DAVIS MUSEUM REOPENS WITH EXHIBIT OF LORRAINE O’GRADY’S WORKS
By Phoebe Rebhorn, February 21, 2024
The reopening of the Davis Museum has been a long-anticipated event for many Wellesley students this year, considering its 14 month closure as a new exhibition was installed. But the wait was well worth it; on Feb. 8th, the Davis Museum reopened their main gallery for the general public. The exhibit — titled “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And” — is meant to consolidate the many facets of esteemed alumni Lorraine O’Grady’s ’55 extensive career and artistic pursuits into one place.
Since the opening of the Davis Museum in 1889, various directors have lent their unique visions to the institution. Combining permanent works with a rotating collection of featured artists, many of which tie themselves back to the College, the Davis Museum serves as both a space of artistic expression and educational collaboration. That same spirit and appreciation was apparent in the reopening of the museum, when students, faculty, and curious art appreciators flocked to the evening opening. There was wine and cheese, a real frame in which students could mimic O’Grady’s iconic work and a general atmosphere of longawaited excitement. O’Grady’s works have been widely regarded as revolutionary, and this is an opportunity to view their ever-changing methods and meanings in one place. O’Grady has held many roles including government analyst,
educator, rock critic, translator, writer and most recently a visual artist who has not always been welcomed by the art world.
As the Davis Museum puts it in their overview of the exhibit, O’Grady’s work spans a wide range of subjects, such as “black female subjectivity in Western modernity and artistic modernism; colonialism and slavery; hybridity and diasporic experience; multiplicity and selfhood; and intersectional feminist theory and praxis.” And those subjects were all revealed within “Both/And,” which included a written performance by O’Grady called “Rivers, First Draft, or the Woman in Red,” her famous frame portraits taken during the Harlem’s African- American Day Parade in 1983, and her 1994 photography exhibition titled “Miscegenated Family Album,” in which she compares family members to old Egyptian statues. The exhibition also included a large portion of her 1977 “Cutting Out the New York Times,” which contained poetic sayings and phrases clipped out of New York Times articles. Across the board, the show exemplified the life’s work of Lorraine O’Grady; simultaneously, it gave students and faculty a peek into the process of creating such works, as well as the extensiveness of O’Grady’s career. ( … )