Art Is. . .
A joyful performance in Harlem's African-American Day Parade, September 1983, was, from the point of view of the work's connection with its audience, O'Grady's most immediately successful piece. Its impetus ...
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Rivers, First Draft, or The Woman in Red
A one-time only performance created by O'Grady for "Art Across the Park," curated by Gilbert Coker and Horace Brockington. It was performed in the Loch, a northern section of Central Park, on...
Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline
O'Grady's second performance, premiered at Just Above Midtown Gallery on October 31, 1980. In an unexpected turn of events, just one month after Mlle Bourgeoise Noire's invasion of the avant-garde gallery...
Mlle Bourgeoise Noire
O'Grady's first public performance, remains the artist's best known work. The persona first appeared in 1980 under the Futurist dictum that art has the power to change the world and was in...
Hyperallergic, 2022
Seph Rodney recounts his experience at Simone Leigh’s symposium held in conjunction with the artist’s presentation of Leigh’s work at the US Pavilion for the Venice Biennale. The symposium “Loophole of Retreat” brought together artists and theorists alike to consider political liberation and sovereignty for Black women. He writes about Lorraine O’Grady’s conversation with Leigh, one that concerned the Decolonize Museums protests that happened outside of her retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021. She began to question just what the privilege of a solo institutional show provided her, and how she could make new allyships with those afforded less power than her, notably trans activists.
New York Times, 2022
Aruna D’Souza offers historicizes the foundational years at Just Above Midtown, the gallery project of Linda Goode-Bryant, which platformed artists including David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, and Maren Hassinger early in their careers. D’Souza addresses the show’s goals to highlight the gallery’s history of the 1970s and 1980s, while also enlivening its archive as it remains active into the 2020s. For Goode-Bryant, the question of integrity arises: “Can JAM be JAM at MoMA?”
New York Vulture, 2021
Jillian Steinhauer reviews O'Grady's retrospective exhibition “Both/And” at the Brooklyn Museum. The article highlights O'Grady's pioneering work in performance art and her exploration of race, gender, and identity in her practice. Steinhauer describes O'Grady's personal history, including her West Indian heritage, her education, and her career as a writer before she turned to art, another aspect of her life that significantly informs her art practice.
Iowa Writers Workshop art-world racism Guerilla Gurls Lucy Lippard performance becoming an artist Linda Goode Bryant erasure/invisibility Just Above Midtown Cutting Out The New York Times black avant-garde Black feminism Mlle Bourgeoise Noire colonialism Art Is... both/and writing in space Brooklyn Museum Boston
New York Times, 2020
Zachary Small reports on President Biden’s homage to “Art Is…” in his 2020 presidential campaign advertisement. The article places O’Grady amongst other artists similarly addressing the political climate of 2020. While Alexander Gray warns that “a piece like this is so easy for advertisers to appropriate,” the article makes clear that O’Grady gave her blessing on the campaign’s concept. “Biden is saying the same thing to the country that I was saying to the art world.”
Experience Magazine, 2019
Heather Kapplow conducts a formal analysis of O’Grady’s performance persona, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, in an attempt to bridge her pioneering artwork of the 1980s with the activism of Black public figures in the 2010s.
The Guardian, 2017
In a review of Soul of a Nation, Steven Thrasher praises O’Grady for “putting Harlem into focus,” suggesting that art can happen on the street – outside of the confines of the museum – embodied through her 1983 performance work “Art Is…”