The Davis Museum At Wellesley College
Teaching/Learning with Lorraine O’Grady’s Both/And
Edited by Lorraine O’Grady and Amanda Gilvin, 2023
Introduction
Amanda Gilvin
Sonja Novak Koerner ‘51 Senior Curator of Collections and Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs, Davis Museum at Wellesley College
The renowned conceptual artist and cultural critic Lorraine O’Grady has made transformational contributions to the fields of contemporary art, art history, literature, feminist studies, African Diaspora studies, and more. Working across the media of performance, writing, photography, collage, and video, she has produced several bodies of work now widely acknowledged as canonical in the art history of twentieth and twenty-first-century art. Having begun her career as a visual and conceptual artist in her mid-forties, she continues to produce dynamic, surprising work as she approaches her ninetieth birthday. By focusing on the diptych and her associated theorization of Both/And—in which one can hold seemingly oppositional concepts in infinite conversation— her artistic practice models the projects of reciprocity and redress that she has also demonstrated as a thinker, educator, and Wellesley alumna.
Throughout each stage of her career, O’Grady has built on her Wellesley experience: she has carried Wellesley with her throughout the world. Reciprocally, she has also, very generously, given back. The presentation of Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And at the Davis represents a homecoming for O’Grady, to the Wellesley campus and to Boston—to roots
that have informed and been transformed through this artist’s oeuvre.
O’Grady has shown great generosity to her alma mater for decades. Her gift to the Wellesley College Archives in 2010 marked the first major gift of alumnae papers to the College. She has connected with Wellesley students and fellow alumnae time and again, on and off campus, as professor Nikki A. Greene recounts in her essay in this volume. She has approached the exhibition of Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And at the Davis Museum with this same commitment to sharing learning experiences with current Wellesley students. The College celebrated her singular artistic contributions in 2017 with an Alumnae Achievement award, and now, hosting this landmark retrospective exhibition provides a remarkable opportunity for the entire campus to share in the sustained attention that O’Grady’s powerful artistic and intellectual contributions deserve. Her theorization of Both/And challenges fundamental modernist assumptions that structure disciplines like art history, literature, and philosophy—and influence people’s daily lives and their most intimate relationships. The expansiveness of her oeuvre, through its explorations of Black women’s subjectivity, diaspora and hybridity, and history-making, makes it ideal for the rigorous, object-based learning across the disciplines that we cultivate at the Davis and at Wellesley. ( … )
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