The AUDACITY of LORRAINE O'GRADY

At 89, the eternally PUNK-ROCK PERFORMANCE and CONCEPTUAL ARTIST still gets a kick out of CRASHING art-world parties. Only now she's the GUEST of HONOR.

- SORAYA NADIA MCDONALD

What if Lorraine O'Grady-acclaimed artist, glorious wit, and the very best kind of miscreant renegade-turned out to be a knight in shining armor? It's a question I find myself contemplating as I sit across from her in the café at the Whitney Museum of American Art, just a few blocks from her studio in Manhattan's West Village.

For more than four decades, O'Grady has exercised a kind of valiance as she has sought to create a place for herself within the racism, sexism, and inhospitality of the art world. Beginning in the late 1970s and early '80s, her conceptual and performance art took aim at the constellation of forces that conspired to marginalize artists of color in mainstream institutions and galleries-and women of color especially. Instead, O'Grady found community with the group of artists that surrounded Linda Goode Bryant's scrappy, idealistic Just Above Midtown (JAM) gallery and contemporaries like David Hammons and Senga Nengudi, who chafed against the way the art establishment rejected the notion of a Black avant-garde.

O'Grady's exploits, at this point, are legend. In 1981, she crashed an opening at the New Museum with a performance of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middle Class, or MBN), in which she dressed up as a debutante in a gown constructed from white gloves, brandished a cat-o'-nine-tails, and recited poetry that called out the racism of the art world. "It was so fucking amazing," says Goode Bryant, who had seen O'Grady debut Mlle Bourgeoise Noire as a part of a group show at JAM a year earlier. "You have this unplanned, unauthorized performance," she says. "People's jaws dropped."