Boston Globe, 2024. Murray Whyte reviews O’Grady’s “Both/And” at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. Whyte notes the multifaceted nature of O’grady with a life that includes a stint at the US Department of Labor, writing rock criticism, and teaching. All of these positions converged into her art making process, beginning with the performance “Rivers, First Draft.”
Forbes, 2024. Chad Scott reports on O’Grady’s “Both/And” exhibit at the Davis Museum of Wellesley College. As an alum of Wellesely, O’Grady’s exhibit and accompanying archival materials offers a unique experience for students to learn about the journey of a former student forging their own path in the art world.
Boston Globe, 2024. Ahead of the showing of “Both/And” at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Murray Whyte provides a comprehensive background on O’Grady beginning as one the few Black graduates of Wellesley College in 1955. Whyte offers an overview of some of O’Grady’s most renowned works that are included in the exhibit such as “Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire,” “Rivers, First Draft,” and “Cutting Out The New York Times”
Wellesley Magazine, 2024. Kerry Gaertner Gerbracht offers an insightful look into O’Grady’s prolific career as a writer, teacher, and artist in this article covering the opening of “Both/And” at the Davis Museum. Gerbracht notes the expansion of the exhibit from its original showing which includes pieces directly related to her time at Wellesley College as a student.
The Wellesley News, 2024. The reopening of Davis Museum at Wellesley College began with the opening of O’Grady’s “Both/And” retrospective exhibit. In this review of opening night, Phoebe Rebhorn pays special attention to the inspiration that alum O’Grady can serve for current Wellesley students. An accompanying symposium, gave insight on the lessons of O’Grady’s art which calls for a consistent pushing of new boundaries and encourages limitless thinking.
WBUR, 2024. Arielle Gray explores the works featured in O’Grady’s “Both/And” exhibit as well as O’Grady’s own writing and words, Arielle Gray. While some may view some of O’Grady’s life as a journey to become an artist, Gray highlights how she always was one. Synthesizing O’Grady’s impact on the art world and her own view of her body of work, Gray finds that it’s not only a critique of or disruption O’Grady seeks, but she crafts a world that shows “all of her multiplicity and nuance.”
FF2 Media, 2023. Artist Lorraine O’Grady’s Both/And Philosophy Rings True — In her article commemorating the two-year anniversary of O’Grady’s “Both/And” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, Julia Lasker reflects on the critical philosophy that underpins many of O’Grady’s works: both/and. Since the debut of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, O’Grady has sought to combat the exclusionary nature of the mainstream art world which, as Lasker writes, “categorize identities…into an ‘either/or’ binary.”
O’Grady’s “Body is the Ground Experience” was featured in Artnews’ list of must-see shows for the inaugural New York Art Week. The exhibit was the first time it had shown in 30 years and was based on O’Grady’s interest in Surrealism.
Lorraine O’Grady’s exhibition of diptych photographs, “Body Is the Ground of My Experience,” is included in a list of standout shows in the first-ever New York Art Week. Thirty years after the photographs were first made, the works are re-contextualized following the artist’s 2021 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, “Both/And.”
Loring Knoblauch considers Body Is The Ground of My Experience (1991/2019) as a “reprise” of O’Grady’s retrospective Both/And, exhibited the year prior. She suggests that the show is vital to understanding O’Grady’s late photographic prints.
Ela Bittencourt delivers polished prose after visiting Body Is The Ground of My Experience on view at Alexander Gray Associates in 2022. Notably, she praises O’Grady’s hybrid mode of making critique into a pleasurable venture.
The New Yorker’s “This Week” section announces O’Grady’s solo retrospective, “Both/And,” set to open the Brooklyn Museum the following week.
In a review of the retrospective Both/And, Siddhartha Mitter sings the praises of O’Grady’s deft political critique. Having developed a rapport with the artist through his repeated reviews of her work, he quotes the artist in conversation: “I am making incisions on the skin of culture” […] “it is work I’ll be doing for the rest of my life.”
In a review of Lorraine O’Grady’s solo exhibition “Both/And,” Hyperallergic’s Alexandra M. Thomas discusses the politics asserted by the artist within the museum. Thomas writes, ““Both/And” thinking posits a refusal of either/or framework that is endemic to the West. In disavowing [Western] binaristic thinking, we can instead dwell on the nuance of the world’s disarray and uncertainty.”
