same. The differences are real,” O’Grady told me. “The problem isn’t the differences. The problem is the hierarchization of the differences.”

The idea of “both/and” has manifested most clearly in her use of diptychs—for instance, placing images of the ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti next to photographs of her sister in the work Miscegenated Family Album; between them, there is an implied connection, a gap, and a tension. It’s also there in the multiplicity of a piece like Rivers, the duality of both gazing outward and in, and in O’Grady herself, a product of several heritages, “living on a hyphen,” as she put it. It informs her overall approach, which is to treat everything as unfixed.

O’Grady was constantly refining her ideas, but she still wasn’t finding the audience she wanted. Even her solo exhibition hadn’t been received as she’d hoped: Operation Desert Storm started the week before it opened, gluing New Yorkers to their TVs. The show was important to her, said O’Grady, “but it was like a stone dropping into the middle of the ocean.”

By the early aughts, O’Grady was living in California, where she’d moved for a full-time position at UC Irvine. Things had been quiet for her; she was still making work, but she wasn’t showing much. Then, around 2005, Connie Butler, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, got in touch and told O’Grady she wanted to include Mlle Bourgeoise Noire in a major exhibition of feminist art called “WACK!” The invitation was a catalyst. “I knew it would be the one opportunity I had to be visible,” O’Grady said, “because I had been invisible, let’s face it.” She also knew the show alone wouldn’t cut it—there had to be a place where people could go to learn more about her work. She made a website and started cataloguing her career, posting images of her work online along with her own descriptions and texts by others. It was a digital showcase as well as an archive. She was building the architecture of her own recuperation.

One of the works she returned to around this time was Art Is … She started by making a slideshow for her website, which led to a wall installation; her new gallery, Alexander Gray Associates, showed it at an art fair, where it attracted the attention of curators. (The piece has become so popular that, last fall, the Biden-Harris campaign used it, with O’Grady’s permission, as the inspiration for a victory video; O’Grady was thrilled and humbled.) After decades of being sidelined by New York’s biggest institutions, she was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. The ground was shifting. The art world had become a much more diverse and integrated place than the one O’Grady had entered in the ’80s, and Black feminist artists and curators were looking for their predecessors.

“It’s one of those things where you find your foremothers after the fact,” said the artist Simone Leigh, who has included O’Grady in several projects, helping to raise her profile. Leigh, who is also the child of Jamaican immigrants, considers O’Grady a mentor; the two grew close over dinners at a Jamaican restaurant in Brooklyn. “She created a way of seeing that was very supportive to everything I was trying to do.”

The Brooklyn Museum show is the apex of a slow-moving process as well as an opportunity to expand the frame of reference beyond Mlle Bourgeoise Noire and Art Is … , which have become O’Grady’s bestknown pieces. “She’s been allowed in in these two kinds of ways, which has been at the expense of the entire career, ultimately,” said Catherine Morris, the senior curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum and co-curator of the show. O’Grady hopes a return to performance—with a new character, a knight named Lancela—will help illuminate her previous work. Inspired by the books about King Arthur she read as a girl at the Boston Public Library, O’Grady had her own suit of armor forged for the part, one that weighs 40 pounds and is so well crafted that she can run and dance in it. Palm trees sometimes sprout from the helmet—a Caribbean signifier atop a Western trunk. Part of the appeal, too, is that the armor gives her a chance to perform without showing any markers of her identity. “When you take away age, race, color, everything, what’s left?” she asked. “What never goes away?”

It may seem strange that an artist whose work emerged from her unshakable sense of self would want to obscure those things. But there’s a logic to it, when you consider that the white Establishment shut out not just O’Grady but an entire generation of Black artists because of who they were.

“I thought that when I had the retrospective, there would be this great big moment when I would go into the galleries and see all of my work at the same time, in the same place, and have this big Aha!” she said. “But it’s already happening with the questions that I’m receiving.” She meant the questions that I and other interviewers had been sending to her ahead of the show. “They have made me understand how much all of us who did not have that attention lost in the ability to grow. The engagement of the audience, which involves a back-and-forth of question-and-answer, is the thing that was missing.”

O’Grady was frank early in her career that she felt the true audience for her art hadn’t arrived yet, that she was making work for viewers still to come. She now recognizes that her audience is here, and after decades spent contextualizing and cataloguing her own art, of finding and strengthening her own voice, she’s eager to hear what others have to say—how they interpret the creations of a woman who has found so many different ways to tell her story, casting it in the harsh light of reality or the hazy glow of dreams. “The whole point of my wanting to be an artist was to find out who I was,” she said, “and to make it clear to everybody else what that meant.”