Avant-garde and conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady, who championed the views of black women in art, has died at the age of 90. Her death was confirmed on December 13, with her heartfelt condolences from her representative gallery, Marianne Ibrahim.
The cause of O’Grady’s death has not been revealed, but gallery artist Marianne Ibrahim took to Instagram to express her admiration for all of O’Grady’s activist work. “Lauren O’Grady was a force to be reckoned with. She refused to be labeled or confined, embracing the diversity of history that reflected her identity and life path. Lauren paved the way for artists and women artists of color to walk critical and confident paths between art and writing.” to create.”
Ibrahim went on to reflect on the legacy of O’Grady’s art; “Our lives, though shaped by different stories, are mirrored in connecting ways. His legacy will live on, a force that continues to resonate with what he created, touching all who encounter his work with the same force and depth that he embodied.”
Born in Boston in 1934 to Jamaican immigrant parents, O’Grady earned degrees in economics and Spanish literature at Wellesley College before entering the creative arts in 1965 as a member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop met and married her husband, Chapelle Freeman Jr., and moved with him to Chicago.
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 his most famous and moving pieces came early in his career with Cutting of the New York Times in 1977, where he turned clippings from the NYT into a critique of contemporary society.
O’Grady’s career began to take shape and was best defined by an ongoing commitment to challenging oppressive narratives around race, gender, and class, as well as the intersections between the three. She expressed her activism through photography, writing, performance, and collage work used art in unique ways to make meaningful cultural criticism.
By: to: Art News:A proponent of feminism, surrealism, and the analysis of representation of black women in artwork, O’Grady used her talent to criticize harmful systems of power in America and fought for the more widespread inclusion of black artists in galleries.
In recent years before his death, O’Grady’s work has been published by Duke University Press and exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 2022, and Ibrahim recently announced that O’Grady will be exhibiting his work in a major exhibition in Chicago in April 2024, The Knight or Lancel of Palm Steel. with the title
O’Grady is survived by her son and daughter-in-law, Guy David Jones and Annette Albert Jones, three grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
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