Anni Irish offers an overview of O’Grady’s art practice in consideration of her retrospective, Both/And, focusing on key conceptual stakes, such as the artist’s interest in language as form.
Jillian Steinhauer reviews O'Grady's retrospective exhibition “Both/And” at the Brooklyn Museum. The article highlights O'Grady's pioneering work in performance art and her exploration of race, gender, and identity in her practice. Steinhauer describes O'Grady's personal history, including her West Indian heritage, her education, and her career as a writer before she turned to art, another aspect of her life that significantly informs her art practice.
After a visit to O’Grady’s retrospective Both/And, Cassidy George commends the artist’s life’s work: to demand art institutions to prioritize inclusion.
Holland Cotter, a chronic reviewer of O’Grady’s work, calls attention to the exhibition design of her retrospective, Both/And. She remarks on how the artist’s pervasive installation, which weaves throughout the museum, encourages viewers to reconsider the institution’s permanent collection through a critical lens.
In light of O’Grady’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, Murray Whyte argues for the artist’s embrace of cultural hybridity through an in-depth analysis of her art practice. Specifically, she considers how O’Grady’s insistence to be “both/and” – to contain multiple backgrounds at the same time, refusing a singular identity – could usher in the next generation of interdisciplinary, multicultural artists.
O’Grady’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, Both/And, receives a sincere note of respect on Jack Bankowsky’s top ten exhibitions seen in 2021.
In a one-paragraph review of Both/And, Lynne Cooke includes O’Grady’s retrospective in her highlights of 2021, noting the artist’s “fiercely intelligent, subversive” defiance of race-based exclusion in the New York art world and Second-wave feminist movement.
O’Grady’s retrospective Both/And (and her publication Writing in Space) receive an honorable mention in Holland Cotter and Roberta Smith’s roundup of 2021’s most notable art exhibitions.
For Artforum, Colby Chamberlain articulates the nuanced, critical value of O’Grady’s “haiku diptychs.” In the review, he traces O’Grady’s deconstruction of print language to the post-Modernist lineage of Benjamin, Derrida, and Mallarmé, which she taught at the School of the Visual Arts around the same time the prints were in production.
Chase Quinn casts light on O’Grady’s performance personas in his review of the exhibition From Me to Them to Me Again. The writer considers the artist’s persona of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire to exemplify her career of fighting against art world racism and Western binarism at large.
The “Goings-on About Town” section of The New Yorker zeroes in on O’Grady’s “poetic, yet pointed” revised collages, Cutting Out CONYT. When a personal voice begins to show itself in the works, it camouflages itself: the journalist who writes headlines blurs with the artist who composes the text into provocative absurdities.
Alexandria Deters offers a detailed formal analysis of Cutting Out CONYT. The article considers how the collages present as – but in reality, are far from – a ‘stream of consciousness’ approach to writing. Deter draws sobering connections between the sensational headlines of the 1970s with the political climate of the 2010s.
In a review of Cutting Out CONYT, Sarah Cascone describes O’Grady’s statements on political narrative as profoundly revealing and “previously unthinkable” in her earlier series Cutting Out the New York Times.
Written in the Fall 2018 Art Guide, Hyperallergic suggests that O’Grady, in her interrogation of print journalism issued in her series Cutting Out CONYT, calls for a collapse of language’s ability to signify meaning for a wide-ranging public.
Kirsten Swenson reviews “Lorraine O’Grady” at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts — Notes uncanny intersections of O’Grady’s early works with contemporary events. Concludes, “Now, we are beginning to see her art.”
Written in Spanish, Laura Revuelta reviews O’Grady’s solo exhibition “Initial Approach” at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain. The author places O’Grady in conversation with historical feminist artists and writers such as Jeanne Duval and Carmen Herrera.
Susan Saccoccia reviews Lorraine O’Grady’s first solo exhibition at the Carpenter Center, entitled “When Margins Become Centers,” focusing on the artist’s approach to connecting personal stories with cross-cultural histories. As Saccocia writes, in a lecture that “unfolded like a great dinner table conversation, rich with anecdotes and touches of humor,” O’Grady shares her drive to “make the invisible visible.”
