Lorraine O'Grady
2024 Milestone Grantee
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Lorraine O’Grady (b. 1934, Boston, MA; d. 2024, New York, NY) was a conceptual artist whose work over four decades employed the diptych, or at least the diptych idea, to explore issues of diaspora, hybridity and black female subjectivity. The diptych’s “both/and thinking” frames her themes as symptoms of the divisive and hierarchical either/or categories underpinning Western philosophy. In O’Grady’s cross-disciplinary work, personal and aesthetic attitudes often considered contradictory, such as anger and joy or classicism and surrealism, are not distinguished. Political argument and unapologetic beauty are expressed simultaneously. Her art works have been acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Whitney Museum and Brooklyn Museum, NY; and Tate Modern, London, among others.
