The Davis Museum celebrates the multiplicity of Lorraine O’Grady
By Arielle Gray, February 08, 2024
Artist Lorraine O’Grady has lived many lives. “Both/And,” a retrospective of her work now up at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, explores the art O’Grady has produced across the decades.
A central theme in her work is captured in O’Grady’s essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” written in the early 1990s. She probes the relationship between the Black female body and art. “It’s true, ‘both: and’ thinking is alien to the West,” she wrote in the essay’s postscript. “The greatest barrier I/we face … is the West’s continuing tradition of binary, ‘either: or’ logic.” Binaries define us, before we even have the privilege of self expression. It is a mode of categorization that so often results in the establishment of the normative — white, male and Western.
O’Grady instead offers a “both/and” framework that gestures toward a reality where identities, both old and new, mutually coexist. It’s a fitting name for the retrospective, originally organized by the Brooklyn Museum in 2021, which features works made by O’Grady throughout the decades that explore the revolutionary potential of eschewing and resisting categorization.
“O’Grady argues that with ‘Both/And,’ we can hold supposed binaries together,” said Amanda Gilvin, senior curator and assistant director at the Davis Museum. “We can see how they’re not actually different … but interrelated.” The rough, messy parts where the edges of things overlap are sites of creation for O’Grady. ( … )