Some 50 years into her career and almost 90 years old artist Lorraine O'Grady was recently

honored with a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. If that sounds like an honor delayed,

much of O'Grady's career has played out with a slow burn.

With her first ever museum retrospective

now at Wellesley College's Davis Museum,

she looks back at her long path to acceptance in the art world.

Special correspondent, Jared Bowen of G. B. H. in Boston has the story for our arts and culture

series, Canvas.

In her work and in life, artist Lorraine O'Grady has long confronted a world of black and white, as in either

or thinking, as in her own art making, but also in racism, including what she experienced, working at the Bureau of

Labor Statistics in the 1950s.

Even though we were all intellectuals, and they saw me as an intellectual. They could not imagine a black

intellectual or a black female intellectual. They had not seen it. And that was

because the black middle class was being willfully ignored

But she would not be ignored and over the next 20 years she established her voice covering the arts as a writer

Translator and rock critic.

And then O'Grady decided to be seen.

In the 1970s and 80s, she became an artist herself, zeroing in on the New York art world by reinventing herself as a conceptual

and performance artist.

Those fields did not have a history, and that meant that you could make a history you could make the present

and the future and make career defining statements. The art world of the time was

deeply divided along racial lines so O'Grady called it out. The art

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