Holland Cotter, New York Times, 2021

Holland Cotter, “Bliss and Anger In Balance: The Art of Lorraine O’Grady.” The New York Times, Mar 11, 2021.

Back in the 1960s, some of us were taking drugs, scrambling genders, and sampling global religions to shake ourselves loose from what we saw as Western-style binary thinking, a view of the world based on strictly held good-bad, right-wrong opposites: white versus Black, straight versus gay, us versus them. Five decades later, such thinking still rules in a red-blue nation, which makes the retrospective of Lorraine O’Grady’s career at the Brooklyn Museum a major corrective event.

The artist flags her own resistance to either/or in the very title of her show: “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And.” As, over a long career — she’s now 86 — she has consistently shaped her art on a different model, one of balanced back-and-forth pairings: personal and political; home and the world; anger and joy; rock-solid ideas and a light formal touch. (…)

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