Lorraine O’Grady

Mariane Ibrahim presents Lorraine O’Grady, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Paris and her second with the gallery. This special presentation, the first since O’Grady’s passing in December 2024, aims to celebrate the artist’s extraordinary legacy. Featuring work spanning four decades (1981-2021), the exhibition examines O’Grady’s revolutionary conceptual practice and the critical yet nuanced ways in which she engaged tensions around race, gender, and colonialism. Guided by the rebellious and powerful nature of the iconic personas the artist created during her career–from her earliest, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, to her most recent, the Knight–the exhibition explores four distinct periods within O’Grady’s oeuvre, in which performance consistently played a central role and a unifying vision.

At the heart of the exhibition is Rivers, First Draft (1982), a performance-based artwork staged only once in New York City’s Central Park at The Loch as part of the Art Across the Park project. Conceived as a collage-in-space, the performance unfolded in three parts simultaneously across adjacent locations, weaving together Caribbean and New England heritages through distinct phases of the self: a young girl, a teenager, and an adult woman. O’Grady described the piece as a three-ring circus of movement and sound that, unlike the randomness of Futurists attempting to shout each other down, played more like a unitary dream. The performance, partly biographical, traces in broad strokes O’Grady’s evolution from child to artist, navigating dual structures of racism and sexism as it conceptually moves between the West Indies and New England.

The exhibition explores revolutionary conceptual practice, and the critical, yet nuanced, ways in which the artist addressed the complexities of race, gender, and colonialism. Through a challenged vision of the fragmentation of identity and history, O’Grady instead advocated for an anti-hierarchical approach to difference—what she termed Both/And. This framework embraces the coexistence of multiple identities and perspectives, resisting binary thinking in favor of layered, intersecting viewpoints. The exhibition thus offers a profound intellectual engagement with one of the most groundbreaking artists of the past fifty years.

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