At Wellesley, the wide worlds of Lorraine O’Grady
The 89-year-old artist returns to her alma mater with a career survey as expansive as her mind-set.
By Murray Whyte Globe Staff, February 15, 2024
WELLESLEY – Homecomings are rarely quite so literal as the one taking place at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum, where “Both/And,” Lorraine O’Grady’s heady 50 year career survey opened this month. O’Grady, a pivotal figure in the Black vanguard of New York’s art scene in the 1980s, graduated from Wellesley in 1955; there’s a better than decent chance she walked to and from class on the leafy pathways just outside the museum’s door.
You’d be right to note a contrast. An elite all-girls college in 1950s New England might not seem like a typical incubator for the Black avant-garde, but everything about O’Grady elides binary assumption. “Both/And” isn’t so much as a title as a way of being; O’Grady resists extremes, and her art lives in the comingling of complex opposites, a constant to and-fro that makes her work more relevant than ever. In her humanely open-minded
challenge to silo thinking, O’Grady, now 89, has always had something critical to say about the perils of retreating to one’s corner; in a fractious election year, there’s an eerie resonance.
“Both/And” arrives from the Brooklyn Museum, where it debuted near the pandemic’s peak in early 2021. I saw it there first and was struck by both the work, which toggles breathlessly from joyful to outraged, fiery to poignant, and its awkward dispersal in distant corners of the museum. Brooklyn had its reasons for that, but the Davis presentation, organized by the museum’s Amanda Gilvin, is crisp and linear, a clarifying strategy for an artist whose live performances are among her most powerful works. ( … )