Photo: Collier Schorr Click to enlarge

What if Lorraine O’Grady—acclaimed artist, glorious wit, and the very best kind of miscreant renegade—turned out to be a knight in shining armor? It’s a question I find myself contemplating as I sit across from her in the café at the Whitney Museum of American Art, just a few blocks from her studio in Manhattan’s West Village.

For more than four decades, O’Grady has exercised a kind of valiance as she has sought to create a place for herself within the racism, sexism, and inhospitality of the art world. Beginning in the late 1970s and early ’80s, her conceptual and performance art took aim at the constellation of forces that conspired to marginalize artists of color in mainstream institutions and galleries—and women of color especially. Instead, O’Grady found community with the group of artists that surrounded Linda Goode Bryant’s scrappy, idealistic Just Above Midtown (JAM) gallery and contemporaries like David Hammons and Senga Nengudi, who chafed against the way the art establishment rejected the notion of a Black avant-garde.

– Excerpt from Harbper’s Bazaar by Soraya Nadia McDonald
Link to full article Lorraine O’Grady