Lorraine O’Grady’s First Retrospective Is Both Invigorating and Overdue.
By Alexandra M. Thomas, 23 Mar. 2021.
Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And has set the Brooklyn Museum ablaze with the radical gestures and eccentric poetics of an incomparable artist. O’Grady’s rebellious spirit has roused the mainstream art world for close to 50 years, and this exhibition is no exception.
Displaying hundreds of artworks from throughout her career, as well as archival documents, the show is extraordinarily thorough. This curatorial rigor is in part thanks to O’Grady’s own meticulous archival practice and collaboration with curators Aruna D’Souza, Catherine Morris, and Jenée-Daria Strand. These efforts coalesce as an exhibition that historicizes O’Grady as a prodigious figure of the conceptual, feminist, and Black American avant-garde, while simultaneously encouraging the viewer to enter the artist’s world and ponder her radical lessons.
The titular focus is the philosophical notion that undergirds O’Grady’s practice. Both/And
thinking posits a refusal of either/or framework that is endemic to the West. In disavowing binaristic thinking, we can instead dwell on the nuance of the world’s disarray and uncertainty.
The exhibition is organized by O’Grady’s numerous bodies of work and begins in the 4th floor galleries, in the Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The first of these groupings I encountered was the Cutting Out the NY Times series, yielding a captivating experience of being absorbed by O’Grady’s collaged news clippings and her concrete poetry that is nevertheless replete with humorous statements and invigorating calls to action. O’Grady appropriates a purportedly objective source and reconfigures it into speculative poetics. “This could be… the permanent rebellion… that lasts a lifetime” and “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” among other scattered stanzas, are the bold outcomes of experimenting with the written word. ( … )