On March 30, 2025, Professor Andil Gosine joined an eminent group of scholars and creatives – the singer ANOHNI, artist Simone Leigh, filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant and Wellesley College President Paula Johnson – to honor his mentor and friend, Lorraine O’Grady, who passed away at the age of 90 in December.
O’Grady was a pioneering conceptual and performance artist and is especially renowned for her formidable intellect; at the memorial ceremony, Johnson called her “a once-in-a-lifetime genius.” Dr. Gosine has written extensively about O’Grady since he first encountered her in 2010, including a review of her show New Worlds for Art in America, the essay “Interracial Picturesque” for the collection The Art of Power, and most recently, his tribute essay for sx art, “Landscape (Western Hemisphere),” which was also published in the program booklet for the memorial. As he notes in that essay, he was intimately engaged with her across her final three artworks:
In the fifteen years since our introduction to each other on February 19, 2010, O’Grady pursued the making of only three new works, including Looking for a Headdress (2015), a video shown at the En Mas’ traveling exhibition curated by Claire Tancons, in which I also appeared. She was still in the throes of the long-forming project Sir Lancela, elements of which were previewed at Both/And, her 2021
solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and at her 2023 exhibition, The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel at her new gallery, Chicago-
based Mariane Ibrahim. Sir Lancela was the primary subject of thirteen hours of recorded Zoom dialogues between us in 2021 and 2022,
an effort she anticipated would result in an authoritative… which will still come.
Dr. Gosine is currently undertaking further research into her archives, as he also begins to process the many hours of recorded conversation between them.
His own scholarly and art practices are also deeply informed by his study of her work, including in his book Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean and through his video Natures: A Guerilla Girl Story, which responds to O’Grady’s infamous diptych about the race, sex and coloniality in the Americas, The Clearing: or Cortés and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N and Me, and features her voice narration from an interview between them.
This fall, Dr. Gosine will invite graduate students to join him in investigating and responding to O’Grady’s work and world, through the one-time offering of the performance studies course (ENVS 6348) “The Ecopoetics of Lorraine O’Grady.” Open to graduate students across the university, the course “will review the important body of art and scholarship that O’Grady has produced over the last five decades, as well as the postcolonial, feminist, anti-racist, psychoanalytical and Cultural Studies theoretical frameworks upon which she draws.” Centering the “ecopoetics” of her work, the course will examine what they say about how we live in the world, and in relationship to other forms of life.” Students will have the option of producing a performance, visual art work or critical writing in response to her work.
“O’Grady had a profound impact on my way of understanding the world, and creating art,” Gosine says, “and I am excited to see what paths graduate students are inspired to take from their engagements with her.” As he noted in his memorial speech, “understandably, a lot of the critical appreciation of Lorraine’s artistic and scholarly contributions center her important thinking about the Black female body… [but] we have not yet come close to understanding the breadth and depth of her thinking, the remarkable insights she had about the very condition of our being.”