Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel, is O’Grady’s most recent artistic persona. The Knight—together with attendants Pitchy-Patchy, her squire, and Rociavant, her horse—has set out to finish what her progenitor Mlle Bourgeoise Noire began 40 years earlier.
In 2017, O’Grady revisited her earliest series, Cutting Out the New York Times, creating twenty-five haiku diptychs titled Cutting Out CONYT. In 2024, she expanded the work further with Cutting Out CONYT: The Quadriptychs, which she considers her most complete piece to date.
O'Grady's conceptual video Landscape (Western Hemisphere) comprises nearly twenty minutes of black-and-white footage of the artist's hair blown in different directions, overlaid with various ambient sounds.
In The First and the Last of the Modernists, an installation for the 2010 Whitney Biennial, two of O’Grady’s careers—rock music critic and avant-garde artist—met unexpectedly. She’d taught the work of Charles Baudelaire for two decades at SVA.
Project for Artpace, San Antonio, is O'Grady's first video installation. With a generously funded residency, she was able to experiment and, as a "reactive artist," she chose to make herself open to the...
Continues O'Grady's attempt to engage and comprehend the self through the study of cultural history, and vice versa. Her historic approach to postmodernist concerns (O'Grady won the Sons of...
O'Grady's 1994 photo-installation of cibachrome diptychs, is aesthetically perhaps her most complete and satisfying work. It had a long gestation period. Its 16 diptychs were selected from...
BodyGround, shorthand for Body Is the Ground of My Experience, refers to the photomontages produced by O’Grady for her first one-person exhibit, at INTAR Gallery, NYC, Jan 21–Feb 22, 1991. The phrase doesn’t ...
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 ...
An exhibition curated by O'Grady at the black-owned Kenkeleba Gallery on East 2nd Street, NYC, April 22 - May 22, 1983, was a conceptual art piece employing other artists' work to make its point...
A one-night only performance done at Franklin Furnace in early 1983 in what O’Grady later characterized as “a state of physical and psychological exhaustion.”
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...
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...
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...
a series of 26 "cut-out" or "found" newspaper poems made by O'Grady on successive Sundays, from June 5 to November 20, 1977. They were first exhibited to the public at Daniel Reich Temp...
In Miscegenated Family Album (1994), Lorraine O’Grady pairs images of Queen Nefertiti with photographs of her late sister Devonia Evangeline O’Grady Allen, drawing parallels across mixed-race identity, family history, and cultural legacy. Originating from a 1980 performance, the work probes the complexities of belonging while serving as an elegy for a sister lost before reconciliation.
Mariane Ibrahim is honored to present Lorraine O’Grady, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Paris and her second with the gallery. This special presentation, the first since O'Grady's passing in December 2024, aims to celebrate the artist's extraordinary legacy. Featuring work spanning four decades (1981-2021), the exhibition examines O’Grady’s revolutionary conceptual practice and the critical yet nuanced ways in which she engaged tensions around race, gender, and colonialism.
Collective Joy – Learning Flamboyance! explores the popular cultures of gathering that shape how we experience and practice joy in everyday life. Bringing together French and international artists whose work engages public space—festive, social, political, musical, recreational, or utopian—the exhibition highlights collaborative and relational practices rooted in cultural rights and social justice.
Beginning October 17, in Room 11 of the Pavilions, Glenstone will present Cutting Out CONYT (1977/2017), a series of “haiku-like” diptych-poems by Lorraine O’Grady. The work is a reprisal of the artist’s 1977 series of “found” newspaper poems, Cutting Out the New York Times (CONYT), which was influenced by O’Grady’s early career as a research economist and intelligence analyst.
Inheritance explores how legacies—familial, historical, and artistic—shape the present and transform over time. Featuring forty-three artists and spanning the 1970s to today, the Whitney exhibition brings together paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, and time-based installations that consider what is passed on and how it is reimagined. Inspired by Ephraim Asili’s 2020 film of the same name, the show interweaves personal narratives with generational histories, examining cycles of life, reinterpretations of art history, and the enduring impact of racialized violence. Curated by Rujeko Hockley with David Lisbon, Inheritance asks how we arrived at this moment and what futures our stories may shape.
SEVEN., presented by We Buy Gold and curated by Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, brings together works by artists including Max Guy, Renee Gladman, David Hammons, Kerry James Marshall, Lorraine O’Grady, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye across Jack Shainman Gallery and Nicola Vassell Gallery in Chelsea. Known for projects that interrogate systems of power, We Buy Gold assembles emerging and established voices whose practices disrupt conventional notions of space, time, and language. Through fragmented narratives, shifting bodies, and reimagined objects, SEVEN. explores how artists create new worlds amid contemporary crises, leaning into ruptures that reveal alternative possibilities.
Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And, on loan from the Brooklyn Museum in New York, is the first comprehensive overview of the work of Lorraine O’Grady (born in Boston, 1934), one of the most significant figures in contemporary performance, conceptual, and feminist art.
Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Lorraine O’Grady: Body Is the Ground of My Experience, featuring the artist’s pivotal 1991 black-and-white photomontages. Merging Surrealist strategies with O’Grady’s incisive exploration of aesthetics, representation, and cultural history, these diptychs mark a key transition from performance to wall-based work and distill the politically and personally radical ideas that have shaped her career.
Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is the first career retrospective of a groundbreaking figure in performance, conceptual, and feminist art. Rejecting either/or thinking in favor of a fluid “both/and,” O’Grady draws on her own experience of racial hybridity to illuminate how Blackness has always been central to Western modernism. Featuring twelve major projects and a new installation, the exhibition spans four decades of work and extends across the museum, underscoring O’Grady’s sustained challenge to art-historical omissions and institutional inequities, an approach that has profoundly influenced a new generation of artists and thinkers.
The SCAD Museum of Art presents From Me to Them to Me Again, an exhibition uniting two major works by Lorraine O’Grady: the single-channel video Landscape (Western Hemisphere) and her 2017 haiku diptychs, Cutting Out CONYT. Created by radically recombining panels from her earlier newspaper-poem series, these works reflect O’Grady’s cyclical practice of revisiting and reframing her own art to reveal new meanings and to probe the evolving relationship between artist, institutions, and audience.
For Freedoms, the artist-led political action committee founded by Hank Willis Thomas, announced its landmark “50 State Initiative,” featuring more than 300 artists—including Lorraine O’Grady, J.R., Marilyn Minter, Rashid Johnson, Tania Bruguera, and Theaster Gates, who have created billboards encouraging civic engagement. These works will appear across all 50 states ahead of the November midterm elections.
The Brookklyn Museum exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 focusing on the work of black women artists, examines the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism.
Alexander Gray Associates presented Cutting Out CONYT, an exhibition of new work by Lorraine O’Grady (b.1934). Featuring a selection of prints from Cutting Out CONYT (1977/2017), in O’Grady’s words, the show revealed her ongoing commitment to “establishing the diptych as a ceaseless conversation of difference.”
Lorraine O’Grady: Initial Recognition is the artist’s first major solo exhibition, presenting nearly 100 works across four decades and bringing long-overdue visibility to her groundbreaking practice. Born in Boston in 1934 to a family of mixed Caribbean and Irish heritage, O’Grady draws on the region’s abolitionist history to explore identity, diaspora, and racial invisibility. Shown in Seville, a historic center of the Atlantic slave trade, the exhibition foregrounds her incisive challenge to exclusion and marginalization in the art world.
Alexander Gray Associates presented early foundational works by Lorraine O’Grady, featuring the collage series Cutting Out The New York Times (1977/2015) and the photographic installation Rivers, First Draft (1982/2015). These projects mark O’Grady’s development of a personal and political artistic voice, transforming public language into intimate reflections on identity and documenting a one-time Central Park performance that intertwined her Caribbean and New England heritages.
EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean, curated by Claire Tancons and Krista Thompson, examines how Carnival’s masquerade traditions shape contemporary performance in the Caribbean and its diasporas. Built around nine commissioned performances staged during the 2014 Carnival season across multiple cities, the exhibition highlights artistic practices rooted in the histories of slavery, colonialism, and migration. Featuring artists including Lorraine O’Grady, it brings together material traces, film, and photography documenting these street-based works.
Alexander Gray Associates presented Lorraine O’Grady: New Worlds, featuring the video Landscape (Western Hemisphere) (2011) alongside two photomontages from her BodyGround series. In works such as The Fir-Palm and The Clearing, O’Grady examines cultural hybridity, colonial histories, and the intertwined nature of identity and landscape. Landscape (Western Hemisphere) extends this exploration by transforming the artist’s own hair into a shifting terrain, set against sounds from across the Americas. Together, these pieces articulate O’Grady’s call for a “miscegenated” way of thinking—one that fully reckons with the hybrid world we inhabit.
The seventy-fifth Whitney Biennial, 2010, offers a broad snapshot of contemporary art across media rather than a single theme. The works reflect the era’s mix of anxiety and optimism, with artists exploring intimate gestures, community-building practices, and renewed engagements with modernist abstraction. Paired with Collecting Biennials, an installation drawn from the museum’s collection, the exhibition situates the present within the Whitney’s evolving history.
Lorraine O’Grady’s Miscegenated Family Album (1994) is a 16-part photo-installation that pairs images from her family history with iconic Ancient Egyptian sculptures. Originating from her 1980 performance Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, the diptychs draw striking parallels between personal memory and historical narrative. Shown widely at institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Wadsworth Atheneum, its presentation at Alexander Gray Associates marked the first full showing of the series in New York.
