Artist Lorraine O’Grady invites self-reflection in Weatherspoon retrospective
By Sayaka Matsuoka, 2022
It’s all too much. Twenty-two months of a global pandemic that has claimed the lives of more than 5 million people worldwide. The exacerbated racial, social and economic inequalities that have bared their ugly teeth in the midst of it all. The ongoing crisis of a warming and steadily degrading environment at the hands of humankind’s manipulations. And yet, in the quiet stillness of the Weatherspoon Art Museum’s upper galleries, artist Lorraine O’Grady offers space for curious introspection and analytical extrospection in her retrospective, Both/And.
On loan from the Brooklyn Museum, the show is the first comprehensive overview of the work of O’Grady, who is considered to be one of the most significant figures in contemporary art. Born in Boston to Jamaican parents, O’Grady led various lives prior to becoming an artist, including work as an intelligence analyst for the US government and a rock critic for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone.
The show, which opened at the Weatherspoon on Saturday and runs through April 30, includes much of O’Grady’s prominent visual works including photographs of her performance art, collages and a short film, all which result from four decades of her artistic career which she began as a 45-year-old.
In the first section of the main gallery, photographs capturing O’Grady’s “Rivers, First Draft,” performance in Central Park in 1982 span the walls. Figures clothed in bright primary colors, including the artist in red, prance and dance within the wooded pockets of the park, telling a vague autobiography. The work, as exhibited by the title, was meant to be a first in a series of three performances, two of which never took place. And while the performance itself happened in 1982, the still images capturing the scenes weren’t processed and displayed in an exhibition until in 2015. This act of returning to her older works is a quintessential part of O’Grady’s process as an artist.( … )