Lorraine O’Grady was born in Boston to West Indian parents. A talented scholar, she attended Girls Latin School before studying economics and Spanish literature at Wellesley College (class of 1955). As a student, she passed the Management Intern Program (MIP) exam and worked as a Research Economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1961, she left the Department of Labor to write fiction, joining the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1965. In Chicago, she worked for a translation agency while volunteering for Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket. She later founded her own agency before moving to New York in 1973, becoming a critic for Rolling Stone and The Village Voice. Disillusioned with the music industry, she accepted a teaching position at the School of Visual Arts, where she discovered her identity as an artist.

In 1994, she expanded her 1992 essay Olympia’s Maid with a groundbreaking Postscript theorizing Black female subjectivity and the Both/And. She launched an artist website in 2008 and donated her analogue archive to Wellesley College in 2012. Her retrospective Both/And (Brooklyn Museum, 2021) traveled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum (2022) and will reappear at the Davis Museum in 2024. Her work is in major collections (MoMA, Tate Modern, MFA Boston). Awards include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award (2023) and the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award (2022).

Lorraine O’Grady was born in 1934 and died in 2024.