Lorraine O’Grady brings Both/And exhibit to the Davis Museum
Exhibition opens to the public on February 8 through June 2, 2024
By Jainie Winter, Jan 18, 2024
Lorraine O’Grady ‘55, a critically acclaimed contemporary artist and cultural critic, returns to the Boston area with her retrospective exhibition Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And. This landmark exhibition will coincide with a performance art series, both of which are free and open to the public.
Both/And will be on view at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College from February 8 to June 2,2024.The Museum will be open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m.to 5 p.m., beginning Feb. 9.
Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is the first major career survey of the renowned conceptual artist whose work has long challenged prevailing understandings around gender, race, and class. Originally organized by the Brooklyn Museum in March 2021, the exhibition charts
the development of O’Grady’s artistic oeuvre, which spans collage, photoinstallation, performance, and video. It brings focus to the artist’s skillful subversion of the “either/or” logic inherent in the Western philosophical canon, and explores her longstanding commitment to the reasoning of “both/and.”
O’Grady’s work deals with a range of overlapping themes: Black female subjectivity in Western modernity and artistic modernism; hybridity and diasporic experience; multiplicity and selfhood; colonialism and slavery; and intersectional feminist theory and praxis. Through her deployment of the diptych as both an artistic and conceptual strategy, O’Grady calls for an anti-hierarchical approach to difference within the categories of Black and white, self, and other, West and non- West, and past and present. ( … )