PS1 newspaper interview, 2008
Abbreviated version of a WPS1 radio chat with curator Connie Butler. Published in the P.S.1 Newspaper Special Edition for “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” Winter/Spring, 2008, P.S.1–MOMA, Long Island City, NY.
Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline
175
WPS1 chat with Connie Butler, 2008
Recorded by Art Radio WPS1, available online at clocktower.org — Full transcript of a 45-minute conversation between Lorraine O’Grady and curator Connie Butler in WPS1 Art Radio’s broadcast studios two weeks before the WACK! opening at PS1–MOMA, Long Island City, NY.
Email Q & A with Courtney Baker, 1998
Unpublished exchange — The most comprehensive and focused interview of O’Grady to date, this Q & A by a Duke University doctoral candidate benefited from the slowness of the email format, the African American feminist scholar’s deep familiarity with O’Grady’s work, and their personal friendship.
black female subjectivity hybridity Jean-Michel Basquiat the Black and White Show Just Above Midtown black avant-garde Rivers First Draft autobiography Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Art Is... Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline art-world racism performance art 1998 historiography art market black women artists black writers erasure/invisibility race and class Ancient Egypt sibling rivalry unpublished Courntey Baker
Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, 1997
Art Journal, College Art Association — In this article for Art Journal, Winter 1997, the special issue on performance edited by Martha Wilson, O’Grady focuses first on Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, then discusses its relationship to Miscegenated Family Album, alluding to the advantages and disadvantages of the move from performance to photo installation.
Interview by Theo Davis, 1996
In Sojourner: The Women's Forum, November 1996 — Conducted in Cambridge during O’Grady’s one-year residency at the Bunting Institute at Harvard, the interview may have been affected by what she’d felt as adverse treatment there of her diptych The Clearing.
black female subjectivity autobiography political art Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Art Is... Miscegenated Family album Surrealism The Clearing Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline Olympia's Maid Gayatri Spivak art-world racism Lucy Lippard performance art 1996 erasure/invisibility sex and sexuality Ancient Egypt sibling rivalry Girls Latin School religion and spirituality Bunting Institute
Interview by Laura Cottingham, 1995
Hatch-Billops Collection, Artists and Influence 1996, vol. 15 — In-depth interview done for the excellent Artist and Influence series produced by Camille Billops and James Hatch for their archive of African American visual and theatre arts.
black female subjectivity the Black and White Show Just Above Midtown black avant-garde autobiography Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Miscegenated Family album rock criticism The Clearing Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline Olympia's Maid white feminism Lucy Lippard performance art Adrian Piper 1995 nature vs culture the Caribbean race and class sex and sexuality Ancient Egypt sibling rivalry Judith Wilson tokenism religion and spirituality
Thoughts on Diaspora and Hybridity, 1994
Unpublished lecture, Wellesley College — Written shortly after the “Postscript” to “Olympia’s Maid,” this lecture delivered to the Wellesley Round Table, a faculty symposium on Miscegenated Family Album, takes a retrospective look at O’Grady’s earlier life and work through the prism of cultural theory.
black female subjectivity hybridity The Dual Soul autobiography Miscegenated Family album diaspora Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline Olympia's Maid Gayatri Spivak post-modernism performance art 1994 historiography nature vs culture the Caribbean race and class Ancient Egypt sibling rivalry Wellesley College artistic process
Interview by Linda Montano, 1986
Unedited transcript for Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties — Montano’s questions on “ritual” cast interesting light on the connection between O’Grady’s early life and her performances. The unedited transcript of the interview contains answers in greater depth on Mlle Bourgeoise Noire and Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline.
Performance Statement #3, 1983
Unpublished statement, for Tony Whitfield — A letter to Tony Whitfield in preparation for Just Above Midtown’s Afro- Pop catalogue interview is O’Grady’s most self-conscious to that point. Experiencing a lack of clear precedents for her work, in it she attempts to theorize her relationship to performance art and the paucity of role models, and to face the question of the audience for black avant-garde art.
Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline at Oberlin, 1982
High Performance #17/18, Artist’s Chronicle — After a delay to see if the first chronicle on Mlle Bourgeoise Noire would be accepted by High Performance, a second on Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline was submitted the following year — though it had in fact premiered at Just Above Midtown just 3 months later.
France.Artinfo.com, 2012
Juliette Soulez on the Paris Triennale — In French, a review of the Triennale that discusses Miscegenated Family Album and the way in which it creates a space in which to "render visible a class invisible up to now."
Brooklyn Museum, 2010
Object of the Month, August 2010: Miscegenated Family Album — Patrick Amsellem, Associate Curator of Photography, blogs a tribute to Miscegenated Family Album. In an analysis of the work’s intellectual and emotional success at the museum, Amsellem writes that MFA “immediately became a favorite."
Ancient Art Podcast, 2009
Episode 22: Nefertiti, Devonia, Michael — Complete transcript of podcast by Lucas Livingston, an Egyptologist associated with the Art Institute of Chicago, that discusses Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline and Miscegenated Family Album in detail. Also a YouTube video with high-quality images.
Johanna Burton, 2008
Miscegenated Family Album, Artforum Magazine — In Artforum's first review of an O'Grady solo exhibit, Burton sensitively parses the "uneasy symmetry" of the Miscegenated Family Album installation at Alexander Gray Associates, NY.
Holland Cotter, 2008
Miscegenated Family Album, at Alexander Gray Associates, NY — The first New York Times review of a solo show by O’Grady. Lead review in the “Art in Review” section, with a photo of “Sisters I.”
WACK! 2007
Connie Butler, curator; Linda Theung, essayist — Catalogue essay by Linda Theung for WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, then traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; MOMA/PS1, Long Island City, NY; and the Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia.
black female subjectivity Rivers First Draft autobiography Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Art Is... Miscegenated Family album Flowers of Evil and Good Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline white feminism Heresies collective 2007 Adrian Piper David Hammons Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution Charles Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval the Caribbean race and class Ancient Egypt mother MOCA WAC
Calvin Reid, 1993
A West Indian Yankee in Queen Nefertiti’s Court — The first critical article on O'Grady's work as a whole, and still one of the best. Published in New Observations #97: COLOR. September/October 1993. Special issue, edited by ADRIAN PIPER.
black female subjectivity hybridity Just Above Midtown black avant-garde autobiography Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Art Is... diaspora writing in space The Fir-Palm The Clearing Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline art-world racism Lucy Lippard performance art Adrian Piper 1993 the Caribbean Ancient Egypt mother Wellesley College Girls Latin School INTAR Gallery Lilith Sends Out the Destroyers Gaze and Dream
LIVE performance 5, 1980/81
“Dialogues,” Just Above Midtown Gallery — Patricia S. Jones discusses a downtown gallery performance series at Just Above Midtown, NYC, Oct 1980 in a late 70s-early 80s annual journal. Article makes special note of O’Grady’s first performance of Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline.