Lorraine O’Grady’s exhibition of diptych photographs, “Body Is the Ground of My Experience,” is included in a list of standout shows in the first-ever New York Art Week. Thirty years after the photographs were first made, the works are re-contextualized following the artist’s 2021 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, “Both/And.”
In a review for the New York Times, Holland Cotter makes note of the similarities and differences between two concurrent exhibitions in New York City that highlight artists of Caribbean descent. “Juan Francisco Elso: Por América,” a solo exhibition at El Museo del Barrio is discussed alongside the group show “Sin Autorización: Contemporary Cuban Art.” Exhibited at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, “Sin Autorización” features Elso and O’Grady amongst other Afro-/Cuban artists.
Rizvana Bradley responds to Seph Rodney’s essay published in Hyperallergic, “Discovering How Black Women Might Forge a Path to Freedom.” In recounting the “Loophole of Retreat” conference – organized by Simone Leigh at the Venice Biennale in 2022 – Bradley offers a sound critique of Rodney’s writing on the conference, which reconsiders in/accessibility in artistic discourse.
Loring Knoblauch considers Body Is The Ground of My Experience (1991/2019) as a “reprise” of O’Grady’s retrospective Both/And, exhibited the year prior. She suggests that the show is vital to understanding O’Grady’s late photographic prints.
Folasade Ologundudu writes on her experience attending the “Loophole of Retreat” symposium in Venice, Italy, which was organized by leading Black feminist artists and scholars Simone Leigh, in collaboration with Rashida Bumbray, Saidiya Hartman, and Tina Campt. The conference, which took place in November 2021, brought together Black women from around the world to explore avenues of political resistance, self-care, and their positionality within the arts.