A Walk Through the World of Lorraine O'Grady — Heather Kapplow, the Boston reviewer, replicates O'Grady's working method by walking backwards, turning the exhibit itself into a diptych, video on one side, wall works on the other, setting in motion a permanent back-and-forth questioning and answering between the two so that the only resolution is to embrace a permanent, un-hierarchized equivalence.
Cate McQuaid on "Where Margins Become Centers" — In this enthusiastic review of the Carpenter Center show, which she later discussed further in an end-of-year column on Boston's galleries, the award-winning critic declares that, after the early performances, O'Grady's work "grew more precise and more searing."
Louis Bury on "Art Is..." — Bury's lengthy and magisterial review is a model of intellectual attention to what is being seen — both inside and outside the frame. Beginning with the freedom of the piece's title, it examines framing as form, content and metaphor, and illluminates police presence and the relation of viewer to viewed.
Blog entry on "Art Is..." at the Studio Museum in Harlem — This brief review by an art historian frames "Art Is..." as a "meta-art proposition" and draws interesting parallels to works by later black artists.
Alan Gilbert review of Lorraine O'Grady at Alexander Gray — The editor of the College Art Association's caa.reviews, through a close formal description of "Cutting Out the New York Times," mimicked by that of the "Rivers, First Draft" wall installation, points to how their form provides an associative logic needed to make sense of the individuation process unfolding on the wall.
Holland Cotter, Art & Design — Cotter's review of O'Grady's exhibit at Alexander Gray focuses on her use of collage in both "Cutting Out the New York Times" and "Rivers, First Draft" as a method of shaping her complex history.
Emily Nathan, The New York List — Analysis of New Worlds focusing on how the works' resistance of "easy classification" and their straddling of "artificial divides of genre and type" serve to replicate O'Grady's thoughts on the contemporary world, one "shaped and inflected by miscegenation."
Lorraine O'Grady's Hair Stare Fare, Village Voice — Davis's career evaluation and review of New Worlds at Alexander Gray, NY, O'Grady's show comprised of The Fir-Palm, The Clearing, and the projected video Landscape (Western Hemisphere), is suggestively sub-titled "A veteran artist turns identity into abstract art."
Miscegenated Family Album, Artforum Magazine — In Artforum's first review of an O'Grady solo exhibit, Burton sensitively parses the "uneasy symmetry" of the Miscegenated Family Album installation at Alexander Gray Associates, NY.
Miscegenated Family Album, at Alexander Gray Associates, NYC — Discussion of framing as a technique of meaning in O’Grady’s conceptual photo-installation.
Miscegenated Family Album, at Alexander Gray Associates, NY — The first New York Times review of a solo show by O’Grady. Lead review in the “Art in Review” section, with a photo of “Sisters I.”
Exhibit reflects downtown dance club — Daily newspaper review of O’Grady’s video installation Persistent, at Artpace, San Antonio, TX, July 2007. A work on dance, music, economics, and race that recalls O’Grady’s own past as a club dancer and rock critic.
Les Fleurs Duval, on ArtNet.com — Sirmans' review of "Studies: for a work-in-progress on Charles Baudelaire, the first Modernist poet, and his Haitian-born wife Jeanne Duval" analyzes O'Grady's conceptual oeuvre and her mid-90s computer use in order to deconstruct and reconstruct accepted reality.
Shadow Boxing with the Status Quo — Review of "Lorraine O'Grady, The Space Between, MATRIX/127," The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, May 21-Aug 20, 1995. Discusses the two-part exhibit: Miscegenated Family Album and debut installation of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire.
Gretchen Faust, New York in Review — Excellent review of O'Grady's first solo exhibit, at INTAR Gallery. Faust confesses: "Every once and awhile I come across a show that really demands more time and space consideration." Special focus on performance docs in the photomontage show.
Art Is . . . — Highlighted box review, taking a retrospective look at O’Grady’s 1983 performance Art Is.... In “Sniper’s Nest,” Z Magazine, July-August 1988, p 102