Lorraine O’Grady Still Won’t Play It Safe
Much like her writing, O’Grady’s photomontages pressure binaries until something other, something “both/and” emerges.
Ela Bittencourt, 2022
Lorraine O’Grady first presented her show of photomontages, Body Is the Ground of My Experience, at INTAR Gallery, New York, in 1991. Inspired by brazen countercultural art movements such as Dada and Fluxus, she had crashed parties at the New Museum and elsewhere, engaged strangers in street performances, and staged happenings in Central Park. In her seminal essay of Black feminist thought, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” O’Grady referred to her transition from live performance to the “safety of the wall.” And yet, to see the original show’s reprise, currently on view at Alexander Gray Associates and including seven photomontages, is to recognize it as anything but safe.
O’Grady’s essay positioned her in the ever-broadening context of Black feminism and anticolonialist critique, but also as an artist fiercely opposed to the confines of social politics and identity. Why must we be either/or, she was asking. A work of piercing analysis, “Olympia’s Maid” endures as O’Grady’s artistic proclamation — particularly in her insistence that, to preserve its mystery, art must guard jealously against all theory, even when it comes from sources as vital as the writings of her Black feminist compatriots such as bell hooks. ( … )