Lorraine O’Grady — challenging the either/or in ‘Both/And’ exhibit
By Susan Saccoccia, February 14th, 2024
Renowned conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady, 89, a Roxbury native whose West Indian parents emigrated from Jamaica, has made her mixed-race heritage a springboard of her art.
A star student at Girls’ Latin School, O’Grady entered the class of 1955 at Wellesley College as the first recipient of a full aid scholarship based on merit and need. After successful careers as a research economist, literary and commercial translator, and rock music critic, at age 45, while teaching French literature at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, O’Grady turned to the arts.
In life and in art, O’Grady has challenged boundaries imposed by gender, class and race. As she connects her personal story with a larger story of the African diaspora, O’Grady embraces the diptych form, which she says couples “two things that are related yet
dissimilar in a position of equality.” She calls the form “my weapon of choice to oppose the West’s either/or binary, which is always exclusive and hierarchical.”
An absorbing survey of O’Grady’s works in performance, installation, photography, writing, collage and video is on view through June 2 in a major retrospective, “Lorraine O’Grady: Both And,” at the Davis Museum of Wellesley College. The exhibition and abundant related programming are free and open to the public.
The retrospective originated at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021, developed by senior curator Catherine Morris and writer Aruna D’Souza, who together edited its handsome, in-depth catalog. The exhibition was organized for the Davis Museum by Amanda Gilvin, the museum’s Sonja Novak Koerner ‘51 senior curator of collections and assistant director of curatorial affairs. ( … )