Photo credit: newyorker.com 2022

Lorraine O’Grady Has Always Been A Rebel

Interviewed by Doreen St Félix
September 29, 2022

I wanted to ask you about your relationship to fame and attention, especially the fame and attention that have attended your work in the past decade or so. When we think of Lorraine O’Grady, we think of the gate-crasher. With “Greetings and Theses,” the persona of the Knight—your second since “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire”—was anticipated, so much so that the announcement of the upcoming performance was taken as the work itself.

There’s two different questions there. The first is the reaction to the reception of the earlier body of work. And that was very calculated, of course, because, from the minute I got invited to be in this groundbreaking show that Connie Butler curated, called “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” I realized that it was going to be more important than maybe even she thought. I woke up and I said, “Nobody knows who I am.” Connie knew who I was because she had been one of the young women at this organization, wac, the Women’s Action Coalition, which I had been very active in during the early days and which she had named her show after. She always knew she was going to put me in the most important position of the show, which was the opening act. You couldn’t get into the show without passing me. I didn’t want to be a one-hit wonder. I wanted to make it possible for people who had been impressed by what they saw, or mystified by what they saw, or whatever they were, to find out more about me. I made sure that I had a Web site that was pretty extensive of all of the work that I had done up to that point.

Your Web site is a living archive. One of the best artist Web sites.

It’s pretty extraordinary, but that’s only because I grew up with the Internet, believe it or not. I’m eighty-eight, but I was one of the early adopters, because I happened to just luck out and have a fellowship at the Bunting Institute, at Harvard, the year the Internet began. My first browser was Netspace One. That was 1994 and I’ve been digitized ever since.

Read the entire interview HERE