[3][8][9] In 1977, O’Grady began her “Cutting Out the New York Times” works: she collaged together clipped phrases from the newspaper; the rearranged words took on different meanings and formed miniature poems.

[11] O'Grady also credited Mlle Bourgeoise Noire for curating exhibitions, such as The Black and White Show in 1983 at Kenkeleba House, a black-run gallery situated in Manhattan's East Village.

[18] As a past summer 2007 International Artist-in-Residence at Artpace,[19] O'Grady's series was included in a show celebrating female-identifying artists.

[20][21][22] The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art argued that the event made an impact for the Black community by describing how there were people everywhere shouting things such as "That's right.

[25] O'Grady first exhibited at the age of 45, after successful careers among others as a government intelligence analyst, literary and commercial translator, and rock critic.

O'Grady's early Mlle Bourgeoise Noire performance was given new recognition when it was made an entry-point to the landmark exhibit WACK!

Her practice, seemingly located at and defining the cusp between modernism and a "not-quite-post-modernist" present, has been the subject of steadily increasing interest since it received a two-article cover feature in the May 2009 issue of Artforum magazine.

She was featured in We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–85, an exhibition organized by Catherine Morris, Sackler Family Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and Rujeko Hockley, former Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum.

It explores Black feminist art where the ideas come first, and then through multiple mediums including, video, sculpture, performance, photography and painting she decided which will portray her expression best.

[39] In addition to the articles O'Grady wrote for Artforum magazine and Art Lies, her essay "Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity" has been anthologized numerous times, most recently in Amelia Jones (ed.

Reflecting on the great care apparent in the artist's writing, D'Souza observes: "O'Grady's words are a gift, a call to action, and a vision of a world as it could be.

"[1] An early review by O'Grady of the night Bob Marley and the Wailers opened for Bruce Springsteen at Max's Upstairs in Manhattan, July 18, 1973, was rejected at the time by her Village Voice editor, who said: "It's too soon for these two.

"[1] The review was first published nearly 40 years later in Max's Kansas City: Art, Glamour, Rock and Roll, 2010, a photo book with texts by O'Grady, Lou Reed, Lenny Kaye, and Danny Fields, among others, and was recently reprinted in Writing In Space.

[40][1] "Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity"[41] is an essay originally published in 1992 in the book New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action.

The metaphors of both the prostitute and feminist psychoanalysis' the female eunuch as a way of describing Olympia’s maid’s positionality as a Black woman are used by O'Grady.

In a damaging critique of the painting from when it was originally shown, Amedee Cantaloube describes as "a kind of female gorilla, a grotesque rubber figure surrounded by black, a monkey on a bed, completely nude".

'"[45] Quoting Patricia Hill Collins, Janelle Hobson states that these stereotypes are products of the systems of power, meant to control those without white skin privilege and "distort the way black women see themselves and each other".

Conceptual artist Renée Greene's work Seen (1990) is also mentioned as representation based on Black female subjectivity, except according to O’Grady, the work falls short "because it is addressed more to the other than to the self" O'lGrady discusses the struggle in depicting race, identity and proper representation as a Black female artist, drawing examples from her own artwork: the politics of skin color, hair texture and facial features.

These hierarchies of difference exist because of historical ideologies and they have difficulty breaking down because they are supported by the preconceived importance of the whiteness in the West.

"[48] Behind the binary logic of science in the 19th century, literature and art situates the representations of Black woman at both the site and sight of violation.

It describes dialogical thinking and living, implying the functioning of both options within a scenario, and suggests the abandonment of the either/or hierarchy.

[49] In 1995–96, O'Grady held the Bunting Fellowship in Visual Art at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study.