Lorraine O’Grady, a central figure in Black American avant-garde—a cultural critic, performance artist, Black feminist provocateur, and conceptual artist—is being reviles after decades of hard work by the Brooklyn Museum, with her very first retrospective at the age of 86.
In a statement to the New York Times, O’Grady said, “I am somebody who is moving from one idea, to the next, to the next, to the next. I feel that I’m working on the skin of the culture and I’m making incisions.”
O’Grady is the daughter of Boston-based Jamaican immigrants in Boston, who went on to earn an economics degree and has even worked for the labour and various state departments. If that’s not all, O’Grady also worked as an intelligence analyst during the time leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis
Like in the case of many other black and female artists, the art world has finally recognised the artists hard work, and herfirst-ever retrospective, titled Both/And, opens on March 5th at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition will cover her art from 1977, revisiting iconic moments, as well as presenting the photo-based series at the heart of her practice since the 1990s. “For 40 years nobody knew what I was doing, really. The retrospective is a wonderful opportunity, not just for everyone to get to know my work, but for me to get to know my work better,” O’Grady told the newspaper.
Image Courtesy: Twitter/Shelton Griffith (@flyrebel)