Had her life been more conventional, Lorraine O’Grady would have been, that Thursday in June 1980, at Wellesley College for her 25th class reunion.
Instead, she was donning a dress hand-stitched from 180 pairs of white gloves accessorized with a tiara, sash and cat-o’-nine-tails and heading to the gallery Just Above Midtown, to carry out a guerrilla-theater intervention.
O’Grady, a daughter of Jamaican immigrants in Boston, had a picaresque itinerary already. An economics graduate, she had worked for the Labor and State Departments, including as an intelligence analyst in the period leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis; attempted a novel in Europe; dropped out of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; run a translation agency in Chicago; been a New York rock critic. Two marriages, both brief, were over.
Lorraine OâGrady, Still Cutting Into the Culture
And at 86, the pioneering conceptual artist isnât done yet. Sheâs getting her first retrospective ever, at the Brooklyn Museum.
Lorraine OâGradyâs retrospective opens March 5 at the Brooklyn Museum. âIâm working on the skin of the culture and Iâm making incisions,â she says.Credit.Lelanie Foster for The New York Times
Feb. 19, 2021
Had her life been more conventional, Lorraine OâGrady would have been, that Thursday in June 1980, at Wellesley College for her 25th class reunion.
Instead, she was donning a dress hand-stitched from 180 pairs of white gloves â accessorized with a tiara, sash and cat-oâ-nine-tails â and heading to the gallery Just Above Midtown, to carry out a guerrilla-theater intervention.
Themes of Black feminism and perseverance will take center stage in a new improvisational performance that will premiere as part of the University of Michigan’s winter 2021 Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series season kick-off event on Jan. 22.
The work was produced and directed from more than 600 miles away by New York-based performance artist Ayana Evans, who collaborated with U-M Stamps School of Art & Design professor Rebekah Modrak and students in her “Dressing Up and Down” course during the fall 2020 semester.
Evans, a Roman J. Witt Visiting Artist at Stamps, is known for her guerilla-style street performances and public interventions where she uses her physicality to express ideas about the body, race and gender. These ideas were present as she worked through a series of phone calls, Zoom meetings and emails to communicate what her next big performance would be a spectacular show on U-M’s Elbel Field, complete with cheerleaders from the U-M Cheer team, vocalists and ac