Artist And Activist Lorraine O’Grady Dies At 90, Leaves Legacy Of Advocacy For Black Women In Art

O’Grady had been active in the art world since 1965.

Avant Garde and conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady, who advocated for Black women’s perspectives in art, passed away at 90. On Dec. 13, her death was confirmed by a trust in her name and followed with a heartfelt condolence from her representing gallery, Mariane Ibrahim.

The cause of O’Grady’s death hasn’t been revealed, but gallerist Mariane Ibrahim took to Instagram to express her admiration for all of O’Grady’s activist work through her art. She wrote, “Lorraine O’Grady was a force to be reckoned with. She refused to be labeled or limited, embracing the multiplicity of history that reflected her identity and life’s journey. Lorraine paved a path for artists and women artists of color, to forge critical and confident pathways between art and forms of writing.”

Ibrahim continued to reflect on O’Grady’s art legacy, “Our lives, though shaped by different histories, mirrored in ways that connected each other. Her legacy will live on, a force that continues to echo through everything she created, touching all who encounter her work with the same power and depth she embodied.”

O’Grady was born in Boston in 1934 to Jamaican immigrant parents after she gained a degree in economics and Spanish literature at Wellesley College. She worked government office jobs before she stepped into the creative art world in 1965 as a member of the Iowa Writers Workshop. She soon after met and married her husband, Chappelle Freeman Jr., and moved to Chicago with him.

In the late 1970s, after doing a lot of work as a teacher and critic, she decided to officially pursue her career as an artist.
One of her most well-known and moving pieces came early in her career with “Cutting of the New York Times,” in 1977, where she transformed NYT newspaper clippings into critiques of contemporary society.

O’Grady’s career began to take shape and was most well defined by a constant commitment to challenging oppressive narratives around race, gender, and class — as well as the intersection between the three. She expressed her activism across mediums, with photography, writing, performance, and collage works. O’Grady leveraged art to make meaningful cultural criticism in unique ways.

According to Art News, she favored analysis of feminism, surrealism, and the representation of Black women in art pieces. O’Grady used her talent to critique harmful systems of power in America and fought for more widely accepted inclusion of Black artists in galleries.

In more recent years leading up to her passing, O’Grady’s work has been published and featured by Duke University Press, the Brooklyn Museum in 2022, and more recently, Ibrahim announced that O’Grady would have her work presented in a major exhibition in Chicago in April 2024, titled “The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel.”

O’Grady is survived by her son and daughter-in-law, Guy David Jones and Annette Olbert Jones, three grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren.