“Lorraine O’ Grady.” The New Yorker, Nov 26, 2018.
The American Conceptualist revisits her 1977 collage series “Cutting Up the New York Times” in a new group of diptychs, completed last year—airy, Dadaist compositions that amount to cut-ups of cut-ups. Poetic, yet pointed, phrases run diagonally across the prints, such as “Come of Age / go to sleep,” or “In the Amber Glow of / August skin / there is no escape from terror.” O’Grady, who has explored issues of black women’s subjectivity
throughout her career, in a range of media—including performances and influential theoretical writings—here zeroes in on the tension between mass-media representation and self-expression with characteristic acuity. Occasionally, a personal voice seems to emerge, only to camouflage itself in the found text’s evocative absurdities. (…)